How Has 'Descartes' Error' Influenced Modern Psychology?

2025-06-18 19:05:35 187

4 Answers

Kayla
Kayla
2025-06-19 03:21:01
'Descartes’ Error' turned psychology’s spotlight onto the body. Damasio proved emotions are physical events—butterflies in your stomach, racing hearts—that the brain interprets. This changed how we treat anxiety; therapists now focus on bodily cues first. The book also influenced tech: fitness apps track heart rate variability for stress, and VR therapy uses simulated physical reactions to rewire trauma. Damasio showed psychology can’t ignore the flesh housing the mind.
Scarlett
Scarlett
2025-06-20 05:10:33
Reading 'Descartes' Error' was like watching someone flip psychology’s chessboard mid-game. Damasio didn’t just argue emotions matter—he demonstrated their absence wrecks cognition. Take his famous Iowa Gambling Task: people with prefrontal damage kept losing because they lacked ‘gut warnings.’ Today, this underpins everything from trauma therapy (where numbness hinders recovery) to UX design (users quit if a site feels ‘off’). His ideas birthed neuroeconomics, proving stock traders rely on subliminal fear cues. Even robot designers now simulate bodily feedback loops. The book turned emotion from fringe to foundation.
Mila
Mila
2025-06-20 14:19:40
Antonio Damasio's 'Descartes' Error' fundamentally reshaped how we view the mind-body connection. Before this, emotions were often dismissed as irrational noise, but Damasio proved they’re critical to decision-making. His work with patients like Phineas Gage showed how damage to emotional centers led to catastrophic logic failures—proof that reason can’t function without feeling. Modern neuroscience now treats emotions as data, not distractions. Therapies for PTSD and addiction integrate his findings, emphasizing somatic awareness.

Damasio also shattered the myth of the purely rational brain. His somatic marker hypothesis revealed that gut feelings—physical responses to potential outcomes—guide choices before logic kicks in. This revolutionized fields from behavioral economics to AI, where emotion modeling became essential. Schools teach emotional intelligence alongside math, and CEOs train in empathy. The book’s legacy? A world that finally acknowledges: to think human, you must feel human.
Trisha
Trisha
2025-06-23 21:41:22
Damasio’s book made me realize emotions aren’t the enemy of logic—they’re its GPS. Before 'Descartes’ Error,' psychology treated feelings like static disrupting the ‘real work’ of thinking. Now we know decision-making flatlines without emotional input. My friend in HR says companies use Damasio’s principles to design better feedback systems—criticism delivered without empathy literally shuts down brains. The book’s biggest impact? Normalizing that ‘trusting your gut’ isn’t mystical—it’s neuroscience.
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