So, I said somatic markers are a good indication of what you should do as long as they're in good order. What does that mean? Well, Damasio is clear, in fact quite eloquent, about the ways in which even if you have somatic markers and have access to them in the way in which perhaps Phineas Gage and Elliot did not, still those somatic markers can be off-kilter in one way or another, and for a number of reasons. For example, your own experience with, for example, a traumatic event. Suppose- and many of my students and I'm guessing many of you will have had this experience- of something that you've eaten in your life thus far, that although in itself that kind of dish is not inherently bad, perhaps you got a bad portion of it because it had gone off and you got sick. Or maybe you were, in the way that I was when I was once a kid, drinking a certain kind of milkshake while in a car driving on a mountain road, and it wasn't anything wrong with the milkshake, but it was the fact that I was in the car and driving on a mountain road that made me sick, and that particular kind of milkshake, from that particular kind of convenience store, I never want to have again. That particular kind of milkshake is somatically marked for me and probably will be to the end of my life. Likewise, I'm sure you can think of cases in which something that's happened to you in your past is something that you still feel a kind of revulsion towards. In Damasio's language, we would say that is somatically marked for you, and that's not necessarily rational. There's no reason to think that just because this particular kind of thing made me sick 35 years ago, it's likely to make me sick anytime soon. It was just that particular situation that I was in. Nevertheless, I'm probably going to avoid that particular kind of food. So too, you can think of cases in which there is that particular corner that you once had a conflict with another kid while waiting for a school bus, and you tend to avoid that corner even though many years have passed and there is no reason to think any longer that street corner is a dangerous place. Or there might be a particular color that corresponds to some clothing that someone wore that you had some feelings about. Or maybe there's a particular song that resonates for you because it has an association with some experience you had in your life, such as your first romance or something of the kind. Those are all fine. But you can also imagine how some things can be somatically marked in a way that creates, for example, phobia. You might have had a run-in with an arachnid sometime in your life, the result of which perhaps is that all spider or members of the spider family are going to be things that give you extreme fear, even if this particular spider you're looking at is clearly very small and extremely unlikely to do you or any other thing very much harm. Nevertheless, people who have arachnophobia are going to have any member of the spider family be somatically marked for them as likely to cause terror. Likewise, heights, crowds of people, water, things that produce phobias are often going to be, when experienced, when you actually look at them or even think about them, are likely to be somatically marked for you and cause a strong emotional reaction. As you can see, those are not always the most functional things. Some of them will actually result in dysfunction, and some of them will make it difficult for you to live the life that you want to live. That is to say, some things might be somatically marked in such a way as to make it hard for you to do what you want to do. If being in a crowd of people in a closed space such as an airplane or a classroom is something that is somatically marked for you in a strongly negative way, then you might find yourself unable to do the things you'd like to do. So too addictions of various kinds: food, alcohol, drugs can trip us up in such a way as to make things somatically marked when in a sense they shouldn't be. You've already eaten your fill and yet, nevertheless, this pizza or spaghetti or these empanadas, whatever, are going to be somatically marked because they call out for you to eat more and more of them. So, these are examples of somatic markers going awry in one way or another. So, these are things that can happen at the level of an individual's life, and how things at the level of the individual's life can make their life go off track, be dysfunctional in one way or another. You can also think about how a psychotherapist, for example, might try to help a patient in such a way as to get their somatic markers back on track. So, for example, if you're afraid of speaking in front of a crowd, speaking in front of a group, there are ways in which, behavioral interventions in which you might be exposed to at least, for example, a low level of somatic markedness of a crowd. Once you're able to, so to speak, erase the negativity in that low level, not very threatening, not very challenging crowd, you might be exposed to a slightly more challenging crowd and see whether you can erase the negative markedness of that, and go on gradually over a period of time in such a way as to overcome the negative markedness of speaking in front of a crowd. So, that something is somatically marked does not mean that it's necessarily going to be like that for the rest of their life. Those markings can change, they can be undone, they can be fixed in a certain way to your benefit in order to make your life more accessible. So too someone who, for example, does not exercise but would like to be the sort of person who exercises might find ways to make the prospect of going to the gym, going out running, riding a bicycle, going swimming be something that is somatically marked in a positive way. Many people have found tricks to get themselves to like and actually look forward to and raise the prospect of getting outside, running in the woods, swimming in the lake, riding a bike up the mountain as the case may be. So, these things can be harnessed for our good and not necessarily in a way that makes trouble for us. But Damasio rightly also points out also with the phrase, what he calls acquired sociopathy, that as an individual, one can become blind to what for normals are going to be somatically-marked situations about their suffering, and perhaps more importantly, at a social level. Whole societies, Damasio would say, can become sick for the reason that whole societies can be indoctrinated in such a way that people and the majority of the society might become unable to react emotionally, that is, no longer have somatic markedness as an application to the behavior as inflicted on certain groups. So, for example, in Nazi Germany, under the regime of Pol Pot, during various aspects of the Balkan crisis, during the genocide in Rwanda, we can see cases in which one group can be described as having what would normally be a somatically-marked situation watching somebody else suffer, what for normals would be an extremely upsetting, disturbing, life-changing experience can, with the right kind of indoctrination, brainwashing, et cetera, so long as those individuals are described as subhuman, vermin, insects, non-humans in one way or another, deserving of a certain kind of treatment, then what would normally be your visceral negative reaction to watching someone being tortured, killed, taken away, et cetera is something that might, at this point, leave you cold. So, Damasio wants to suggest that part of what can make a whole society sick is when what normally would be people's somatically-marked reactions to others than themselves being treated in a certain way becomes erased. Somatic markers can be removed by the appropriate kind of indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda, et cetera in such a way as to make us be left cold by situations that would normally affect us profoundly and very disturbingly. So, Damasio wants to suggest that somatic markers are not necessarily good. They can be abused in a certain way, in such a way as to make a society an extremely intolerant one, and they can pave the way for various kinds of genocide, et cetera.
