Readings at the Intersection of Culture and Faith: Intuition, Immunology, and the Free Market

Readings at the Intersection of Culture and Faith: Intuition, Immunology, and the Free Market

Books Discussed

Emotional Longevity: What Really Determines How Long You Live. By Norman B. Anderson with P. Elizabeth Anderson. New York: Viking, 2003. xiv + 332 pp. $24.95 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. By Antonio Damasio. New York: Harcourt, 2003. x + 355 pp. $28.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).

The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. By ArIie Russell Hochschild. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003. ix + 313 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

The Link Betioeen Religion and Health: Psychoneuroimmunology and the Faith Factor. Edited by Harold G. Koenig and Harvey Jay Cohen. London: Oxford University Press, 2002. xii + 304 pp. $39.50 (cloth).

Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx. By Heidi B. Neumark. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2003. xvii + 286 pp. $25.00 (cloth).

Antonio Damasio understands what it means to be embodied minds and complexly historical selves. His argument on such matters has been following me around for weeks, quietly explicating my inner life. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain continues the argument of his earlier books, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body ami Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999). With growing certainty and ever-stronger evidence, he undercuts the classically Western and perniciously modernist priority given to self-controlled rationality.

The neurological process he describes goes like this: sensory receptors transmit the presence of what he calls an "emotionally-competent stimulus"-for instance, an SUV barreling up in the next lane and then starting to fishtail in the snow. Or maybe something as subtle as small changes in body posture and tone of voice among those at a meeting. This level of sensory transmission is not or not yet conscious: we can react to things we don't yet "know" are there because these perceptions can remain below the limited radar of self-aware consciousness. But whether or not we yet "know" what's going on, an array of structures in the brain (mostly the limbic system) trigger a complex somatic response to these sensory inputs.

These somatic responses are emotions, properly so called: the body's response to external stimuli that are significant in some way for pain or for pleasure, for joy or for sorrow. Emotions range from spikes in blood pressure to grimaces or gasps to the stunningly complex motor responses necessary to swerve in an instant at highway speeds and in the snow. Sweaty hands, pounding hearts, the cold churning gut: these too are emotions.

Feelings, properly so called, are distinct from emotions as strictly defined. Feelings well up within consciousness only as yet other structures in the brain catch up with what's going on both in the world and in the bodily response to it. That's why-as we all know-feelings of terror at a highway accident narrowly averted commonly well up only in the seconds afterward. Such awareness can be "last" in a string of events that transpires at blinding speed, of course. But the attentive know that conscious awareness comes a split second later in the string of responses to a genuine emergency.

What we call critical thinking comes in even later than feelings. In fact, critical intelligence and problem-solving are stunningly dependent for their accuracy upon these primary neurological systems of somatic emotion and mental feelings. Life's ongoing flow of visceral responses and many-threaded feelings builds and later provides access to an otherwise minimally accessible archive of observations, experiences, and prior judgments. You can demonstrate this to yourself by paying attention to the exact experience of trying to remember a phone number, a name, or the title of a book. There's no intellectual, rational chatter going on in your head. The sense of "search," the sense of "reaching back," is entirely silent and utterly visceral because it works by and through these emotions/feelings pathways, which function as something like keywords accessing a database. These pathways are minimally linked to language centers, although obviously there is some connection: the right answer pops up in verbal awareness as if Google is reporting back.

The Sixth Sense

We repress our feelings and emotions at considerable peril: it is always dangerous to blind ourselves to any dimension of our perceptions of the world around us. In a meeting, for instance, that tingle of anxiety, especially if attended to, can release a flood of relevant memories about colleagues' hot buttons or how other meetings were either rescued or went down in flames. Furthermore, Damasio explains,

Feelings help us solve nonstandard problems involving creativity, judgment, and decision-making that require the display and manipulation of vast amounts of knowledge. . . . [T]he state of feeling prompts the brain to process emotional-related objects and situations salientlij (pp. f 77-178).