What is the somatic marker hypothesis?

This concept tells us about the relationship between emotions and decision making.

The human being is a complex animal. Underlying his reality as a living organism is both the capacity to feel deep emotions and the capacity to elaborate 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.For many years, emotion and cognition were understood as independent realities, even confronting each other, forming an artificial antagonism in which affect was relegated to the background of the animalistic and the irrational.

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

In this article we will review the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) 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, in addition to a purely affective component, cognitive and physiological correlates.. We can all imagine at this very moment how we felt the last time we experienced fear, one of the basic emotions. The Heart rate accelerates, we breathe profusely, muscles tense, and the entire body prepares for a rapid fight or flight response. Sometimes this response is so immediate that it bypasses all prior cognitive processing.

Just as we are able to evoke these physical sensations, we may be able to glimpse the thoughts that are often 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 become aware that we are experiencing fear. Both phenomena, physiological reactions and cognitive certainty, seem to occur in a coordinated and automatic manner..

However, since the very dawn of the study of emotions, which was unfortunately delayed for a long time as a consequence of having been 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 lead us to think the latter, not all authors have followed this line.

William James, who focused his efforts extraordinarily on the dynamics governing affective 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. Thus, when we feel our body start to sweat or become active, we would conclude that we are seized by the emotion of fear.The sensations and emotions are assembled into an integrated experience.

From such a perspective, which Damasio recovers 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 consciousness in multiple areas of life. In a certain sense, it could be said that the physiological imprint of experience ends up "programming" the body to emit rapid responses to to emit quick responses to situations that require it.

• You may be interested in "Are we rational or emotional beings?"

What is the somatic marker hypothesis?

The human being resides at the perennial crossroads of two great worlds: the external one (which he perceives through the sense organs) and the internal one (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 have to live through are nuanced by the thoughts that are elaborated around them, and from which emerge the thoughts and images of the individual reality.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 involve an emotional response that involves both physiology and cognition (sensations and interpretations). The result of each of our experiences brings together the concrete event, the thoughts that originate, the emotion that emerges and the physiological response that erupts, all of which are stored in their entirety in the increasingly thicker registers of episodic memory.

This complex sequence involves a succession of phenomena that, under normal conditions, occur unconsciously and automatically. Thoughts, as well as the emotion that depends on them and the physiology itself, take place without our deliberately trying to channel them in any direction. For this same reason, many people directly link the event experienced with emotions and behavior, ignoring 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 because of their evolutionary properties. Joy, fear, sadness, anger, disgust and surprise each involve a distinct and identifiable physiological reaction. When through our experience we are confronted with real situations that precipitate them, an association is produced between the events experienced and the way they made us feel.

This effect follows the basic laws of learningThe general characteristics of the situation are associated with the contingent emotion that accompanies it, and all this is extended to subsequent events that have similarities with respect to the original one. In this way, 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) are distinguished.

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

What is its 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 to end up in the turbulence of failure. And popular wisdom, embodied in the very 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 that we have very limited cognitive resources.. Whenever we are confronted with a new, highly demanding situation, we usually go through a period of anxiety that even compromises our state of mind, because we need all our available mental capacity to extract, encode, systematize and understand the information involved, processing it efficiently in order 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.

Emotion acts as a guidein short. It tends to unfold before every significant event in our life, forming part of its memory when it is recalled even many years later. For all this to be possible, the brain requires numerous structures, with the amygdala (located in the depths of the brain) being reserved for emotional memory.

Well, when we are faced with a demanding situation similar to the one we may have experienced at another time in the past, the body sets off 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 opportune decision in the present moment, equating what was experienced before with what happened before.The latter offer us a compass on the appropriate decision at the present moment, equating what we have experienced in the past with what we are experiencing now.

At 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 occurred at the very moment of making a decision, and which ultimately influenced the process. In this way, 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, and therefore require the integrity of the brain structures on which they depend.Therefore, 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 in interaction, as well as the integrity of the connections that link them. This is why frontal lesions (tumors, accidents, etc.) have been consistently associated with difficulties in integrating emotion into decisions, leading to difficulties in assuming one's own personal autonomy.

Bibliographical references:

• Márquez, M.R., Salguero, P., Paíno, 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.
• Bechara, A. and Damasio, A.R. (2004). The Somatic Marker Hypothesis: A Neural Theory of Economic Decision. Games and Economic Behavior, 52, 336-372.