EP148 Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing
The Jim Rutt Show
Is a Frog Waiting for a Fly?
'I think i know where you'll come down. Is a frog waiting for a fly or is it extracting from the world a pattern?' 'We have this marvellous thing that is allowing us to converse right now, which is the possibility of translating anything you want in any language you want,' he says. "And so you and i can understand each other, but the complexity immense"
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Speaker 1
It's not, you know, not an absolute, but most of the time if you think about, you know, your children, your nieces, your neighbors who are three, four, five years old, they're not very worried about looking awkward. Yeah. They're just dancing in the kitchen, pantsless, arms up, you know, screaming at the top of their lungs. It doesn't matter to them because they haven't yet developed this emotion of self-consciousness as deeply as folks do as they get older. You know, I think it would be naive for us to say, hell, let's just go back to that. Right. Very few of us don't operate in a team or in some sort of environment where we interact with other people. There are some exceptions, you know, astronauts tend to be isolated, polar explorers tend to be isolated. But what's interesting is there have been studies on those folks who are more isolated and we found that when they come back from their adventures, their escapades, that there is a lot of people who are in the community. And that there is actually a decrease in their social muscle. They forget how to people.
Speaker 2
Right. Well, and we are talking in 2024 and from all that I can tell, 2024 is the year that the office reassembles itself. You know, there was the pandemic and then we've had a couple of years where some people have worked from home. Some people have worked from the office. But this is the year we're going to have to learn how to people again because people are coming back.
Speaker 1
We have to. Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. And, you know, where there's real opportunity for all of us. And, you know, sometimes people hear about the topic of awkwardness and they think, oh, Hannah wrote a book for introverts. Well, let me tell you something. I am a 100% extrovert. I am not an introvert. But here's what we're experiencing. This is actually even before the pandemic. We are experiencing a decrease in our social musculature. What I mean by that is technology and other kind of just changes in society have made it so we don't have to talk to people if we don't want to. So well before we were back in a hybrid or back in a remote environment, we were starting to, you know, date by swiping. We were ordering our food on the restaurant's website or on DoorDash. We've slowly been atrophying these social muscles and just add to that the fact that there's a decline in, you know, public shared spaces. People don't spend as much time in libraries and things as they used to, you know, successful people as they get more successful. They move to the suburbs instead of living in the big cities where they interact with folks more. There's so many reasons that these muscles start to lose their strength. And so when we come back to the office, we need to
Speaker 2
know how to do that. We need to learn how to do that. Well, so your invitation to all of us is to figure out how to lean into the awkward things that happen. It's easy when these things happen to think A, that you're the only person who's ever done this, B, that this is a career ender for you. Most importantly, C, that anybody actually noticed at all and perceived it to be awkward in the same way that you perceived it to be. Yeah, most people run through that sequence of three, you know, completely
Speaker 1
run through that sequence. And the C is the important one is even if they noticed, even if they noticed, one of the best pieces of research that comes out of this is, you know, A, they're not noticing with the people. They're not noticing with nearly the intensity that you think with something called the illusion of transparency. We think, oh, God, they can see me sweating. They can see how red my face is. They can see that I'm visibly mortified. Sometimes, rarely can they see it the way you feel that it's coming across. It's rare that they can see it to that intensity. And then, of course, Tom Gilevich out of Cornell has, you know, research on the spotlight effect. They may have noticed, but guess what? They stopped paying attention ages ago. People are not analyzing you with the depth and intensity that you think they are because guess what? Within seconds, they're already worried. What about me? What am I going to say next? What awkward thing am I about to do? They've already moved on. And that's, it's freeing once we realize that.
Speaker 5
We're going to
Speaker 2
take a quick break here, stick around. And if you like the show, sign up for our newsletter at linkedin.com slash hello monday. That's linkedin.com slash hello monday. We'll drop career advice and episode highlights into your inbox every Monday.
Speaker 4
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Speaker 2
And we're back. So in the first half of this conversation, Henna makes it pretty clear that most people do not notice our awkward moments.
Jim has a wide-ranging talk with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious...
Jim has a wide-ranging talk with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. They discuss the importance of separating intelligence from the nervous system, feeling as the inaugural event of consciousness, distinguishing consciousness from mind, the permeability of intellectual & affective processes, debunking William James's "stream of consciousness" metaphor, interoception, proprioception, & exteroception, how anesthesia works, attention as the cursor of consciousness, introducing vulnerability into AI, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, by Antonio Damasio
JRS EP97 - Emery Brown on Consciousness & Anesthesia
Antonio Damasio is Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Trained as both neurologist and neuroscientist, Damasio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying emotions, feelings, and consciousness. His work on the role of affect in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. He is the author of several hundred scientific articles and is one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era (see Damasio, A. Feelings and Decisions. In: R. Sternberg, S. Fiske, D. Foss (Eds.), Scientists Making a Difference: One Hundred Eminent Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk about Their Most Important Contributions, 2016). He is one of the most cited scientists worldwide.
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