The Markings Of A Great Decision

We learn from experience. We array objects (things, events, locations, emotions, thoughts, feelings, etc.) into categories, and also associate possible emotions to those categories. We mark those emotions with a measurement of their productivity.

A productive emotion is one which generates pleasure or lessens punishing. “Pleasure” and “punishment” are sensations in the body. So the marker of an emotion’s productivity is literally an associated sensation from the spectrum ranging from ecstatic pleasure to excruciating punishment. Since these markers are body-based, they are better labeled “somatic markers.”

We use what we have learned. When we encounter an object included in various categories, we rapidly deploy the associated emotions. The markers help determine which possible response we should consider first.

If there is conflict among possible responses, we inhibit any behavior activation, until one is chosen (BIS/BAS, for more discussion, see my essay, Cookie Conflict: How Do We Do).

When we have new experience of an emotional response and its associate marker, we might find the emotion more or less productive. Accordingly, we alter the associated somatic-marker to reflect a new sensation of its productivity.

We adapt. We modify the underlying markers.

Damasio builds these elements into his somatic-marker hypothesis:¹

...The revival of the emotional signal [the somatic marker] accomplishes a number of important tasks. Covertly or overtly, it focuses attention on certain aspects of the problem and thus enhances the qualities of reasoning over it. When the signal is overt it produces automated alarm signals relative to options of action that are likely to lead to negative outcomes. A gut feeling can suggest that you refrain from a choice that, in the past, has led to negative consequences, and it can do so ahead of your own regular reasoning telling you precisely the same “Do not.” The emotional signal can also produce the contrary of an alarm signal, and urge the rapid endorsement of a certain option because, in the system’s history, it has been associated with a positive outcome. In brief, the [emotional] signal marks options and outcomes with a positive or negative signal that narrows the decision-making space and increases the probability that the action will conform to past experience. Because the signals are, in one way or another, body-related, I began referring to this set of ideas as the somatic-marker hypothesis.

He describes a decision making process that is driven by emotions, manipulates attention, occurs near automatically and unconsciously, incorporates past experiences, and plays out in the body. This process does not determine one-best-action, but rather narrows the responses to a collection of most-productive responses.

If there is a conflict among these possibilities, the brain delays our response to allow higher-order cognitive processes time to evaluate the choice. In other words, our BIS/BAS process might “give us a chance to think about what to do.”

The emotional signal is not a substitute for proper reasoning. It has an auxiliary role, increasing the efficiency of the reasoning process and making it speedier. On occasion it may make the reasoning process almost superfluous, such as when we immediately reject an option that would lead to a certain disaster, or, on the contrary, we jump to a good opportunity based on a high probability of success.

Since conscious awareness of an event develops only after 0.5 seconds, this emotion-driven decision making drives so much of our behavior.

How do we change this process? How do we learn to respond in a more constructive, less reactive manner?

We must change our somatic markers.

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1. Damasio A. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2003: pp 148-9.

   A more complete description of somatic-markers in Damasio’s words:

   ...we connect the conceptual categories we form - mentally and at the related neural level - with the brain apparatus used for the triggering of emotions. For example, different options for action and different future outcomes become associated with different emotions/feelings. By virtue of those associations, when a situation that fits the profile of a certain category is revisited in our experience, we rapidly and automatically deploy the appropriate emotions.

   ...Among these emotions/feelings, I accord special importance to those that are associated with the future outcome of actions, because they come to signal a prediction of the future, an anticipation of the consequence of actions.

   ...The revival of the emotional signal [the somatic marker] accomplishes a number of important tasks. Covertly or overtly, it focuses attention on certain aspects of the problem and thus enhances the qualities of reasoning over it. When the signal is overt it produces automated alarm signals relative to options of action that are likely to lead to negative outcomes. A gut feeling can suggest that you refrain from a choice that, in the past, has led to negative consequences, and it can do so ahead of your own regular reasoning telling you precisely the same “Do not.” The emotional signal can also produce the contrary of an alarm signal, and urge the rapid endorsement of a certain option because, in the system’s history, it has been associated with a positive outcome. In brief, the [emotional] signal marks options and outcomes with a positive or negative signal that narrows the decision-making space and increases the probability that the action will conform to past experience. Because the signals are, in one way or another, body-related, I began referring to this set of ideas as the somatic-marker hypothesis.

   The emotional signal is not a substitute for proper reasoning. It has an auxiliary role, increasing the efficiency of the reasoning process and making it speedier. On occasion it may make the reasoning process almost superfluous, such as when we immediately reject an option that would lead to a certain disaster, or, on the contrary, we jump to a good opportunity based on a high probability of success.

   In some cases the emotional signal can be quite strong, leading to a partial reactivation of an emotion such as fear or happiness, followed by the appropriate conscious feeling of that emotion. This is the presumed mechanism for a gut feeling, which uses what I have called a body-loop. There are, however, subtler ways for the emotional signal to operate and presumably that is how emotional signals do their job most of the time. First, it is possible to produce gut feelings without actually using he body, drawing instead on the as-if-body-loop... Second, and more importantly, the emotional signal can operate entirely under the radar of consciousness. It can produce alterations in working memory, attention, and reasoning so that the decision-making process is biased toward selecting the action most likely to lead to the best possible outcome, given prior experience. The individual may not ever be cognizant of this covert operation. In these conditions, we intuit a decision and enact it, speedily and efficiently, without any knowledge of the intermediate steps.

   pp 146-149 ↩