If Economic Theory Met Neurosciences: Examining Damasio’s Cognitive Somatic Marker

The paper examines the cognitive “somatic marker”, as proposed by
the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. The aim is to demonstrate how the
submerged world of the body and emotions contributes to delineating a more
integrated rationality, detached from the pretensions of perfection and distant
from the rationality of the economic theory of rational choice. The idea of a
pure, Kantian, formal, and abstract rationality, and the cold strategy it pursues,
despite seeming to be a source of reasonable decisions, appears to be closer to
those of patients with frontal lobe alterations. The omission of the emotional
sphere and the absolutisation of “high reason” in decision-making lead to
decisions focused on the present, short-sighted with respect to the future and
subject to the dictatorship of immediate reward. Effective decisions, on the
other hand, are those that allow us to reach a functional equilibrium with the
world (homeostasis), maintaining relationship continuity with the environment,
an accumulation of unexpressed knowledge of which man is the repository in
its entirety as Brain-Minded Body and Body-Minded Brain.