Human beings are complex animals. Underlying his reality as a living organism is both the ability to feel deep emotions and to develop cognitive hypotheses about the way reality presents itself to him.

For many years, emotion and cognition were understood as independent and even conflicting realities , forming an artificial antagonism in which the affects were relegated to the background of the animalistic and irrational.

However, today we know that emotion and cognition are two necessary gears for the optimal functioning of the mind, so affecting either of them will compromise important processes during life.

In this article we will review the hypothesis of the somatic marker (HMS) proposed by the prestigious neurologist Antonio Damasio; which articulates an integrated explanatory model to understand the way we feel, decide and act.

Emotions, Cognition and Physiology

Emotions have, besides a purely affective component, cognitive and physiological correlates . We can all imagine at this precise moment how we felt the last time we experienced fear, one of the basic emotions. The heart rate accelerates, we breathe profusely, the muscles tense up and the whole body prepares for a quick fight or flight response. Sometimes, this response is so immediate that it bypasses any previous cognitive processing.

Just as we are able to evoke these physical sensations, we may be able to glimpse the thoughts that are usually associated with them. Instantly we are able to interpret that emotional stability has been altered in the presence of an environmental threat, and consequently we assume that we experience fear. Both phenomena, physiological reactions and cognitive certainty, seem to follow each other in a coordinated and automatic way .

However, since the very beginning of the study of emotions, which unfortunately took a long time as a result of being understood as irrelevant epiphenomena, theorists have questioned the order in which both moments of the process occur: Are we afraid because we are trembling or do we tremble because we are afraid? Although our intuition might make us think the latter, not all authors have followed this line.

William James, who focused his efforts extraordinarily on the dynamics that govern emotional life, postulated that the emotion we perceive at a given moment is the result of the interpretation of physiological signals, and not the other way around. In this way, when we feel that our body begins to sweat or to activate itself, we would conclude that we are seized by the emotion of fear ; the sensations and the emotions being assembled in an integrated experience.

From such a perspective, which Damasio recovers in order to give shape to his hypothesis of the somatic marker, the body would have the capacity to anticipate the very consciousness of what we are feeling at each moment, asserting itself as a sentinel to orient the consciousness in multiple spheres of life. In a certain way, it could be said that the physiological imprint of experience ends up “programming” the body to emit rapid responses to situations that require it.

What is the somatic marker hypothesis?

The human being resides at the perennial crossroads of two great worlds: the exterior (which he perceives through his sense organs) and the interior (which takes the form of thoughts and images through which he represents and elaborates his individual reality). Both are coordinated, in such a way that the situations we are called upon to experience are nuanced by the thoughts that are elaborated around them , and from which a concrete emotional response emerges.

The occurrence of positive and negative situations is inherent to the very fact of living, and all of them imply an emotional response involving both physiology and cognition (sensations and interpretations). The result of each one of our experiences brings together the concrete event, the thoughts that originate, the emotion that emerges and the physiological response that bursts in, all of which is stored in the thicker and thicker registers of episodic memory.

This complex sequence involves a succession of phenomena that, under normal conditions, occur unconsciously and automatically. Both the thoughts, the emotion that depends on them and the physiology itself, take place without us deliberately trying to channel them in any direction. For this same reason, many people directly link the lived event with the emotions and behaviour, , ignoring the mediating contribution of their way of thinking .

Well, each emotion involves the activation of different brain regions, as well as body sensations that are specific to it due to its evolutionary properties. Joy, fear, sadness, anger, disgust and surprise imply in each case a different and identifiable physiological reaction. When through our experience we are faced with real situations that precipitate them, an association is produced between the facts we have lived through and the way they made us feel.

This effect follows the basic laws of learning , associating the general characteristics of the situation with the contingent emotion that accompanies it, all of which can be extended to later events that have similarities with the original. In this way, a distinction is made between primary inducers (environmental stimuli that provoked the emotion in the first place) and secondary inducers (subsequent environmental stimuli to which the original fact-emotion relationship is generalized).

In the initial moments of the evaluation process of a present experience, while the cognitive mechanisms required to respond to the environment with maximum immediacy and accuracy are unfolding in our inner self , the somatic and visceral reaction that was experienced before an event similar to the one we faced in the past emerges in a parallel way . The question is: how does this double and overlapping reaction, based on previous experience, but with a proactive capacity, affect us?

What is your function?

It is said that the human being is the only animal that stumbles twice over the same stone. That is, in the face of a situation very similar to that in which he made a mistake, he tends to repeat the same strategy to end up again in the turbulence of failure. And popular wisdom, embodied in the very rich Spanish proverb, also suggests that: “the first time was your fault, but the second was my fault”. The wisdom of our ancestors should never be underestimated.

The truth is that we have very limited cognitive resources . Every time we are faced with a new situation of high demand we usually go through a period of anxiety that compromises even our state of mind; since we need all the mental capacity available to extract, codify, systematize and understand the information that is involved; processing it efficiently to offer an adequate response as far as possible.

This process is known, in general terms, as decision-making. If we understand it in the way indicated in the previous paragraph, it is tempting to interpret that emotions have not contributed at any point in the process, but the truth is that the evidence indicates that they are absolutely necessary to select the best course of action in the context of a multiplicity of possible paths to choose from.

The emotion acts as a guide , in short. It tends to unfold before every significant event of our life, becoming part of its memory when it is recalled even many years later. For all this to be possible, the brain needs numerous structures, reserving the amygdala (located in the depths of the brain) for emotional memory.

Well, when we are faced with a demanding situation similar to that which we might have experienced at another time in the past, the body sets in motion a somatic marker: we immediately feel the bodily sensations that occurred on the previous occasion (the specific ones of fear, anger, sadness, etc.), offering us these a compass on the appropriate decision in the present moment , equating what we experienced in the past with what we are experiencing now.

On a colloquial level this phenomenon has been transmitted through popular expressions such as “I had a hunch”, which make a direct allusion to the physiological components (heart rate) that followed each other at the very moment of making a decision, and that ultimately set the process in motion. In this way, the emotion would be acting as a mechanism of cognitive economy through its somatic components, and releasing the high load of cognitive processing.

Conclusions

Emotions and cognition are indissolubly linked in the totality of the basic decision-making processes , so they require the integrity of the brain structures on which they depend.

The somatic marker would draw on the physiological pattern of emotions that occurred during past experiences to facilitate a prospective analysis of current ones, helping to choose concrete courses of action in complex environments.

The convergence of emotion and cognition is called feeling (which acquires greater experiential depth), which requires the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala to interact, as well as the integrity of the connections between them. That is why frontal lesions (tumors, accidents, etc.) have been consistently associated with difficulties in integrating emotion into decisions, leading to difficulties in assuming one$0027s personal autonomy.

Bibliographic references:

  • Márquez, M.R., Salguero, P., Paíno, S. and Alameda, J.R. (2013). The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and its Impact on the Decision Making Process. Electronic Journal of Applied Methodology, 18(1), 17-36.
  • Bechara, A. and Damasio, A.R. (2004). The Somatic Marker Hypothesis: A Neural Theory of Economic Decision. Games and Economic Behavior, 52, 336-372.