What is the somatic marker hypothesis?

The human being is a complex animal. Underlying its reality as a living organism is both the ability to feel deep emotions and the ability to develop cognitive hypotheses about the way in which reality appears in front of it.

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

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

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

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Emotions, cognition and physiology

Emotions have, in addition to 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 quickens, we breathe heavily, muscles tense, and the entire body braces for a quick fight-or-flight response. Sometimes this response is so immediate that it obviates any previous process of cognitive elaboration.

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 capable of interpreting that emotional stability has been altered before the presence of an environmental threat, and consequently we assume awareness that we experience fear. Both phenomena, physiological reactions and cognitive certainty, seem to occur in a coordinated and automatic way..

However, from the very dawn of the study of emotions, which unfortunately took a long time as a result of having been understood as epiphenomena irrelevant, theorists questioned the order in which both moments of the process take place: are we afraid because we are trembling or do we tremble because we have fear? 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 affective life, postulated that the emotion that we perceive at a given moment is the result of the interpretation of physiological signals, and not the other way around. Thus, When we feel that our body begins to sweat or become active, we would conclude that the emotion of fear seizes us; assembling sensations and emotions in an integrated experience.

From such a perspective, which Damasio recovers to shape his somatic marker hypothesis, the body would have the ability to anticipate the awareness of what we are feeling at every moment, asserting itself as a sentinel to guide awareness in multiple areas of life. life. In a way, it could be said that the physiological imprint of the experience ends up “programming” the body to issue quick responses to situations that require it.

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What is the somatic marker hypothesis?

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

The occurrence of positive and negative situations is inherent to the very fact of living, and they all imply an emotional response that involves both physiology and cognition (sensations and interpretations). The result of each of our experiences combines the specific event, the thoughts that originate, the emotion that emerges and the physiological response that erupts; all of this being stored in its entirety in the increasingly thick records of the episodic memory.

This complex sequence implies a succession of phenomena that, under normal conditions, occur unconsciously and automatically. Both thoughts, as well as the emotion that depends on them and physiology itself, take place without our deliberately trying to direct them in any direction. For this same reason, many people directly link the event experienced with emotions and behavior, obviating the mediating contribution of their way of thinking.

Well, each emotion involves the activation of different brain regions, as well as bodily 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 face real situations that precipitate them, an association is produced between the events experienced and the way in which 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 this being extended to subsequent events that harbor similarities with respect to the original. In this way, primary inducers are distinguished (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 process of evaluating a present experience, while they unfold in our internally the cognitive mechanisms that are required to respond to the environment with the maximum immediacy and accuracy, the somatic and visceral reaction that was experienced before an event similar to the one we faced in the past emerges in parallel. The question is: how does this double and underhanded reaction, based on previous experience, but with a proactive capacity, affect us?

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What is your function?

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

The truth is we have very limited cognitive resources. Every time we face a new situation of high demand, we usually go through a period of anxiety that even compromises our state of mind; because 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 to the extent 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 these are absolutely necessary to select the best course of action in the context of a multiplicity of possible paths to choose.

Emotion acts as a guide, definitely. It tends to unfold before each significant event in our lives, forming 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 it) for emotional memory.

Well, when we are faced with a demanding situation similar to the one we could have experienced at another time in the past, the body sets up a marker somatic: we immediately feel the bodily sensations that occurred on the previous occasion (those specific to fear, anger, sadness, etc.), offering us these a compass on the opportune decision at the present time, equating what was lived in the past with what is being lived now.

At a colloquial level, this phenomenon has been transmitted through popular expressions such as "I had a hunch", which allude to directly to the physiological components (heart rate) that occurred at the very moment of making a decision, and that ultimately decanted the process. 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 inextricably linked in all basic decision-making processes., so these require the integrity of the brain structures on which they depend.

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

The convergence of emotion and cognition is called feeling (which acquires greater experiential depth), which requires the interacting orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, as well as the integrity of the connections that unite. That is why frontal injuries (tumors, accidents, etc.) have been consistently associated with Difficulties integrating emotion into decisions, which leads to difficulties assuming one's own personal autonomy.

Bibliographic references:

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