Origins of the Mind - Antonio Damasio, MD, PhD | The FitMind Podcast

well today i was honored to have dr antonio dimaggio on the podcast if you're unfamiliar he's currently the david dornstein chair in neuroscience and a professor of neuroscience psychology and philosophy at usc he's the founder and director of the brain and creativity institute which researches human emotions memory communication and decision making and he's regarded as one of the most influential psychologists of the modern era dr dimazio has also authored several highly acclaimed books including descartes error the feeling of what happens looking for spinoza self comes to mind and most recently feeling and knowing he received an md and phd from the university of lisbon portugal and this was another really fun one we touched on basically where does this brain and mind and consciousness come from and he traces it back to pretty surprising mechanism i hope you enjoy this as much as i did here is dr antonio dimacio all right well dr demacio it's great to be with you on the fit mind podcast thanks for joining me my pleasure i wanted to start with a question that seems kind of obvious but then when you think about it it's maybe not so obvious and it's one that a lot of your research uh helps us understand which is why do we have a brain to begin with ah that's a very profound question and i think i have an answer for you we have we have a brain to help us manage our life what we are fundamentally is complex living organisms and because of that complexity you need quite a lot of assistance to manage it properly so when when historically living organisms were very simple at the level of say one cell or a few cells they that complex could manage itself fairly well without special assistance it's as complexity increased and organisms became more and more complicated and different systems appeared that there was a need to coordinate and literally the best word for this is coordinate so it's a way of making sure that what one part is doing is not in conflict with another part and so that there is some kind of heart in the end we have nervous systems to create harmony among the different components of a living organism and to make it function in accordance with the fundamental quote-unquote goals of a living organism which is to maintain its life as well as it can during the period that has been allotted for that life by the genome of that particular organism so if i'm understanding you're right so we have the the body and the nervous system running throughout and the brain is kind of this central command center that's helping us helping coordinate the body in some sense let me help clarify that when i'm when you asked me did you ask me about the brain or about nervous system i can't recall anymore how you formulated your question the first question was about the brain yeah the brain okay so when i when i hear the word brain for me i'm thinking about nervous system because i don't i don't make a fundamental distinction between central and peripheral components it's all nervous system so the answer that we gave you was meant to answer the question of why is it that we have a nervous system to begin with because if you go back historically organisms that were you know lived for eons did not have nervous systems did not have brains either so a brain is a a sort of vague term that we use to refer to the central components of the nervous system because nervous systems have a peripheral component all the nerves that go into every nook and cranny of our living organism and then there are the central components that include nuclei and that include for example in the case of our what we normally refer to as the brain this complex of structures that is within our cranial valve but even there is not one single thing called brain because there are all sorts of different aspects of the cerebral cortex the different nuclei that are in the base of the brain nuclei they're in the brain stem in the spinal cord so it's words like brain are are funny because they have different meanings for lay people and for scientists but what i think is very good for your uh for your for your audience is to get the idea that the the central issue is a nervous system we have nervous systems to help coordinate life nervous systems are a historical answer to the complexity of our organisms to the growing complexity of our organisms and to the need to coordinate functions and within that nervous system you have both peripheral components all the nerves that i was talking about the ones that go out to our every component in the body and the ones that come back from every component into this central nervous system of which the brain is the sort of general term to designate that central complex one of the things that you mentioned is how in the beginning there was just action you know there were just bodies but no minds and i thought you know this was very counter-intuitive to me and it helped my understanding of how the the mind came to be so could you walk us through kind of the high level evolutionary evolutionary steps here yeah so the the sort of to to make it as is as simple but hopefully true as possible i would say that when you think about simple organisms like for example bacteria you're thinking about simple creatures that have cell they don't even have a nucleus in that cell so that there is a living organism there is a perimeter to that organism and inside there are exchanges of energy and production of energy also that allow that organism to maintain its life so there's metabolism for example and all this is being run by according to certain um certain goals that maintain the operations in such a way that the whole thing does not explode it does not die off immediately or or some such so there is a again i'm thinking about the word harmony there's a way of making the operation conform to a certain set of parameters that will allow it to continue for a certain amount of time okay and simple organisms like that actually have in many other organisms there have one cell or a few cells and sometimes nucleus or not those organisms clearly did not have anything that we could call in mind although interestingly they had the possibility of action they could move about in the world they had the possibility of in a way sensing in a very primitive level sensing that there was something that would impinge against them for example and say mechanically destroy them and they can sort of recoil and move away from any kind of influence that would be destructive and in a way they have an intelligence which we have to put in quotes because it's not the kind of intelligence that you or i are normally we're accustomed to deal with intelligence looking at somebody who is smart and is doing something very smart or with the contrary of it which is doing something stupid which is contrary to what the person should be doing well a organisms don't have intelligence in the sense that it is minded it's coming out of say for example reasoning over a certain problem but they have intelligence that is sort of built into the system and that intelligence will allow them to do funny things such as for example if an organism requires a certain kind of temperature to operate at its past if the temperature goes up that organism will move away seeking a territory that has a temperature that is commensurate with its own internal goals so there is intelligence in that sense which really consists of responding to the environment in a way that will allow it to continue so to go back to your very interesting question if you wanted me to walk you through this well so there is their actions in the sense that that organisms can go in one direction or another seeking for example nourishment or seeking the best kind of temperature or avoiding some kind of confrontation quotes with the environment or with others and then there's this basic intelligence that is allowing them to operate better within that environment but none of this is minded quote unquote and by minded i mean none of this is accompanied by a representation of what is actually happening in the world around or inside the organism and this is what for your viewers is the important thing and when we think about a mind and we think about intelligence that is minded we think about this possibility of representing internally what is going on inside of us or what is going on around the world so for example right now i'm looking at you and i am representing you so in my mind there is a picture and actually not the picture a movie because you're moving as well there is this representation of you physically and when you talk i hear the the sounds that make up your sentence and that too is represented in that level in in sound form and if you were playing music i would listen to that and at the same time in my mind i have not only you on the screen right now i have your words when you speak um and i also have me because i'm here too so uh and and the representation of me is actually probably the most intriguing and the one that people have a harder time picturing because it's a representation in terms of feeling it's i'm not preoccupied with representing my heart or my lines or my guts right now but i am constantly inevitably representing my the feel that i have of my body being alive curiously we pay very little attention to it which is too bad so that's why it's so important for us for example to meditate because it will it allows us to get a richer picture of our representations you know the scope enlarges you know most most of the time people go through life representing the outside world and reactive thoughts to the outside world without ever even noticing that they are there and that they are the support they their living bodies are the support for all this system of representations and and that's why the notion of mind and the notion of minded is so important and making a principle distinction between what is minded and what it's not is so critical so when you when you see or when you don't see because you actually have to have a microscope to see when you see creatures that are terribly small they are as i said they have their they have their little intelligence which is not so little but nonetheless they have their intelligence they have their metabolism they're ruled by homeostasis this this set of goals and parameters that allows you to be living but there is no mind inside that something that is also very interesting for you and for your viewers and listeners is that science is not necessarily the the most essential thing here because of course the the size of bacteria or perennial what have you is very very small and you need a microscope to see them but when you see for example a fly very small little organism but guess what the very complex organism that actually has a nervous system and i would bet although that that's would be debatable that those organisms have a mind so i think there's something like the mind of a fly uh and they're the mental aspects that allow it to govern its life in distinction from say the bacteria in paramecia so i've taken you on a rather long spiel about the fact that there's life is the essential thing and then if light gets too complicated it cannot be managed without the help of this coordinating system which is the nervous system and the nervous systems when they get really to the top of the heap in terms of complexity guess what their nuclei and quantities and so forth and they create what you call the brain which is how we started this interesting conversation right yeah there's a lot there to unpack and one of the things that strikes me as you're talking about this is just the different levels that have been built off of what was mere feeling tone to begin with i mean so you talked about this very basic approach avoidance software and then on top of that we've layered uh you know a visual let's say or or other representations of the world and then on top of those even we might build other representations you know for example i'm seeing your face as color and form but then on top of that there's also projections about based on their interactions together kind of a sense of you as a person so it seems like there's different layers being constructed absolutely it's extremely complex it's extremely rich it's extremely complex and i think we need to we need to pay our dues to that complexity and to to recognize it's complex and it should not be dismissed uh uh in a cavalier way because it's it's really a monument of complexity and and and that's of course in the case of humans we are i would suspect at the peak that at that complexity yeah and there's a lot of your research in writing talks about feelings and and you know i should i should just premise this that we're not talking about uh you know emotions here we should probably really define what you're what you mean by feelings but but the importance of feelings and how we're not talking or we're not paying attention enough to the importance that these give to our representation uh our conscious experience so could you explain where do feelings come from what what are they and why are they so important very good um right first of all thank you for making that very clear distinction to to your your listeners between emotion and feeling not at least saying that they're not the same because unfortunately most of the time um emotion is what gets the attention uh let's start with that fundamental distinction so that that people don't make confusions when you think about an emotion for example fear or [Music] anger anger you think about a collection of actions that are directed to the outside and certainly visible or audible to others so you're really talking about actions those actions tend to have patterns you know there's certain patterns to the way our faces and bodies uh operate when we are in fear or when we are angry or when we are loving so the important thing is that it's about actions i like to call emotions concerts of actions they have a certain a certain score along which they are represented but they are visible detectable to the outside world and if you are having an emotion you have a lot of trouble hiding that emotion from others because it's there in your body it's there in your face and it's going out in the world in the form of action when you have feelings nobody can see or hear your feelings their feelings are internal so the fundamental difference is that emotion as the term implies it's about movement it's about movement projected to the outside whereas feelings are internal they're subjective feelings on my own and your own and i can tell you about my feelings but you cannot see my feelings you cannot hear my feelings you cannot detect them unless i tell you so it's a big difference between subjective material that is private versus external theatrical material which is in the outside world which is really what emotions are about now the interesting thing is that what what is the what is the function of feelings why do we have this stuff called feeling well my claim and this is by the way my arg has been my argument for a while and i make this argument i think very clearly in my last book which is called appropriately feeling and knowing how to make minds conscious and in this book i explained that probably the first row of feelings and the first kind of feelings that we had were feelings about our own body guess what hunger thirst pain discomfort well-being uh fatigue um desire all of these are feelings and they are really the the fundamental collection of feelings of what is the is this the base of our feeling system what what what feelings those feelings are doing is informing your mind about the state of your body and this is really quite spectacular because it is feelings producing knowing that's why i i came to this title feeling and knowing and feelings are for me the inauguration of this great spectacular development called consciousness so if you turn to me and ask me antonio how did feelings start i'll say the same way that consciousness started feelings are the beginning of consciousness consciousness started when we started having feelings that told us that we were hungry or thirsty or that we were in pain because they were from the point of view of evolution a first arrival at a point of giving you information giving you knowledge about the state of your body uh and that of course is absolutely critical and in in the history of organisms that is all geared to creating efficiencies about how life operates you can see the beauty of this if when you are in a certain state you are for example running into low on your energy it's very wonderful to have this thing called hunger that can tell you that you go you need to go out and eat or you're getting dry and you need to go out and drink so uh i i think these these two things were combined consciousness and feeling uh one giving rise to the other and then of course if you are conscious of your own needs in your own living body you you're entirely open to many other kinds of consciousness which have to do with what you see or what you hear because as nervous systems developed and became more complex we were able to hear or to see or to touch and lo and behold when we did that depending on which state we were in which could be a state of well-being or a state of hunger or a state of desire everything that was around us could be connected and and be be appreciated together with that fundamental feeling state so that's why feeling is so so fundamental it is your base you start with feeling when you have organisms that are complex enough to require a nervous system and that nervous system needs to to run the controls of this organism otherwise you're just going to die and that's why it's there and so feelings and consciousness are sort of assistance to the process of life regulation within an organism and they depend on this great development within a living organism which is emerging system so you have really an enchantment of of developments you have life and as life becomes more complicated you need to have more and more devices that help you run that complexity and not fall apart and die and nervous systems were a great answer to that and what nervous systems produced that is fundamental to that goal of maintaining life uh in maintaining it in check is actually feelings that that's that's the the grounding of the the process of maintaining life in complex organisms and of course once you developed feeling you were without noticing it developing consciousness yeah that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me and you know as you just said and as the title of your book suggests in order to if a feeling is going to have any value there needs to be a knower there some kind of consciousness that's interpreting the signal that's coming in exactly and that nowhere is of course implanted in your body you know it's really it's so interesting because it makes it makes sense feeling and consciousness makes sense because you need to regulate an organism that has become too complicated to just run on its own playing devices and and then of course also generates a nowhere because the knower is the organism the the know where is the living organism you know i'm always a little bit perplexed when people find this i i don't know what they want to know more because they say well how how do you know it's the nowhere well you know our no our knowledge our knowing is predicated on the fact that there is an organism that knows you know we it it's revealed at the same time you you have a feeling of thirst and that thirst is connected to a certain organism that is thirsty in a certain organism whose metabolism requires molecules of water at that particular point and it's all that single organism and that organism of course happens with the nowhere the feeler and the knower are one and the same um i don't find this terribly complicated provided you start from the right point now of course if you if you if you start uh if you start from the top down uh you may start to think that consciousness is related to vision or to hearing which by the way many remarkable people before me have thought but i think that that's just wrong and you're not going to go anywhere with your with your search for consciousness from the outside world no consciousness is about the inside world it's about who we are as living creatures i'm hearing a lot of this through the context of meditation and one of the reasons your work really excited me is that there's a big emphasis on feeling or the poly word is vadena feeling tone this uh positive or negative feeling that then gives rise to craving and clinging and eventually a lot of our mental suffering and really the advice is you know if you could if you can notice more carefully just the pure feeling itself just the feeling tone then you can observe that with equanimity and there won't be the reaction piled on top of it because a lot of our feelings are basically maladapted in the sense that we'll layer a lot of mental suffering on top of them rather than just responding to a pure biological stimulus the way that it would have once been adaptive so i'm i'm just i'll just throw that out there and also just wonder your thoughts on that or if there's other kind of conclusions that you can build off of this emphasis on feeling yeah well i i think that that also means this is well obviously we we share a strong interest in feeling so we we mutually preaching to the converted but the um you know it's really quite quite remarkable because when you you know in typical circumstances you know i remember growing up and seeing people around me that were quite oblivious to their feelings there's no question that they have them um but most of the life was directed to the outside world what counted was what was the events that were occurring in the outside world and they were running the mental events of those persons and of course this is perfectly true today you know you you look around and and many people are completely oblivious to the fact that they're feeling that they have you know on occasion they will acknowledge pain for example or they acknowledge their feelings in a very roundabout way which appears couched as a crisis of some kind or a problem of some kind and yet all of that has developed from as you pointed out from those mismanagements that have occurred in daily life when you are distracted when you don't listen to what is actually happening in your organism another thing that comes to mind is that not paying attention to your own feelings and not allowing them to to to give you you know proper information is a good recipe to not pay attention to the feelings of others how can you pay much attention to the feelings of others if you don't recognize and pay attention to your own uh and that i think makes for impoverished relations with others um obviously there have to be limits but you know you don't want to spend your entire life just concerned with your feelings that that would be a rather maladaptive solution to problems but you want to pay attention to them enough that you can recognize them in others because then you have a much better chance of not making mistakes when you're dealing with others i mean even from a from a self-serving point of view if you understand your feelings then you understand the feelings of the other you're more likely to get what you want in life than if you don't and of course you can take the even better view which is if i understand the feelings of others i can help them and i can help those people that are coping with say negative feelings and make life better for them which is of course the preferable option but so from every conceivable perspective i find knowledge about feeling extremely important extremely relevant and i would say that culturally that's one of the things that societies such as ours need to pay attention to because the the world outside is so powerful and so noisy and so rich that you can easily spend an entire life just connecting with the outside world without ever paying attention to what's inside and of course if you're doing that you can be lucky and things go well uh or you can have a disastrous life with all sorts of pains natural and induced but most of all you're going to miss the opportunity of having some kind of integrated experience of what it is to be alive in the circumstances we humans have which is the circumstances of having a very complicated organism but one that is endowed with a nervous system that together with the living organism allows you to feel and allows you to have this tremendous amount of knowledge about others and about the world around yeah this is a really good point you make about how we've our introspective abilities are limited in a lot of ways and especially in such a distracted world you know we're liable to not uh pay attention to our feelings and then miss the signal altogether so you could just keep repeating the same mistakes that are bringing up bad feelings and not even be aware that you know you're feeling that way to begin with and um i'm curious so you've explained you know kind of from the cellular level all the way up to then the organism human level and now the social level and then you talk about feelings are also important on a mass cultural level could you talk a bit more about how feelings impact our culture yeah right the the you know the first thing i would say is the the the way in which without feeling you really cannot have uh cultural interactions because they they get reduced to the factual material but the the the many many avenues to try to answer your question for example in terms of in terms of the general cultural system you have the way in which feelings play a role in the development of art clearly art has been a response by feeling persons a response to the state they're in you know our whether we're talking about music or painting or sculpture or poetry literature in general um the the motive behind those developments as far as i can understand generally comes out of some feeling and the feeling can be a very positive one can be a feeling epilation admiration for nature or another person or it can be suffering very quite commonly it's actually suffering and so a very strong motivation of artistic developments comes from suffering um you know you might say well you know i mean play comedy in theater um actually not from suffering from joy but i actually doubt that i think that even comedy even farce very often comes out of pain that is expressed um or finds its way in generating something that could counter that pain but then there's more you know feelings also play a role in how you organize society in how you organize society politically in how you organize society in terms of justice so you you have the the idea of justice for example in relation to something wrong or not um do we do we want to say correct the fact that somebody was hurt inappropriately or robbed um even that comes out of the feeling system because it's feelings that will give you the sense of outrage or the sense of injustice that is associated with certain events in our cultures so not just the arts but the entire justice system is also being very importantly influenced by by our feeling systems and of course if you move sideways to politics well politics is about whether or not people think that they are getting their due people think that they are getting what they need from from their peers and that too is filtered by a sense of being comfortable or not of being in pain or not of admiring someone else as a leader or not so it's it's difficult to see actually where in our cultural life feelings would not play a role it's not that they play around here and there is that they play around everywhere they are in the background of all of that and once again to go to the to what we discussed earlier um so often people just ignore this because again if you open a newspaper uh the the what jumps at you is the facts or what people think are the facts and so it's what happened uh with the effects of these prices the the facts about the economy and so forth and we are totally dominated by that huge amount of material in that huge amount of data they have to do with the facts and yet the only reason why we're even discussing those facts and details is because of the role that they play in our feelings otherwise we wouldn't give a damn why why bother so all of those things are sort of a great constructions that mask the reality of life and its needs and which are fundamentally expressed by feeling so it's all about either the life of the individual or the life of the group or the life of the community and you cannot you know that the bridge between life and the rest of the world is through feeling and of course through consciousness automatically yeah this makes sense to you it makes a lot of sense and uh i guess uh you know it makes me think about evolution of our species too and where we're headed and technology and i know you've done a bit of work around machine learning so i'm curious how we can apply these theories to making machines more intelligent or uh yeah building basically conscious machines interesting yeah that that's an excellent question the the the point there is that the when when we look for example of the world of robotics around us it's a very interesting world you know people created with their intelligence they created these machines there are capable of operating quite efficiently and do a job but you know it's quite obvious that when you look around them that they are not intelligence in themselves the intelligence they have is sort of in quotes and is related to a particular job that they were supposed to do that the inventors ask them to do but they are rigid they are not adaptable to the things that are coming their way they're supposed to their job and that's what robots do and and we should be thankful that there are such devices now one thing that occurred to us and this is actually work that i did together with one of my um that first student and then post postdoc and calling in faculty his name is kings and man the idea what we thought is this wouldn't it be interesting if instead of having a rigid machine that is intelligent but rigid if you would introduce paradoxically a little bit of vulnerability if you would make that creature vulnerable by using not rigid materials but soft robotics for example and might that vulnerability within a more complex system actually give it the possibility of developing some intelligent way on its own to cope with the problem so the the that in a very simple way is is the issue it's introducing vulnerability in something that is rigid and invulnerable in the hope that that vulnerability would lead to provided you have a way of computing things would lead to a smarter way an innovative way of dealing with the problem and of course the inspiration for this is the fact that we have been vulnerable all along and our great intelligence the intelligence of humans and the intelligence of it and other creatures before us it's an intelligence that was always based on vulnerability because what we have been trying to do is always stay off disease and death we we've been trying to do everything possible you know why is it that we have medicine medicine developed once we had once we gathered knowledge about what to do with medications surgeries and so forth with the the role of covering up for the enormous weaknesses of our bodies for as long as that's possible um so it it's it it was this idea uh and of course this is something that of course for many people in the world of artificial intelligence is just a complete uh exotic thing i mean why would you do that if the machine is perfect already why bother to make the machine weak uh and then of course but at the same time the the the people in the world of machine intelligence that think that this is actually a good idea so you know it's something to be debated and we'll see what happens in the future it's fascinating and uh it's it makes a lot of sense because our intelligence it seems like came from this as you're describing it this struggle for survival really this this desire to maintain homeostasis in a world that's constantly changing absolutely yeah yeah no it's so i i i think it makes a lot of sense we'll see what happens very good so so i just have a couple of rapid fire questions for you that we do at the end of every interview and uh the first is what's your most surprising finding to you personally from your research oh oh my god um a surprising finding um well i i think that there's one general surprising finding uh is that i never thought when i started my my research that the effects of feeling would be as powerful as they are um i i started you know precisely from the point of view that i now criticize in others i i was very cognitive and i was very because i was very interested in the visual system for example i was very interested in language those were the beginnings of my of my scientific career and i was quite surprised by how powerful feelings were i i would say that that's the main main surprise but it's a very old surprise yeah and is there any research and is there any research in in particular that you're most excited about for the future yes one of the things that i first of all i think that we can have we have a chance of understanding consciousness from a biological point of view and um stopping you know this idea that you that you cannot understand consciousness that it is a mystery that is unsolvable i i think that's something that i would like to see disappear and i think that we have a convincing way of arguing and saying that consciousness is in fact resolved through feeling in terms of what it is fundamentally and what it is for you know but which are two different things um i think that that's probably the thing that that most intrigues me is that that possibility and i would like to see that um be explained and discussed and and hopefully accept it so that people are not don't don't make a mystery where it isn't where there's no mystery anymore yeah well i mean that's certainly one of the biggest questions is science this hard problem of consciousness and it's exciting that your research is really getting at the heart of that um my last question for you that i asked everyone is that you have a 15 second commercial that goes out to the world with a message for everyone what would you like everyone to know what would you say to everyone that might help them all that can i can i make it an amusing factor the the amusing answer here's the commercial i have a new book it's called feeling and knowing making minds conscious so go out and get it read it and see if you get my points um and if you don't write me and protest now i think that that that's my my very you know if it were another time but right now the the my my book is actually coming out on tuesday so you have the perfect timing for a commercial for for this book and i hope you enjoy it as much as my friends say that they enjoy it and that they have that they have to learn from so go on wonderful and get annoying okay wonderful yeah i was going to say that so by the time this podcast comes out it will definitely already be out on amazon and yeah where else can folks find your work or follow you the the the work is published in books and in scientific papers and there are things out there older work in like their lectures all the time that are on on different media so if you go to websites that have those lectures you have a way of learning from them and i think they are in there many of them are in the in the public in in the public domain wonderful well listen thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us your your passion for this field is really palpable and contagious and uh it's uh it's it really is a lot of it's counterintuitive but it it uh changes the way that i've seen the world and um i thank you for your your time it's been a real honor thank you vian it's a great pleasure and i'm glad we were able to talk [Music] you

Channel: FitMind

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Keywords: antonio damasio 2021, antonio damasio consciousness, antonio damasio emotions, antonio damasio feeling and knowing, origins of the mind, dr antonio damasio, consciousness, consciousness evolution, consciousness explained, feeling and consciousness, feeling and emotion, feeling and emotion difference, nervous system explained, brain and nervous system, conscious machine, consciousness evolution of the mind, beginning of consciousness, why do we have a brain, neuroscience podcast

Id: wxhKqejnPIs

Length: 50min 7sec (3007 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021