The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

Such is the conclusion drawn by two neuroscientists, Antonio Damasio and Antoine Bechara. Working with patients who had damage to one particular part of the brain which integrates signals from the body, Damasio and Bechara found that these patients could have perfectly normal, even exceptional, cognitive abilities, yet make terrible decisions in their lives. Perhaps, Damasio and Bechara surmised, the patients’ IQs counted for little in making good decisions because they were deprived of help from their bodies, from homeostatic and emotional feedback. They concluded that “feeling was an integral component of the machinery of reason.” To account for the decision making impairments of these and similar patients, Damasio and Bechara developed their Somatic Marker Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, each event we store in memory comes bookmarked with the bodily sensations—Damasio and Bechara call these “somatic markers”—we felt at the time of living through it for the first time; and these help us decide what to do when we find ourselves in a similar situation. When we scroll through the options open to us, each may present itself with a subtle tensing of muscles, a quickening of breath, a slight shiver of dread, a brief moment of calm, a frisson of excitement—until one just feels right. These bookmarks are especially memorable, and most urgently needed, when we take a risk, for risk can hurt us, physically and financially. So it is little wonder that tales of gut feeling...