NEURO-SOMATIC SUMMARY
It is Antonio Damasio’s and our own conclusion is that our emotions are ‘equal partners’ in our intellectual lives, especially in practical decision making. Our Somatic Markers appear to be the mechanism by which emotions conspire with thought to produce all the decisions we make.
Every goal, every means to that goal, every intermediate or alternative step is encoded with emo-attributes we are not aware of.
The scars of our past experiences hamper the neural connections between the brain’s emotional and cognitive centers. The ventromedial frontal region is reported to be responsible for emotional processing and social cognition via connections with the amygdala and hypothalamus.
This processing cannot be completed, if we resist to complete certain experiences. Our decision making process is then unable to include certain somatic markers, and is thus overwhelmed by trivial information. Then, we have a hard time keeping a problem in perspective in relation to other goals. It is as if we forgot to remember short-term goals.
Forgiveness allows us to finalize an experience. The emotional charge is removed from the somatic marker and the experience can now be appreciated for what it is, and be used as ‘clean’ information in our future decision making.
Somatic markers serve as an automatic device to speed select biologically advantageous options, because the emotionally unmarked options are automatically omitted.
Traumatic memories of social situations previously experienced, prohibit the activation of certain somatic markers that are directly linked to punishment & reward.
Our accumulated trauma makes it more difficult to activate certain somatic states when ordinary decisions arise. There is an inability to mark the implications of a social situation with a signal that would separate good and bad options.
Someone can be trapped in a never-ending cost-benefit analysis of numerous and conflicting options. Without emo-markers, decision making is virtually impossible.
Damasio claims that un-marked options are not considered by the conscious ‘decider’. This biasing function of somatic markers is really what makes decision making possible. In the absence of markers, the ‘decider’ has too much info to deal with. The computations involved are so cumbersome that they cannot yield a final decision. In short, emotions dictate and constrain which bits of info are used.
People with a flattened emotional life have a hard time reading the somatic code and find themselves paralyzed by simple decision making tasks. They manifest a preoccupation with details as a substitute for the decision making. It is like a filing system without tabs. You have to read the contents of each folder before you can make an intelligent decision.
The consequences of all the trauma that is experienced in the past is a kind of paralysis, an emotional deficit, because it resembles an arrested experience and thus an arrested development of the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system.
All neurological studies indicate that pure reason is usually unimpaired, because most of us can pass tests designed to identify intellectual impairment. If the element of practical, personal decision making is added to the mix, most will fail. This is true for both the psychopaths as well as each of us, the carriers of past trauma.
