He is one of today’s great scientists. Doctor honoris causa by various universities, has won the Prince of Asturias Awards of Science and Technology of 2005 and that of the Greatest Recognized Investigator of the Institute of Scientific Information. Professor of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, he directs the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California (United States).
“I am a modest person who doubts himself, but when they say that this book is revolutionary, I agree, because we are experiencing enormous technological success, but we have forgotten that we are sentient creatures.” says the portuguese Antonio Damasio, one of the best-known and most cited scientists of the last two decades. And the book he refers to is (Destiny, 2018).
—Why are emotions, feelings, so important?
—The current world of algorithms does not realize that we started out feeling. Without the feelings of pleasure and suffering, we would never have created medicine, government, or justice, for example. Our story begins with the search for homeostasis, which is the preservation of life, and the search for well-being. Seeing bacteria at work, which also create small societies, is extraordinary. And every cell in our body stores the cellular memory of these bacteria. That is also why homeostasis, which is the regulation of life, is at the origin of our culture and, although we forget it, feelings are the beginning of everything.
It’s not usually considered that way…
—The world has tended to neglect that we are sentient beings. The intellect has a capacity that is also trained, but it is the feeling that pushes me to train. and it’s important know how our mind works. We are in a social crisis, facing a rise of populism, facing an immigration crisis, and I do not believe that these problems can be understood only through reason, because behind them are feelings such as anger and other feelings that compensate for the negative ones, such as love and compassion. Feelings are vital to understand the position of the human being.
“To convince others we must combine reason and feelings”
—If we ignore affection, are we lost?
—Yes, because there is always a tendency to refuse to accept anything that is imposed on us, and knowledge and reason create dogmatic attitudes; However, to get something, it is not enough to yell that you want it. To convince others we must combine reason and feelings, and that negotiation always go hand in hand with affection.
—You question that speaking is what makes us human…
—I am against saying that culture comes from language. Language is important, but first we have the ability to feel. Without feelings we would not have developed language., a code for transmitting information. We have the ability to feel and reason, but without the ability to feel culture would not be possible; it is the combination of both that originates it.
-I understand…
—We have to accept the different ways of feeling of human beings, even though we all have the same base and share it with the rest of living beings. Within the same general organization, we can develop different specificities. For example, we create a shelter that keeps our homeostatic regulation to preserve heat and protect children from the cold, but architects such as Antoni Gaudí or Frank Gehry later appeared from this initial need for shelter… Both arise from the same concept of “shelter”.
“Feelings connect us with the body, life and homeostasis”
—He also says that the intestine is our first brain…
—In the book I pay a lot of attention to the nervous system because it is supported by the intestine and the heart. The first brain is the intestine, because it already existed before the nervous system itself developed. Most important of all, the relationship between the body and the mind begins with the fact that minds are not the result of the nervous system, although this mistake, that the brain creates the mind, is repeated over and over again.
“And how is it created?”
—The brain creates the mind when it cooperates with the body. Life has been around for four billion years and, by contrast, nervous systems have only been around for half a billion years, a very short period in Earth’s history. Only when brains and bodies cooperate does this new product emerge, the mind, whose first aspect is feeling, and which is really a portrait of what happens inside our body and also the origin of consciousness. We have to realize that the mind, above all, has to do with feelings and that these connect us with the body, with life and homeostasis.
—This close relationship hardly applies in medicine…
“It takes time for important ideas to sink in and change the way people act. But gradually we will return to what is important. The relationship between feelings and disease is very important and within ten years we will see great changes in medicine.
“You can’t improve your life if you don’t pay attention to your feelings”
—Practices such as meditation can help homeostasis?
—There is a movement in the United States that is part of this change that I was telling you about and it is a real movement, the mindfulness. I think it works and we should combine the various effects. We cannot cure cancer with mindfulness, but it can help people who have cancer to better cope with the situation they are experiencing. Another important thing is that before you are sick, if you live with more attention and awareness, in the sense of knowing what your feelings are, you will have a better life. Because you can’t improve your life if you don’t pay attention to your feelings.
—What mysteries would you like to uncover about the brain that you have not yet been able to discover?
—There are many. Behind every discovery you make, there are a lot of new questions and mysteries… For example, we have a lot of information about the biological and chemical basis of feelings, we also know which neurons are involved in these feelings, but there are many details that we don’t know . And it’s also important understand what is the origin of consciousness. These are the two mysteries of the brain that most interest me today.
—Would you say that there is room for spirituality in our brain?
-Absolutely! There are many ways to understand spirituality. For me it is a sublime beauty that gives you extreme happiness. We should try to have more and more moments of this extreme happiness instead of causing suffering. It’s important that you write about this because a lot of important things in my book have to do with the questions you’ve asked me.
three essential concepts
- homeostasis. When we hear this word we think of a stable and fixed thing, but it is constantly changing. The origin of the general influence of feelings is the extraordinary power of homeostasis, the set of processes that maintain life, project it into the future and guide natural selection and biological evolution.
- The feelings. They are mental experiences and represent the internal state of the organism, which is constantly changing. The feeling occurs exclusively in the mind and can only be transmitted when it is explained.
- The emotions. Bacteria have emotions and they show an emotional response when you poke or touch them and they shrink, but they don’t have feelings, which is a mind builder that we do.