Let me start by saying that these chapters were extremely interesting. So Damasio has laid out some systems that, when damaged, severely affect a person’s ability to plan and decide in social and personal situations. The systems play an important role in the processing of emotions. Somehow processing and understanding emotion is integral to our ability to make real life decisions. Having said that, I found this information to be disturbing as well. The evidence Damasio has presented is detrimental to our conception of personhood. Brain damage can do more than affect certain cognitive capacities like speech or memory. It affects that subjective thing we call “personality”-- something we’ve assumed has a certain degree of permanency. But the stories of Phineus Gage and Elliot indicate that brain damage can affect these subjective aspects more than we thought.
What bothers me is that the picture this paints of us is deterministic and reductionist. We are a combination of our machinery and the physical stimuli that go into shaping that machinery. If one part breaks, (like this decision making network) our entire personhood changes. I suppose this reductionism would be ok if we could fix our machinery, and while sometimes this is possible, most of the time it is extremely difficult to fully regain lost functions.
This brings me to another point. Neuroscientists have discovered that our brains are plastic. This means that, given the proper stimuli, brain maps can be rewired and the connections between neurons can either be strengthened or weakened. For instance, stroke victims who have suffered damage to those areas involved with language have been known to regain many of their language skills during rehabilitation. The victim's brain rewires itself; the speech center moves to a different area. I wonder if that same plasticity could be achieved in patients like Phineus and Elliot. Could their brains have rewired themselves to make up for their deficits given the proper therapy?
The thought about humans being deterministic and deductible is extremely scary. Our brains contribute so much to whom we are that sometimes it doesn’t seem fair. So is it fair to label those with brain damage as abnormal? How much of it is their fault that their brains cannot or do not have the proper items to function properly? Gage’s life after his accident was not one to look upon with great joy. He could not hold a job, people did not like him, and he couldn’t be independent. Would anyone really want to live that life? I am almost curious to know how Gage felt about how drastic his life had changed after the accident. Because his emotions were inhibited, I assume he would probably not express any emotion towards this subject, but that seems even worse. Sure it may save him from some hurt, but as someone mentioned in class imagine being able to know how you once felt about something and not being able to feel that anymore. I do hope that in the future neuroscience will be able to help patients like Elliot and Gage. I am not quite sure how little brain damage has to occur for rewiring of the brain to occur. Elliot might be a better patient because his brain was probably less damaged then Gage’s. But being able to rehabilitate these kinds of patients would vastly improve their quality of life.
ReplyDeleteI don't find Damasio's analysis of people and their personalities to be detrimental to our "personhood" - if anything, I feel like he's looking at it from an incredibly scientific standpoint. At the end of the day, we, and our emotions, are simply the sum of our biological parts. Changing that sum thus changes us - it's a simple concept that holds true for any living thing.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I do think that people like Gage could have been "rewired" given more knowledge and therapy to treat their conditions. The only thing I think that truly held them back from achieving this was that their cases were exceptional back in their time, when we did not really know an incredible amount about the human brain and how it worked. Even so, I wouldn't bet on a -full- recovery so much as a minor return of emotion, as seen by Gage's taste for "simple" things during his post-accident lifetime.
Answering your question at the end...I think we definitely can bring ourselves up to what is normal along with rehabilitation. I think our brain immediately identifies the problem and starts assessing what it needs to do to fix it.
ReplyDeleteHelp and rehabilitation is key though because I think, as the book describes, that our brains problem is that when it gets hurt it just shuts off that part of itself as if we are completely normal anyways. (Going back to when subjects still think they have limbs that they lost). In Elliot's case, he still knew what emotions were, he just knew he couldn't feel them. Like "Nemo" said, the times have changed, and I'm sure by now we have figured out a way to go around this and heal it, or will learn it soon enough.
I think what you are saying about reducing us to plastic machines might be a little extreme. Dimasio is discussion the change in personality of a person who lost a cylinder an inch and a quarter in diameter of brain matter, not just someone who got hit on the head. Even in the case of Elliot, there was actual irreparable damage done to sectors of the brain.
ReplyDeleteAnalogously, if the spike had hit Gage and permanently severed his arm rather than part of his brain, it would not be expected for that to grow back, rather it would be expected to see Gage change his lifestyle to accommodate his disability. Looking at it that way, I don't think it would be reductionist to say that losing such a great part of your physical form would greatly change your personhood. Even the differing examples of Gage and Elliot show that damage to the same region can manifest in different ways. Rather it would be reductionist to say that taking off a finger on every person would elicit the same change in behavior across the board.
I often have a hard time understanding people's criticisms of reductionism. Understandably, Demasio's work as reductionism is a daunting thought. This greatly reduces the significance of the human experience.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I feel that this is as far as the argument goes. I always think of early forms of astronomy and societies' rejection of the Earth revolving around the Sun. People can tend to reject things because they seemingly diminish the grand importance of human beings. This negative depiction of reductionism may be simply a criticism, and nothing more. I personally feel that even if we are merely a collaboration between neurons firing, chemical excretions, and other functions within our brains, we are no less unique and exquisite. If this reductionist perspective is reality than I, personally, have no problem embracing my artificial experience of profound life.