Bookraft

Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio Avon Books, $12.50

This book which I found at a second hand book store marks a return to an area of science that has always fascinated me - how the brain works on a biological basis. What makes Damasio so interesting is that he takes cases that appear like Oliver Sack's stories - bizarre behavior, at the fringe of normal but often induced by heredity or serious brain injury - and Damasio who as resident neurologist at Iowa State University Hospital, must treat thee conditions.

And the conditions such as frontal forebrain damage or stroke induced Anosognosia (inability of a victim to tell that one is ill , paralyzed or otherwise incapacitated) force new conceptions of what the brain does and how it works. In short deficits and brain injuries, tell us much about how the brain works.

But of course that is just straight forward logic. For example, the Russian psychologist Luria, having to deal with so many Russian soldiers suffering severe brain injuries in the Great War with Germany, has already described this with Karl Pribram in the book Psychophysiology of the Frontal Lobe. But these are original papers, with the lay reader having to do a lot of interpolation and fill-in-the-blanks on interpreting the results. What Damasio has done is selected his cases well, brought the language down to laymans level, and most importantly used each case to underline a line of reasoning and approach towards higher order brain functioning.

In this book the uniting theme of all the stories is what Damasio calls Descartes Error. This is the notion that the mind and reason are part of a separate soul or ghost-in-the-machine spirit which handle higher order functions such as reasoning and decision making while the brain handles lower functions like movements, senses and emotions. At one point he refers to it as the Star Trek Vulcan error - as soon as you can control and strip away all emotions higher reasoning , intellectual analysis and enlightment will result. Not so.

What Damasio manages to do in 270 pages is convince readers that emotions and feelings are an integral part of not only reasoning but also formation of long term memories and better decision making. What remains vivid in memory is highly emotional experiences, not the drab and parochial everyday or the oft-rehearsed and ingrained teachings and trainings of school days. This book is so well written and the stories are so inherently fascinating, that the book illustrates its theme by its very telling. Not bad for non-fiction.

(c)JBSurveyer 2006