Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [159]
Frank clicked and read apprehensively, reminding himself that knowledge was power. “Fear and Anxiety: possible roles of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.” “Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala.” The amygdala was behind the nose, a little distance in. A famous case of short-term amnesia had been nicked in the amygdala when a fencing foil went in through his nose.
“Emotion: an evolutionary byproduct of the neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system.” The sociobiological view, for once of less interest to Frank. He would come back to that later. “Reciprocal limbic-cortical functioning and decision-making: converging PET findings in lack of affect and indecision.” “Neuroanatomical correlates of happiness, sadness, and decisiveness.” Both studies of the emotion/decision connection. “Subgenual prefrontal cortex abnormalities in mood disorders.” A study of a case who was unusually wild and incompetent in life decisions, unlike anyone else in her family, and then they remembered that when she was an infant a car had run over her head.
“From the nose to the brain.” Oh my; there were synapses that ran from one end of the head to the other. They went from the nose to everywhere. Scent, memory, behaviors associated with pleasure. These tapped into dopamine that was made available in the nucleus accumbens in the basal forebrain, behind the back of the mouth. This availability depended on a long biochemical sequence functioning well at every point.
The right frontal cortices were more associated with negative emotions than the left; the right somatosensory cortices were active in integrating body management, which might be why they were the apparent seat of empathy. Blocking oxytocin in a female prairie vole did not interfere with its sex drive, but with the attachment to its partner that would usually correlate to sex. Suppressing vasopressin had the same effect on male voles, who would normally be faithful for life, voles being monogamous. You needed both the insula and the anterior cingulate working well to be able to experience joy. Fluency of ideation increased with joy, decreased with sorrow. The brain was often flooded with endogenous opioid peptides such as endomorphines, enkephalin, dynorphin, endorphins—all painkillers. You needed those. Brain systems that supported ethical behaviors were probably not dedicated to ethics exclusively, but rather also to biological regulation, memory, decision-making, and creativity. In other words, to everything. You needed joy to function well. In fact, it appeared that competent or successful decision-making depended on full capability in all the emotions; and these in turn depended on a healthy prefrontal cortex.
It looked to Frank like all the new research was adding up to a new understanding of the roles played by the various elements of human thought, consciousness, behavior; a new model or paradigm, in which emotion and feeling were finally understood to be indispensable in the process of proper reasoning. Decision-making in particular was a reasoning process in which the outcomes of various possible solutions were judged in terms of how they might feel. Without that, the ability to decide well was crippled. This was Damasio’s main point: the definition of reason as a process that abjured all emotion had been wrong. Descartes and most of Western philosophy since the Greeks had been wrong. It was the feel one was looking for.
Judging