Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

The neuropsychological condition that prevents individuals from diagnosing their own physical condition is anosognosia. For example, a patient with left-side paralysis is incapable of realizing that they no longer have control of the left half of their body.

Primary emotions are the near universal emotions that humans have at birth. They include happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. They precondition humans to respond a certain way to certain types of stimuli without the need for reasoning.

Learned later in life with the guidance of their primary counterparts, secondary emotions are generally more complex and can be mapped to specific stimuli. They form the bedrock of somatic markers in humans and, along with working memory, allow people to anticipate situations.

Unlike emotions, which reflect the body’s state at a specific moment, feelings are the consequence of a prolonged emotional state. Beings capable of feeling an emotion in connection with a particular stimuli possess a higher level of consciousness.

The Phineas Gage matrix defines all individual who have damage in a specific area of the prefrontal cortex and are no longer capable of processing secondary emotions but otherwise retain their intelligence. In Descartes’ Error, Elliot is the main example of an individual in the Phineas Gage matrix.