[00:02:51] Sean: Professor Damasio, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today? 

[00:02:56] Antonio: Very well. How about you?

The Impact of Detective and Spy Novels 

[00:02:58] Sean: I am doing well. This is going to be one of those really interesting conversations. We’re going to get a lot into the brain & neuroscience, but I want to start early and I’m actually really intrigued by what impact reading detective and spy novels had on you early in life?

[00:03:13] Antonio Damasio: How interesting, how’d you know about that? Quite a lot. I read voraciously as a kid and it was very interesting because my parents wanted me to read very serious things and I did, I have to say, but at the same time, there was this very interesting small library of detective stories. Some of them were in English, some of them were translated into Portuguese. And I was very intrigued, mainly because they had fantastic covers. They have very beautiful artistic covers by some surrealists, even painters that have done very, very attractive covers. 

I was attracted by the covers. And then there were these little books sort of pocket size, and I started reading them. And I remember the first one I read was a man called Van Dine, I think. And I was fascinated and I was intrigued by the mystery. And I thought that maybe my thoughts of my inquisitive mind and my desire to arrive at the solution of a problem when we talk about neuroscience may have come from that. Of course, it’s not necessarily so.

[00:04:38] Sean: It’s so interesting those early experiences, is that what shaped you? The curiosities? Exploring those and then trying to solve those big mysteries, those big problems?

[00:04:47] Antonio Damasio: I have to say it certainly played a role in my mind. I was intrigued by that. And then I think I had read all the books that were available in that series. And then there was something about just the mystery, the suspense, the pleasure at arriving at an end, and also the fact that they were relatively short. You could consume them relatively quickly.

Multiple Languages

[00:05:16] Sean: I know you’re from Portugal originally. You mentioned some of the books being translated. Does having the ability to read multiple languages have any impact for you? Are you able to come to conclusions differently based on the language?

[00:05:30] Antonio Damasio: I don’t. I doubt that that is so. I think it certainly does hint there, being forced to confront words for the same thing in different languages is a plus. It helps, for example, realize that language is about texts that you can put on things and on actions. But those vary, depending on the cultures in which you are. Being forced to confront other languages is I think a very interesting issue and probably, I would say it’s always positive. I don’t see any negatives to it, certainly, it doesn’t confuse anybody. 

And I was exposed to that because I learned other languages early. My first language actually, other than Portuguese, was French. I had a vague contact with Spanish because one does hear a little bit of Spanish once in a while in Portuguese culture, although it’s not definitely a main language exposure. And then I was exposed to English through movies. There was a very interesting, and very marvelous law in Portugal that prohibited the dubbing of movies. In Europe, for example, most countries dub movies. I don’t know about today, but I still see it that way. 

If you go to an Italian movie house or a French movie house or German, you will watch, for example, an American film that has been dubbed in whatever the local language is. People in those countries have not been exposed to the sound of our languages and it was quite marvelous. Before I knew English from studying English, I knew English from the movies. I knew how Humphrey Bogart sounded like, or how Ingrid Bergman sounded like in English, to tell you about people that were from that age. I didn’t know what Brad Pitt sounded like, that did not exist. 

[00:08:00] Sean: You knew he looked good, just didn’t know what he sounded like.

[00:08:09] Antonio Damasio: I think being exposed to multiple languages is definitely a plus. I’m very happy with the possibility of having some control over more than one language, which I do. 

[00:08:24] Sean: Professor Damasio, have you ever thought about just this cross-disciplinary approach to life? I mean multiple languages, multiple countries, arts, science, movies, theater, creativity. I’m just wondering how you articulate and think about this, being able to analyze your entire life.

[00:08:41] Antonio Damasio: Let’s say it’s a privilege, to begin with, having those multiple exposures and it enriches you. It’s very interesting to look at problems from different perspectives and to look at, for example, some of the problems that I look at today as a scientist, for example, the problem of feeling, which is one of the main topics of my work, and it has become more and more so, and I’m talking about feeling, not emotion. 

And as you know, the last book is called Feeling & Knowing precisely because feeling is so important for me. It’s very interesting to look at feelings not just as a scientist, as I do, looking at it from a perspective of psychology and neuroscience and biology, but also look at it from a perspective that could be yours as a person who is not trained in the sciences. I presume you’re not. And just looking at feeling like an experience that you have as a human being or the experience that people have. 

A feeling, for example, being, say, a novelist, or a filmmaker or a painter, and spot it’s a problem. It’s an issue that is part of the life of all those people. They’ll have different perspectives on it. I think the different perspectives, different points of view is very essential to enrich your life and to make you understand, for example, other opinions, other views that we may have about things that you would otherwise consider settled and may often, may not.

More of the Good, Less of the Bad

[00:10:36] Sean: What have you done to be able to cultivate that muscle? Like most people, they have their opinion, their view, and they hold onto it with dear life, where you’re able to really analyze other people’s views. It’s empathy, like you can almost get inside their mind. You’ve mentioned, you’re not a scientist. I’m going to try to think about how you think here. What have you done to be able to develop that?

[00:10:58] Antonio Damasio: I don’t think I’ve done anything. I think it just happened. No, I don’t claim any great powers of direction in my life. Actually, it’s a very interesting question that you ask because you’re assuming as a good sportsman that you are, you’re assuming that you can cultivate, you can train something, you could train the muscle of empathy.

I don’t, it’s just that if things go well if what you’re doing is positive and rewarding, you probably do more of the same. I feel that I am just fairly fortunate that I have experienced a lot of good things in my life. And I hope that I haven’t made too many mistakes in throwing away the good parts and ignoring those good parts and just choosing bad things. It’s luck.

[00:11:58] Sean: Professor, one of my favorite things about you is just how humble you are. There are few, if any neuroscientists or people even involved with the brain of the last hundred years who have had the impact you had, I mean, there must be something here. Like if you were analyzing why you as opposed to all these other people.

[00:12:20] Antonio Damasio: I don’t know. That makes me very self-conscious. I think it would be very presumptive. First of all, there’s plenty of other people that have produced enormous amounts of good work and have a lot of significance in science and in culture in general. I don’t want to be too self-conscious about that. Let’s just say that if one is reasonably intelligent, one wants to hold on to the good things that have happened in your career, in your life to have more of the same. That’s a very plain explanation. It doesn’t require great philosophizing.

[00:13:18] Sean: More of the good, less of the bad. You do that on the long journey, and you end up somewhere.

[00:13:24] Antonio Damasio: You’re very kind to say that I appear humble. I’m not so sure that I’m humble. If you would be, for example, let’s just do a hypothetical, if you would stop this conversation, and say professor, I see that you have some interesting ideas about the neuroscience of consciousness, I’m not so sure you’re right. I would get pretty defensive very quickly and you would see another side of me that is not so humble. I would not exactly insult you, but I may turn into a nasty guy.

[00:14:04] Sean: What would that be guided based on the number of years, the amount of work, and the knowledge and thought that’s gone into that?

[00:14:10] Antonio Damasio: Yeah. There are very few things that actually get me irritated. I get irritated by the lack of respect for anybody in general. I get irritated by stupidity but I can get irritated with people, for example, I have if people disregard the credits of others. If I see somebody claim knowledge or success in a certain area of science, totally disregarding a calling that actually contributed tremendously for that, that really gets me. Those are the things that can sort of deviate you from a path of being pleasant to yourself and to others. And trying to be, as you say, humble, it’s a good thing to be humble, but I’m not really humble. I’m not. That’s just a facade.

How Professor Damasio Became Interested in the Brain and Neuroscience

[00:15:17] Sean: Well, I appreciate you opening up, speaking of deviating from the path, this is a different type of path, but I know you were originally intrigued by the arts and cinema. How did you become interested in the brain and neuroscience?

[00:15:31] Antonio Damasio: That very easy to answer because you see when you are in the world of the arts and especially the word of the narrative art like cinema, theater, novels, if the work is good, it’s dealing with not only humanity in a very general sense but with some particular aspect of humanity, which has to do with your mind and how you run your life. So all the good movies that you have had, that you experienced in your life are about themes that are very interesting. And about all of them, you could start asking questions. Why did this happen? 

What was going on in the mind of a certain character? How did that come about? And how it came about is something that has been treated historically in the world of philosophy, of course, that’s where it started. And then in the world of the arts, literature, theatre, were the first ways of analyzing the human mind in ways that are sort of pre-neuroscientific. So it was pre-psychology and pre-neuroscience. When you look at the Greek theater, sometimes I like to say, one of the greatest psychologists, neuroscientists ever was Shakespeare. 

You read the Shakespeare plays and the sonnets, if you read those plays, you have a way of dealing with the human mind in a tremendous number of very important sort of standard situations, ranging from the beautiful and lovely and fun to the situations of tragedy. What you find when people betray when people go mad and attack others. All of that is in Shakespeare. It’s really remarkable. Shakespeare of course did not go to Oxford University to study neuroscience. 

But he was there and the structure of the verse, the words that are there are telling immensely important things about the human mind. So I would put Shakespeare above any of the people today that are doing science. We’re doing interesting things here and there and illuminating certain pockets of this big bridge story but what somebody like Shakespeare did is extraordinary. Whether it was Shakespeare himself or somebody with the name of Shakespeare doesn’t make any difference but somebody did and it was one person that was able to collect the immense canvas of humanity.

Ancient Wisdom Vs Science

[00:18:42] Sean: How do you think about that? Let’s just call that ancient wisdom, even someone like Shakespeare. I think about the wisdom, a big impact on me was the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu. I’m just trying to think about the clarity and understanding they had even thousands of years ago that science is just proving now. I don’t know, I’m just trying to figure out what to make of that…

[00:19:02] Antonio Damasio: Well, I think that what science has contributed mainly is a way of delimiting a problem, self-containing the problem in a smaller way, in the size that can be illuminated by methods of discovery or the substructure. But all of that ancient wisdom, as you call it, was there telling you about the main problems, telling you about domain issues. And what we do in science today is have ways, sometimes clever, sometimes just taking the problem and putting a sort of square around it so that you can just work on that little part.

And then we also have the good luck, thanks to the technology of having a variety of techniques that allow us to get insight into that, and you have something that’s very important. You have the possibility of quantifying stuff, measuring, comparing, and therefore creating data. Giving the comparisons of data so that you can have, not just your opinion, which is very interesting and important, it may be perfect, but you have the possibility of testing, whether your opinion is correct, or whether you are in fact indulging your fantasy, that is not correct. 

And that’s the beauty of science. That’s of course, what Shakespeare didn’t have or Sophocles is the possibility of analyzing a part of the problem, trying to quantify it, and then trying to decide with the concurrence of others and get some kind of agreement that, yes, this is likely true or not true because it’s not supported by data. And that’s really the main difference. The old guys we’re doing the right thing. And we’re the ones that define the problems for us. And we just knew a little bit of detail.

Luck and Chance

[00:21:29] Sean: You mentioned defining the problem using data, maybe this is a question for later in this conversation as we get more into the brain and consciousness. But I’m wondering, like the big decisions in your life, what were you driven by, as they say, the head or the heart? I’m wondering for you, so many years studying… 

[00:21:49] Antonio Damasio: Well, it’s interesting. I would say that many of the decisions of looking back were quite conscious, quite well thought through, and actually dealt with the sort of looking at data in a very broad sense. But a lot of it has to do with luck, chance, whatever you want to call it. It has to do with encounters that are unpredictable. I think it’s very different. 

Of course, I’m not going to bore you with that analysis, but there are lots of things that happened in my life from the people I met, the persons I studied with, what I chose to do, that really came out of chance. Encountering a person in a meeting, for example, will change your life because you hear that person, like what the person said, then you have a chance of talking to that person, and then you have a chance of studying with that person that has happened to me more than once.

And I think that the idea that one goes through life, controlling everything and planning your course, I think it’s possible. And they are people that probably can work that way, but it certainly did not work that way with me. There’s an enormous amount of influence-of-chance. There are things that have happened in my life that are wonderful that came by chance.

[00:23:26] Sean: Yeah, I know from my own experience earlier in my life where it was more about control, it was like, let me control this scenario. I came to realize so many greater things in life when you finally just surrender and like, let’s see what happens here. But you said you were going to analyze luck, but you didn’t want to bore me. I would love to just hear you actually articulate that because you’ve must have said the word luck five times so far in this conversation.

[00:23:52] Antonio Damasio: Luck and chance 

[00:23:56] Sean: Here we go. 

[00:23:58] Antonio Damasio: Of course there are things in which you have to think it through. For example, if you’re offered a position at a university, this has happened to me lots of times, and you actually have objective effects that you can deal with. It said one of the people that you would work with are the people that will be your colleagues. What is the status of a certain institution, or if people asked you to be on the board of some foundation? You can’t analyze the effects that, that is not a chance. That is sort of some kind of wisdom of manipulating the data.

It’s not science either. And you should not take it hyper seriously. I think that sometimes people, especially when they get older, which in my case, people sort of getting very reflective and they want to sort of rewrite their own histories and put everything in it and then create a big scheme, a following. And I think maybe in some cases that’s true. I think mostly that’s fiction. It’s a lot like writing your own novel so that others can read it on the fly.

Effects

[00:25:33] Sean: I’ve got to catch myself here because I could literally spend my entire day talking about your background though. So I’m going to catch myself, but I just got to ask one more thing. Just thinking about luck, and risk, essentially, I guess, your decision in 1990, you changed the course of what you were doing in your lab, correct? And I’m just wondering what led to that decision and why you were willing to go against the grain. I’m just intrigued by how all this comes into play in a scenario like that.

[00:26:03] Antonio Damasio: Yeah, again, it’s the power, there’s an aspect of effects there. That is very interesting. Those decisions have to do with the effect. The effect is also the reason. So it’s something that urges you to do, to follow a certain path. Things are not all equal. By the way, that’s one of the great themes of my work now, when I think about it, is the differentiation that happens when you look at facts because all facts with normal individuals come affected by a certain quality.

It’s not just about quantities. For example, I love the achievements of artificial intelligence, but one thing that people very often don’t understand is that artificial intelligence is an incredible instrument that deals very nicely with things that are measurable, things that can be exactly measured as quantities. And that’s why it’s wonderful to have artificial intelligence to help you, for example, guide a 747 to a fall bomb runway and land precisely where the program wants it to, land it better than a pilot ever could.

But if you want to have a human judgment, if you want me to decide if that person intended to commit a crime or not, and when I go through the analysis of the facts and the testimonies in court, and when you try to put together an idea of whether that person did wrong or not, or what should be the punishment for the person that actually did wrong, then that you’re starting to deal with things that have to do with feelings, with effects. And that has to do with qualities more than quantities. 

And that’s where the big problem starts. So drifting, making this distinction between what is easily quantifiable and what is not instantly quantifiable. And then, in fact, may never be quantifiable because it’s in the form of a quality that moves with the vagaries of life. That’s a very big, important problem. That’s by the way, something that I tried to address in a very simple, calm way in Feeling & Knowing because it’s just to give an idea to people that that feeling is about an ongoing, interactive representation of the state of your life in your body. 

And that by nature varies. The state you are in right now, the state I’m in is not exactly the same as it was 20 minutes ago when we started our conversation, if that was twenty minutes ago. And that’s because of the way life is. Life is constantly moving in, waving in different rhythms. It’s like music, do you like music? 

[00:29:38] Sean: I love music. 

[00:29:40] Antonio Damasio: What do you listen to?

[00:29:42] Sean: Yeah, no, no. This is great. Depending on what I’m doing, I actually listen to a bunch of classical music while reading or studying. And then a lot of times at dinner, my wife and I are big jazz fans, so we listen to a lot of jazz in the house.

[00:29:58] Antonio Damasio: Okay, good. Very good. The reason why I asked you to see that is that music expresses very well this kind of qualitative vagary of life. Sorry, I interrupted.

Feeling Vs Emotion

[00:30:20] Sean: No, no, no. I think it would be helpful for people to understand the difference between feeling and emotion. Because I don’t want people to lump these two together when they’re clearly different.

[00:30:31] Antonio Damasio: Okay. Oh, good for you.  The big difference is that emotion as the name indicates is about action. It’s something that you can actually see. When you see somebody happy or when you see somebody crying you see an action, there’s theater there. There’s a mask, there are movements and the movements that are directed to the outside. Actually the very root of emotion, it’s actually having some emotion directly to the outside. It’s something that is visible. It’s objectifiable, you can make a videotape of it. You can record songs, you can do all of that.

But feeling it’s all interior. Feeling is about the experience. When you feel hungry, of course, you can have aspects of your body that signify to others that you are hungry, but when you feel hunger or thirst or pain, you’re actually having an experience, which is in your mind and is telling you something about your body. So the feeling is about the experience. It is necessarily subjective, it’s private. Emotion is public, it is something that is action directed to the outside world. 

You couldn’t have it more different. And, yet these two things are constantly confused and people are constantly talking about emotion and feeling and vice versa, which is on a great big salad. And we need to make this distinction because feelings are very primordial. It’s through feelings that we entered the world of consciousness. Feelings are the clear inaugural examples of being conscious. The first time that any creature, not human necessarily, felt pain, that feeling was conscious by itself. 

If it were not conscious, the creature would not have felt it, the creature would not have known. So the beauty of feeling is that it is automatically necessarily conscious. It’s the beginning of this great big phenomenon in the history of life. And it is giving you knowledge. It’s giving you a special signal now that has a complicated mind and brain helping it. It’s giving us very precise knowledge about what is going on in your life and you can act on it. 

And so the great beauty is that when you think about it, creatures that are very complicated, but at the same time, very simple by comparison to us like say bacteria, they don’t even have a nucleus. They’re simple organisms, but guess what? They have a body. They need to have energy sources to nourish themselves and to go through the days of their life that are prescribed in their genome. They need to be in a good part of whatever territory they’re in so that they can get food. 

They cannot be in a place that it’s too cold or too hot because their bodies may be destroyed. And what they’re doing is to navigate “the universe” to be in the place that is most convenient to maintain their lives, which is of course a great issue of homeostasis. They are governing homeostasis. Let’s be careful, they’re doing all this very intelligently, which means without knowing they’re doing it. The great beauty here in these distinctions is that bacteria and many other simple creatures are intelligent, but the intelligence is covert. 

They don’t know that they’re intelligent. They don’t know what they’re doing. And yes they do. Yes, they do it. We and many other creatures are complex creatures before us because we have the possibility of a nervous system adding the possibility of feeling, having the possibility of mapping out the world around us. We have the possibility of doing things about our life that we know that we are doing. When you have pain, you have the possibility of withdrawing from what caused pain in you. 

And if you’re hungry, you can go in and eat food. And if you’re thirsty, you can drink. And if you have a desire, you can act on your desires, all things being equal. Some may need some caution given the laws. But other than that, you can do all that. So feeling is the great fantastic entry into the world of consciousness and into the world of knowing which is of course what makes the big difference between our own self-governance and the non-self-governance of creatures that don’t have this beautiful apparatus.

[00:35:53] Sean: This is absolutely fascinating. This has me thinking in recent years, a lot of talk with the gut-brain, right? Like they call it the second brain, but you’re saying feeling first, so essentially the gut, that brain has been our first brain?

[00:36:07] Antonio Damasio: Yes, we are really a compound of many organisms, of course. And we have lots of things in our organism that work exactly the way bacteria do. They do their own work and they don’t need us to interfere. And there are things in our guts that do precisely that; they’re contributing to the general economy but they themselves, the cells in the gut and the neural cells that are in tandem with those cells, intestine, they do not know what they’re doing. They are working covertly, just like bacteria and other simple organisms can do. 

Now all of this is contributing knowledge about the general state of the living organism. And then, because we have great brain structures that can put together that information and map it, then you have the possibility of feeling and the possibility of knowing about them. But it’s really we are of course a collection of organisms that have been developed through evolution. And we are these conglomerates, and because of that, we have all these possibilities, but it’s made up of many parts that are far less intelligent than we are.

Consciousness 

[00:37:43] Sean: To form a greater good. How do you define consciousness?

[00:37:49] Antonio Damasio: Something’s very important, when you talk about consciousness, the most important thing probably is to say that it has to do with experience. Consciousness is what allows you, first of all, it’s in your mind, so it’s not something that you see outside. Again, it’s on the side of feeling for a good reason, it came from feeling. It’s something that’s internal, something that is in your mind, something that is allowing you to be a subject, to be a self, and to have “experiences”. When you have pain, one way of saying when you have pain or when you have wellbeing, one way of describing that saying you are having the experience of wellbeing. 

So there is you, there’s yourself. I wrote some years ago, a book called Self Comes to Mind. The idea is that once in this mind structure, once you have the possibility of referring to yourself, referring to your own organism, then you’re entering the world of consciousness. The best way of saying it in simple ways is that consciousness is about knowledge of the state of your organism. It’s experienced internally by itself. So your organism becomes the reference point of the knowledge. And then as we have this possibility of mapping out the external world to a vision and hearing and touching and smelling and so forth, you have the possibility of referring all of that world to the world of your arguments. 

The big thing here is to separate feeling, and its immediate entry into consciousness because it has to do with building yourself, building your own organism to refer first to your body and only body. And then the world that is outside, which our nervous system is collecting through, the eyes, ears, and so forth, which then ends up being referred to that world within that’s what gives you the possibility of consciousness. Now, if you would take away the feeling, you would remove the possibility of self, and then you could have all the images in the world around you but they would not mean anything because they would not be referred to you.

It’s very interesting for you to think about this and for your viewers and listeners, that most of the time when people think about consciousness, they are attracted by this great big show around us. So, the landscape that I have in front of me, like your room, your face, or the sounds of music, all of this is a spectacular production, very Hollywood stuff production. And yet that would not mean anything if you would not have the “other production”, which comes from within. And which is the possibility of feeling yourself, telling you, Hey, if you feel this, you’re here. 

It’s not a syllogism that you very often go through, but the fact that you feel you already exist, that you’re feeling yourself, good or not so good is the anchor to everything that’s going on around you. Nothing makes any sense unless you have that core self that is based on your living organism right now. And which just disappears the minute you die. Because of course, if you die you’re suspended or if you lose consciousness by the way, which really is a way… again, the purveyor often thinks about losing consciousness, it has something to do with losing the picture of the world. Well, it is that too, but what you lost first was the picture of your inside. Just think of this, why do you want to have anesthesia when you’re having surgery? 

[00:42:27] Sean: You don’t want to feel pain.

[00:42:29] Antonio Damasio: Exactly. You want to have anesthesia so that the surgeon can cut your flesh without you starting screaming and attacking the surgeon. So what anesthesia produces first and foremost is the suspension of yourself, the suspension of the view of feeling, which is the anchor to everything that’s around you. And so they give you the anesthetic, they inject it. There you go. In one split second, you go from being to not being, and you’re gone. And then the surgeon can do what he wants.

Global Consciousness

[00:43:05] Sean: This might be a completely out there question, but I remember reading it. Might’ve been in Nature around global consciousness and hours prior to 9/11, like there were spikes in global consciousness. I could just be asking a horrible question here, but I’m just wondering, like, what’s your take on global consciousness?

[00:43:22] Antonio Damasio: I don’t know what it is.

[00:43:25] Sean: It’s essentially like there’s a collected consciousness amongst the world.

[00:43:30] Antonio: Yeah. Yes. I mean, that stands to reason from that definition, but is the idea that there was a global awareness that something was going to happen?

[00:43:41] Sean: Yeah, essentially I am a novice in this. I don’t wanna try to pretend like I know more than I do. Essentially they were massive spikes in terms of global sadness and depression just hours before the attack. The same thing actually happened leading up to COVID, when it was first released.

[00:44:02] : Really?

[00:44:03] Sean: Yeah.

[00:44:04] Antonio: Interesting. Well, I’m not going to say that that’s impossible because I haven’t seen what the data are, but my question would be if in order for me to be convinced that that’s the case we would have to prove that on other occasions, that kind of phenomenon has not happened. My suspicion is that yes, it could go inside because there must be periods in which, for a variety of reasons, people have spikes of sadness, trouble, and so forth. 

I think right now we are having something like that. For example, what has happened, the kind of conflict that social media so often induces is clearly leading to a conflict that you see in societies. You see it in our society quite clearly, but you do see in other societies throughout the world they’re situations that cause conflict. And then there are mechanisms of distribution of information and dealing with information that may enhance the conflict. 

So should we expect another 9/11 because of this? Of course, not. I’m open to seeing the data, but it’s not something that I find likely, let’s put it this way. I think there must be waves up and down happening in that global sort of increase of certain affective states. But that doesn’t mean that is the precursor to a horrible event. 

Interoception, Exteroception, and Proprioception

[00:45:54] Sean: No, I appreciate you even entertaining that and exploring that with me there. One thing I’m always so intrigued by is interoception and please fill in gaps here, but it’s essentially like the perception of sensors inside the body, related to emotion. And I always think about it, so there’s a legendary investor. His name is George Soros, and he used to talk about this, this legendary back pain he would get when he just felt something within his portfolio and whenever that happened, he was essentially right every single time. I would just love to know like you’ve studied this so much. I would love to know if there is something wrong with that. I just want to know.

[00:46:27] Antonio Damasio: Yeah, I do that. That’s actually a very good example. First is the interoception, it’s about perceiving the interior. What’s very interesting is that there is another word, the other word that you need to have at least next to interoception is exteroception. Exteroception is about perceiving the outside. So for example, when I’m perceiving you on the screen of my iPad I am doing a visual exteroception. And when I hear your voice, I’m having sound exteroception. So interoception, and by the way, there’s also, since you’re an athlete there’s also proprioception.

Proprioception is about the perception of the state of your muscular and skeletal frame. And it’s quite interesting because it’s very distinct, the neuroscience of proprioception and of interoception are completely different worlds. Interoception is about the perception of the interior and the interior means, not the muscles, not the bones, but all the other stuff, thick of your skin, the hearts, the lungs, the circulation of the blood, all of the flesh that is inside you, except for the muscles and the bones. So interoception is about that. 

The interesting issue though, is that interoception is unique in the fact, in the sense that you perceive with the nervous system, what is going on in the body, but it so happens that the nervous system is inside the body. So we’re talking about a perfectly incestuous relationship and that incestuous relationship leads to something unique is that the brain that perceives the body and the body that is perceived interact, which really means that the word perception does not really apply. 

What you have in interoception is an interfusion of all of your body and nervous system, the nerves stemming, those that go into every nook and cranny of your body are mingling and co-mingling with your flesh. And of course, when I’m looking at you on my screen, I am not mingling with you. I would not be mingling with you if I were in the same room and I’m not mingling with you because you are an image. You’re being created in my retinas and going on into my visual cortex, but you live in a separate world from the world of my body. 

Now, if I now have pain for some reason in my body, that pain is inside my body. That pain is actually generated by this interaction between the nervous system and my living organisms. And so it produces something very different, but it’s interesting. Historically interoception began as a sort of perception of the interior. And right now, as I explained in Feeling & Knowing, we shouldn’t really say that it’s a much more complicated process, the interactive process of the body and nervous system. 

And so what George Soros says, that’s very interesting. He is a remarkable man, by the way. I know him, he is absolutely brilliant and very thoughtful. And I hadn’t heard that story, so I will have to ask him. But I’m not surprised that he has that kind of attention and intuition based on that attention to pain that he would have. It’s interesting.

Cultivating Intuition 

[00:50:34] Sean: Can you actually cultivate that?

[00:50:37] Antonio Damasio: Oh, yes. That you can, I think you can. You can pay attention to what your intuition correctly. It’s really a question of paying attention to how having a particular thought and being in a particular situation is associated generally with success in things you’re supposed to do in your life. Yeah. I think you get a bit of that. That’s actually something that I probably do, not in a very determined way, but I think I probably do it automatically.

[00:51:16] Sean: What do you mean by that? 

[00:51:20] Antonio Damasio: I mean, I probably want to believe that sometimes super configurations of a relationship or event can lead to more success or less success in something they’re trying to do. But of course, be aware of the fact that that’s also the source of superstition. So if you pay too much attention to it, and if that’s the way you are going to guide your life, then you become a superstitious person. So you could say that back pain is almost like superstition. Is that a good superstition or bad? It all depends on how Soros uses it, but that’s the basis for superstition. So, you have to be careful. 

[00:52:13] Sean: I’m sure it’s a fine line. I’m assuming a lot of people are wondering, like, does meditation help cultivate this?

[00:52:19] Antonio Damasio: I think meditation helps cultivate clarity of thought. Meditation can get rid of a lot of stuff that is unnecessary and that is bothering you, and shouldn’t, and so it can make things more clear. Meditation is really about making people observe with some calmness what’s going on in their lives, instead of having this jumble that we have because we have too much to do. And, we’re being solicited too much to do things. And very often you don’t need to do things, although it’s very nice to talk to you, which is very nicely solicited.

Chipping Away at the Non-essential

[00:53:06] Sean: Speaking about just getting clear, and clarity on things, you had a great line in the book. I just want to highlight, because one of the things you do extremely well actually takes these unbelievably complicated things and distills them down. And the line you had in the book “Do what good poets and sculptors do so well, chip away at the non-essential and then chip some more.” I just love that. Is this something that you’ve done your whole life because of the books? It’s remarkable how you are able to chip away so much?

[00:53:32] Antonio Damasio: No, I don’t think I’ve done that my whole life. But I did that in relation to this book, which is something that I wanted to do to see how it would work. And it was actually very influenced by a request from my editor that I’ve worked with for many years. And he said, you know, several times you told me you would have to write a book that is very simple, very direct, and get rid of all the things that are unnecessary to explain your story.

And said, don’t do references, just like poetry. And I said, well, I don’t think I can do that, and I actually didn’t. We had a disagreement about references and notes. He did not want me to have any notes as I kept to that but I did chip away a lot. So I did practice a little bit of haiku in relation to this book. The other day I was actually preparing for an interview in depth with the French edition of the book, and I was reading the book just in case. I was on a plane with my wife next to me.

I was reading that and said, you know, this is actually very well written. This is a good book, which I normally don’t have because normally when I read, I have an article here that was written just about two or three weeks ago. And the first three pages are just filled with corrections and I don’t like it anymore. And normally I’m awful. I have 10 versions of the same text and so forth. But with this one, I actually liked it, which is a good sign or a bad sign… 

[00:55:50] Sean: Very good point there

[00:55:52] Antonio Damasio: I’m getting less critical.

[00:55:54] Sean: Well, speaking of hacking away the non-essentials, one of the things I’m just so fascinated by is, they say, and please correct me if I’m wrong here. That the unconscious, essentially every second takes in about 11 million bits of data through all of our senses. But we’re only processing between 40 and 60 of them. First off, is this correct? And then what am I to make of this, what’s happening with it? There are 11 other million bits. 

[00:56:17] Antonio Damasio: Probably nothing. I mean, it’s going to your unconscious to some degree now. I don’t know about the numbers, those numbers need to be taken tongue in cheek, depending on how we measure it, those things. But there’s no doubt that we deal with relatively small portions of what we bring in from the world. There are so many things that we are perceiving, but not really attending to. And the world is so rich, and you are constantly being distracted. 

For example, I’m talking to you, and what you’re asking me is very interesting, and I’m thinking about your question, but thinking about that, I’ve been distracted by several things on your wall presented. There’s one picture on the left-hand side with a black frame which is some kind of drawing and throughout our conversation, I have been gradually imagining that that drawing is a drawing of Matisse.  How did I do that? If it is a Matisse, my congratulations. In case it’s not a Matisse… 

[00:57:34] Sean: I wish I had an authentic Matisse back there.

[00:57:37] Antonio Damasio: Yeah. I actually see the details of it, but there’s something about the lines that made me think of a Matisse drawing. And I’m not actually seeing the lines. Obviously, all of this has been computed by me, and I honed in on that because again, it sort of rhymes with some of my interests. I also saw some horses in the background and they did not attract as much attention as the frame with the potential Matisse. 

It’s an incredible wealth of things that you have in your mind. So is it true that we have more in our minds that we can chew? You bet, true. Where does that go? Probably into a waste or it goes into these vast unconscious processes and it may surface. Certainly, our dear old Sigmund would say that it surfaces when you least expect it to, in some tricky form.

[00:58:48] Sean: I guess that’s why I’m so intrigued, is this actually going to waste or would there be a way to tap more into those, not to call them 11 million bits, but so we could?

[00:59:00] Antonio Damasio: I think. There may be ways. And then of course the psychoanalyst is telling you, well, there are always ways to see. You just go through psychoanalysis and pay the big bucks and you will know what’s in your unconscious. A big physician has been, I’ve seen that actually, that’s a way of getting into the unconscious for sure, but I don’t know. I think that what one should do is worry about the things that you are conscious of and try to make sure that they harmonize, that they are connected with the same things that you want to do that are part of your general plan of life.

[00:59:43] Sean: Gets back to music, the harmonizing, right?

[00:59:47] Antonio: Yeah, yeah, exactly. 

Nobel Laureates

[00:59:48] Sean: There’s a research paper that might intrigue you. And it was something around Nobel laureates. I think it was something like 22 times more likely to play a musical instrument than their counterparts that didn’t receive it. It’s something about the beauty and creativity that comes from that.

[01:00:01] Antonio Damasio: I think that’s very interesting. I didn’t know that fact, but I think the ability, the sensibility that allows you to tap into the arts is useful in the sciences. The same way that knowing about the sciences would not be hurtful to an artist. I don’t think that this idea that you would be a great artist, if you would be in the state of complete lack of knowledge about the work, disregarding science and math and so forth. I think that’s not true. It may be that some people are helped by their ignorance. I’m not convinced. 

I think that in general, you find great artists either through knowledge that they acquired or through an incredible intelligence, very intuitive, and actually know a lot about the world and dealing with it. I don’t think that artists can be great artists without having considerable intelligence and considerable knowledge of the world. And of course, it differs if your arts demand as much. But I think this applies to music as well. And of course, there, that knowledge would find a way into the music composition through non-conscious means for sure.

[01:01:43] Sean: Well, I mean, look at da Vinci, right? Like the amount, he studied the sciences to understand lighting, skin, everything like that. I’m fascinated by da Vinci. So I like this example.

[01:01:53] Antonio: Yeah. And he is a good person to be fascinated by. Yeah. Quite a remarkable mind. 

Feeling & Knowing | Making minds conscious 

[01:02:02] Sean: Well, speaking of remarkable minds, I feel bad taking an hour to distill down one of the greatest minds here in neuroscience in history. I’m wondering, because I really did enjoy the book Feeling & Knowing, I want to know, like, what else, any other big things you just want the listeners to understand or walk away from? Because I hope based on this conversation, they’re very intrigued and are very interested in picking up the book.

[01:02:25] Antonio Damasio: Well, first of all, thank you for talking to me. That was very interesting. Terrific conversation, that’s the first thing. I think that take this book as something intermediate, and again, we go to the idea of haiku. The fact that it is paired down doesn’t mean that it is superficial, on the contrary, because once you have the possibility of honing in on just one particular idea and chip away at it, you actually have the possibility of going deeper. 

That’s the first and then in this book, in spite of the fact that it’s the shortest book I ever wrote, normally my books are at least 150 pages longer than this one, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not things there that you’ve never heard. And so there are in fact things there in terms of my commitment to a feeling as a source of consciousness that go deeper than my previous books. And the last thing I would say to my potential readers is that in a way I’m happy that it’s there, but I’m already beyond it.

And what I’m looking for is like this year, there are already two, three papers that I have published with colleagues of mine that go beyond what’s in the book. And that’s one source of satisfaction, in the middle of COVID and all the other terrible nonsense that we’re dealing with in our world. It’s nice to know that somehow you’re making progress and sooner or later that progress is appearing in the form of scientific papers. I hope it will appear in the form of a book. So that’s my message to the readers. Read this one. Hope for the next one.

What Drives Professor Damasio?

[01:04:40] Sean: There’s more, right? We’re always uncovering more. You speak like that, what’s driving you? What’s at the core?

[01:04:46] Antonio Damasio: I don’t know if I can answer that. I wake up in the morning and I’ve not taken to doing something that I’ve never done in my life. I’ve never kept a diary, which I regret because there would be incredibly interesting things in my life in terms of the people I’ve encountered. I’ve been incredibly lucky to encounter so many people that I find fascinating. Some people that I wanted to meet and did, and some people that I met by chance. But now I’m doing something. I don’t want to call it a diary, but a lot of times, a roll of dice I have, sorry.

I hope I stopped it. I forgot. What I’m finding now is that I end the day and if I write something at night, I very often write about exciting things that are making me wake up and continue that idea, which happened, for example, in relation to last night and this morning. So that’s something that obviously drives me, but then these other more conventional things that you want to know, you want to have the answer to certain questions. And they are nagging you and you want to go after them.

[01:06:18] Sean: What’s the one, the most nagging one? 

[01:06:23] Antonio: There’s isn’t a most nagging one.

[01:06:25] Sean: Could you entertain me even one, that’s just kind of sitting up there?

[01:06:29] Antonio Damasio: I can tell you that it has a lot to do with what we’ve been talking about, feeling. That’s the smaller part of the question, but that has a lot to do with it. Terrific. Sean, this has been a wonderful conversation.

Greatest Piece of Music

[01:06:46] Sean: It has been. Do you mind if we do two really quick ones, two final ones? I know how much you love music and art. Is there a piece it could be music or art or even a performance you’ve seen that has just moved you, you saw it and you can never get it out of your mind? Anything like that?

[01:07:03] Antonio Damasio: Oh, yes, many, my God. It’s not many, we’re not talking about thousands, but hundreds easily. And, there are pieces of music that are indispensable to me that I can listen to tons of times and always find new things. I’ve been listening actually in the last few days to interpretations of a Bach- Piano Partitas and one is a new recording by Piotr Anderszewski. He’s a great pianist. He is Polish, Hungarian, and French. And it’s interesting because I always thought, especially the Partita number one, the best interpretation was by a Portuguese pianist. 

A wonderful, brilliant woman pianist, Maria João Alexandre Barbosa Pires. She’s wonderful. She’s a contemporary of mine, and she’s an absolutely incredible pianist. She’s very much adored by legions of people, especially in Europe. She doesn’t come to the United States often. At any rate, I thought her interpretation was the best, and I still think she’s fantastic, but this new interpretation that I’ve discovered has new things about the way that the music is presented.

It’s incredibly captivating and not only the sound itself, but even in the length of the pauses between the different movements. That’s something I look forward to in my life is having those experiences or the experiences that one has with certain visual artists or with certain actors that you see presenting a play. All of these are very important and very nourishing.

Conversation With Someone Dead or Alive

[01:09:15] Sean: Music is the space between the notes, right? The final one, I know your friends and have gotten to talk with a lot of people. Is there anyone you haven’t gotten to talk to dead or alive that you would just love to have just an evening just full of conversation with?

[01:09:30] Antonio Damasio: Dead or alive? Oh my God. Dead, I would want to talk to Shakespeare and da Vinci would not be far behind. I could line them up. Alive, I’m not going to say because they’re several people. It’d be too long a list, I think.

[01:09:56] Sean: Well, Professor Damasio, this really is a true honor for me. I can’t thank you enough. I enjoy you, your work, your thinking. I just can’t thank you enough for coming on What Got You There.

[01:10:07] Antonio Damasio: Thanks so much, Sean. I really enjoyed our conversation.

[01:10:09] Sean: And believe me, we’re going to have everything linked up in the show notes and the transcript with your new book and the previous books. So once again, thanks so much for joining us.

[01:10:20] Antonio Damasio: My pleasure. Thank you. Have a good day.

[01:10:22] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing it on social.

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