Decision Making

This weeks readings focused on the processes of reason and emotion in decision-making. In both The Iowa Gambling task and the Somatic Marker Hypothesis and in chapter ten of Descartes’ Error, Damasio discusses two key experiments used to identify biological reactions in relation to emotion and decision-making. The somatic marker hypothesis tests the use of the autonomic nervous system, which consists of an outgoing network of motor commands and an incoming network that signals changes in the viscera. A somatic marker identifies essential changes of body state that are triggered by neural and chemical indicators in the viscera and musculoskeletal systems. When feeling particular emotions the autonomic nervous system generates a secretion of fluid in the skin’s sweat glands. By conducting skin conductive response experiments on people like Elliot with damage to their frontal lobe brain area juxtaposed with normal people, interesting results arose. While the normal participants had skin responses after viewing emotion-provoking slides, the subjects with frontal lobe damage showed no signs of skin reaction. The brain damaged participants could describe in words the horror (or whatever emotion) of the slides but were unable to actually feel what they were talking about even if they were aware of their lack of emotion, which demonstrates Damasio’s first point: to know is not to feel. The lack of something in these patients’ frontal lobe area somehow turned these people into robots.
The second experiment that is discussed is the gambling experiment. This test played with the ideas of reward and punishment in a fun gambling game that possibly activated more ‘real-life’ decision-making, since it wasn’t a typical testing environment. This experiment showed that people with brain damage to their frontal lobe made bad decisions because they were too concerned with the present instead of the future. In a third experiment that combined the skin response tests with the gambling experiments both brain damaged and normal participants showed immediate signs of skin responses. The difference was that the normal subjects continued to show signs of skin response that reflected their increasing learned knowledge to be able to predict bad or good card outcomes to make good decisions, while the brain damaged subjects did not learn from their mistakes even though they were aware of what was going on in the game.
On a slightly different note, I think something that Sanfey, Loewenstein, McClure, and Cohen state in their article Neuroeconomics: cross-currents in research on decision-making is very important to remember: “One current challenge is to ensure that researchers are communicating productively; often, terms such as ‘choice,’ ‘judgement,’ and ‘decision’ are used in different ways by different fields” (114). This also applies to the words ‘reason’ and ‘emotion.’ I felt almost offended by Jonah Lehrer’s use of these words in his article Driven to Market, although I realize a lot of people use it in the same way (it seemed like he was blaming emotions instead of money). I think it is important consider different definitions of both words: why is emotion always considered irrational? Is that true? Is it not rational to follow your instincts? Why does society try to repress emotions (it almost seems like socirty wants to damage our frontal lobes so we can't feel emotion...but of course that would only result in chaos...)? How is reason related to the ability to consider the future? How is it related to the ability to consider the present? Maybe there is more than one kind of reason, like Damasio presents in the first three chapters of Descartes’ Error. Damasio also suggests a very important idea—maybe reason and emotions are not completely separate. We need to find a balance between immediate emotion (reason 1) and future planning (reason 2). I think it is important to remember Damasio’s understanding that ‘feelings are a powerful influence on reason, that the brain systems required by the former are enmeshed in those needed by the latter, and the such specific systems are interwoven with those which regulate the body’ (245).