Transcript

Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Good morning. Good morning Ani. How are you? I’m doing well. And you? Good, good. Thanks. Good. What’s up? We’re ready to do it. Yeah. What are we ready to do today? So, what are we talking about? This is a topic that I’ve been wanting to unpack for a while. It’s actually a really big topic.

So we’re not going to be able to pack. Going to be here. All of it. Oh, okay. Well, no, this this topic could be like a dozen podcasts probably or more. Okay. So so we’re not going to all do today. We’re going to kind of introduce it. But it’s something that’s been on my mind for a while and it’s some really fascinating work.

So there’s a book out there called Descartes Error. And I remember when I ordered it and it came in the mail, you stole it. I did, I opened the mail and I saw it, and I was so excited. I was like, oh, this looks really interesting. And I, I actually haven’t read a book like that for a while.

I’ve read other kinds of books usually, and I opened that one up and I sunk right in. You found me on the couch. I was already into it. I was already like two chapters in. Yeah. So I had to mope for a couple of weeks while you you were really upset. You read the book. I don’t know how I convinced you to let me keep it.

I mean, if roles were reversed, I would have just puffed and gotten my way, but. Well, you were very kind. That’s kind of like how it works, kind of thing. So anyway, just to note, so there’s a book called Descartes’ Error. It’s written by Antonio Damasio, who is a neurophysiologist and physician. Like a super in-tune guy when it comes to the whole research and study of introspection.

So Descartes’ error was written in the 90s, actually. So it’s not a new book, but it’s not that old, but it’s not that old either. He’s actually written like 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 books. Yeah. Even since that time, and all on the work that he started to lay out in Descartes’ error, which is the work he started to do in the, I think, really like in the 70s, in the 80s was a lot of his professional work was done in this area of emotions and decision making.

Or he talks about terms of feelings and decision making and how you can’t make decisions without feeling. Yeah. So it’s pretty. It’s so good. By the way, the book is really fun to read, like it’s not one of those books. It’s just Chuck with science and it’s kind of dry. It’s got nice storytelling. It the way he describes the science is really digestible.

I really enjoyed it. Yeah. You know, and I do just want to say, you know, I hadn’t even heard of Antonio Damasio probably until, I don’t know, probably until I read Body Keeps the Score actually, which was, you know, the first time I read that book was probably around 2014, 2013, 2014, where Bessel mentions just a little bit of Damasio work in that book.

Is that where you found out about him then? Well, this when I first heard about him, but I kind of it was like a mental note. And then I kind of forgot about him. And also in full transparency, I for for better or for worse. Is it a positive or negative, a strength or a weakness? For me, I don’t know, but when I tend to come across people who write about kind of the things that we do, I tend actually not to read them because I don’t want to be accused of being influenced by other people’s books, writings, those kinds of things.

I really want to be able to take a really organic process from myself and really look at the research of things, rather than people’s interpretations of the research. So I really try to keep a purely aspect around that. And so that could have really kind of delayed a lot of my introduction understanding of DiMaggio’s work, because actually the reason I got back into him was actually through research.

I was doing research on interception came, and I found several papers, peer reviewed papers that he wrote on interception and especially around interception and consciousness, and that he created a theory that consciousness is actually dependent on feeling, dependent on introspection. So I got reintroduced to his work that way a couple of years ago. I’ll bet some people don’t like that.

Yeah, well, I people don’t like that. I don’t think very much. But so I got kind of reintroduced to his work. And the reason I want to talk about it in the podcast is because his work is probably, of all the work that I’ve come across, really validates what we do with sensation based motivation coaching. I mean, it really talks right to the core of that work, so his research speaks directly to it.

So once I started diving back into it and I was able to pull the research out and said, wow, you know, he’s actually validating work that we’ve done for over a decade. And it’s always fun to find research or contemporary work or even historical research that validates what you do before you knew that it was validated. Right. So so that’s kind of why I’m bringing this to the forefront right now and talking about the podcast, because I hope that everybody kind of investigates his work a little bit more, especially if you’re interested in somatic work and sensation based work, particularly because there’s a lot of great research around what he does.

Well, I know you’re interested in this topic because it validates the work that we do in such I, I am also interested in this topic because and maybe I’m saying the same exact thing. I think out there, there’s so much talk about how decisions are like, don’t make emotional decisions, right. Decisions should be void of emotion. And it’s just such to me, that kind of idea puts a lot of shame in like, oh my God.

Am I making this? And self-doubt, like, am I making this decision emotionally? I shouldn’t make it emotionally. It puts down emotions, which we do, you know, and we have emotions, which is hard. So how do I have emotions and still be a person who makes decisions? And so I think it’s like a very complicated thing. And bringing this work to the forefront helps us to understand, yet again, a way that we just kind of knew that was not totally accurate.

Like it was like when when you know that it’s not totally truth, but you don’t know what else to say. And so this work really does validate something. I think most of us really know in our bones, in our homes. Yeah, right. So it’s really kind of just formalizing what we already know. Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about a little bit about the book and what Damasio calls his somatic marker hypothesis, the somatic marker hypothesis.

So somatic body oriented marker means some type of signal that the body is giving. And his hypothesis is basically the core central theme of the hypothesis is that emotions and bodily sensations play a central role in decision making. Actually, that you can’t make decisions without that input. You can’t make decisions without emotional or sensory sensory input. So with the what the body is experiencing is not just noise, it’s actually an important signal that guides not only appropriate but really effective decision making.

And that’s what he’s kind of shown with his research, with his stories. Right. He found this out by studying people who had brain damage in certain areas where they couldn’t connect with their entire reception. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk about that. Yeah. So the idea so some of the patients that he he starts off the book talking about this character by the name of Phineas Gage.

Yes. Story. Yeah. So in in 1848, I’ve just got some notes about it right here. So I make sure I get it right. In 1848, Phineas Gage was working for a railroad. And this actually, this incident actually happened in Vermont, right across the lake from where we live. So it’s kind of like local some ways to us. But he was working for and he was a foreman on the railroad.

So he was and he was actually had a reputation as being the highest functioning, most effective foreman on the whole, in the whole railroad. So he actually had a reputation. It was like he could run this place sort of thing. But he was working on a job site, and there was an accident with a with a dynamite, and it sent a iron shaft through his, up through his jaw and up through the frontal lobes of his brain, and then right out through the top of his head.

Ouch. Yeah. And the thing is, the crazy thing is he didn’t lose consciousness. He was like, ready to go back to work. Like it was just kind of this odd, weird thing that happened. So they got him to a doctor and, you know, they had to, you know, obviously has got a hole in his head. So they got it’s 1848.

So infection and all that kind of stuff is potentially a problem. But somehow he survived. Somehow he survives. And the thing is, is that when he’s ready to go back to work, or when they think he’s ready to go back to work, his personality, you know, his his his intelligence hasn’t changed his memory. He still got really good memory.

He still can, you know, do addition, subtraction, his his communication skills or haven’t changed. Like there’s a whole bunch of stuff that hasn’t changed about him except for his personality. And it had there was one interesting change in his personality is that he became much more emotionally volatile. That was kind of like the the one change, which is very different than he was a very polite man, a very professional man, you know, very reserved.

And then after this accident, you know, he became emotionally volatile. So for those of us who work, who have worked with people who have had brain injuries, and again, I worked at Kirk Hospital for almost ten years on the with people who had brain injuries. This is like not new news for people who work a lot of people brain injuries.

And but in 1848 was before people understood what different regions of the brain maybe had responsibility for it. So people were really blown away that he had all of his cognitive skills seemed to be still intact. But this emotional volatility was was obvious. But it wasn’t there all the time. It just it would come in like bursts. And then he would go kind of back to quote unquote normal again.

But the other thing that became very apparent was he could not make decisions. And all of his decision, well, he couldn’t make decisions, but they were all bad decisions. You know, he would he got conned out of a lot of money. He made decisions to take these risky behaviors without seeing the consequences for them. And like all these kinds of things.

And his life basically fell apart, you know, he lost his family, he lost his living, he lost his job. He ended up being dependent. And there was and there was a whole like, medical kind of buzz around him at the time to, to kind of study him and try to understand him because this was so odd. And then even after he died, Damasio did a lot of work on trying to understand or reconstruct his skull and his brain, to understand what was in use, all this fancy imaging to kind of figure some of those things out.

But he was kind of the first person that put into the kind of the medical area that brain regions may have some differentiation amongst them. But he goes into the talks a lot about that in the book as well, with different types of philosophies that are happening at the time. So there’s a bunch of side kind of paths in the book, two that are kind of interesting and fascinating.

So he so he had read about this character, Finney’s Gage, and he kind of had put it in his, in his, in his awareness somewhere. But then as Damasio was doing his work in the 70s, he was working with patients who had people referred to him that had kind of like similar, let’s say, experiences to Phineas Gage. And one of the very first clients he had was a guy by the name of Elliot.

So Elliott. And this is the 19 late 70s, 1970s, 80s, there weren’t any dates specifically, just kind of talked about it in terms of decades and stuff in the book. So I don’t have exact dates, but so this character, Elliot, was a husband, a father, a very skilled professional in a, in a business. And I think it was in New York at the time.

So again, very, very high functioning, high functioning guy. And and then he started to get headaches and dizziness. And it turns out he had a brain tumor. And the brain tumor was like kind of like right in the middle part of the frontal part of his brain, right? Kind of between his eyes and his orbit and his, you know, what we now know is kind of the prefrontal cortex was right where the tumor was.

And so he had to have surgery to have it removed. And when he had it removed, the surgeon had to remove a whole bunch of other brain tissue around the tumor that had been damaged by the tumor. It wasn’t it wasn’t a malignant tumor. It was a benign tumor, but had grown so fast that compressed brain tissue and so other brain tissue had to be removed.

And so Elliot had actually some interesting presentations. He still scored exceptionally high on all of the cognitive tests that were given to him. His intelligence, memory, problem solving, like you name it, they threw every single cognitive test battery at him that they could, and he passed all of them with flying colors. But here’s the thing with Elliot he couldn’t make decisions.

He would. When he went back to work after his surgery, he would just sit there at his desk and work on the most inconsequential things and get caught up in all these, like, rabbit holes of stuff. And he just wasn’t getting the work done that his bosses were asking him to do. And so he lost his job. And then in life, he couldn’t make decisions.

At home, he couldn’t make decisions with his children. He couldn’t make decisions with his neighbors. He couldn’t. And he made a catastrophic number of life choices. Also lost everything in with taking risky investments and risky business ventures and those sorts of things. He lost all of his money and ended up being on completely dependent on the state or on the people around him as well.

And so when Damasio found him, you know, when he got referred to Maceo for this work again, he ran all the battery tests and everyone was really surprised. Like, how the heck could this guy not be functioning so well because he’s passing everything with super high marks in terms of Italian and memory and all those sorts of things, even like spatial awareness, like all that stuff.

Nothing. Nothing wrong in that regard. But there are a couple of standout things that were really, really important that they started to notice for him once they got deeper and deeper into the tests, and it was this that they would give him like a theoretical scenario on decision making, okay. So in other words, like if someone gives you $10 and they ask for $20 back, do you give that to him?

And he’s like, well, no, of course not. You know, because then that’d be ten bucks. So like all that kind of stuff like testing out great. And all the hypotheticals, even ethical hypotheticals. Okay. So ethically, like, if you know someone is dying and you have to rob some medicine to give that to him, like, what do you do?

Like he was able to process through all these scenarios in very high functioning ways, like he wasn’t outside the norms of how how healthy or people without brain damage would do these things. So hypothetically, he passed all of the all of the tests, but in real life, he would actually make different decisions for the exact same decision in real life than he did hypothetically.

And so it was really bizarre because he just like literally in the laboratory, he answered a hypothetical situation. He went outside in real life and he made an exact opposite or different decision, and he didn’t follow his hypothetical decision making. And they were like, how could that possibly be like, what just happened? So the more work that they did, they realized that the the area of damage was in what’s called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex in his brain.

And this area of the brain is the area that has a lot to do with, well, sensory integration, emotional context in terms of when that information comes from the limbic system and the higher cortex centers. This is the first area of the brain that is supposed to do that processing to create context and what we call valence for decision making.

And so that area was completely damaged or obliterated for this patient, Elliot, and for several other patients that Damasio worked with and studied. And it turns out for Phineas Gage to that’s where his primary brain area of damage was. And so they were not receiving sensory or emotional cues from their body. Their brain wasn’t picking it up. And so what what it turns out to happen is that when you’re making decisions in real life, like Annie, if you and I are having a conversation about something, every time I ask you a question and you respond, it’s actually like a new conversation again, because every response in you is going to activate some type of sensory

response in me, right? So I’m going to need more emotional context from that. I’m going to say something to you. You’re going to say something back. I’m going to have to have another emotional context. So when someone’s giving a single hypothetical event, they can process through it. But in real life, an ongoing social engagement, it’s an ongoing repurposing of of a sensory input coming to the brain that the brain has to, has to process quickly and decide what to do with it.

Right. Does this feel like a right decision or not feel like a decision? Does this feel right or wrong kind of thing? Right. So it’s and so when that area of the brain is disrupted, you don’t have that ability to receive the constant flow of sensory information coming up into the brain. And so that was really what the realizing when Damasio really landed on, he said, oh my God, you know, feelings and emotions.

You can’t make actually decisions without that, without that amount of valence or that amount of input. So kind of fascinating to start to think about it that way, right? Yeah. What was the other thing that I wanted to mention about this is that. Oh. The other thing, and this was true for both Phineas Gage and for and for Elliot and Phineas Gages experience.

They they notice a lot of emotional volatility, like a lot of high emotional volatility. Like you would get abruptly very, very emotional. In Elliott’s case, he was very flat emotionally and and to Damasio, you know both surprise and also credit for admitting this. He said he had tested him for months cognitively and never picked up on the fact that when Elliott would describe his experience like having a brain tumor, losing his family, losing his job, he was very emotionally detached from it.

And what Damasio said he was, he almost was unaware of his own suffering, and it hadn’t occurred to him until later on in their time together, where he started to link up. Oh my God, this there’s so much emotional disconnection from this person. Is that again, is that a part of a feature of challenging decision making, both emotional hyper volatility and emotional suppression or lack of emotional flow?

And it turns out that in both those cases affect a person’s ability to make really highly functional and effective decisions. So the flow of emotions actually is important to decision making. Yes. And the flow of, let’s say, regulated emotions is really important, right? Because if we talk a lot about dysregulation or regulation. So if there’s hyper hyper arousal in the system, that’s going to push the decision making to become less functional than if it was regulated.

And if you have hypo aroused states, that’s also going to obviously affect really functional and supportive decision making going on also. And so he was really starting to bear out the importance of that, because here’s the thing. He started off studying a lot of people with this ventral medial prefrontal cortex injuries. But what his work has evolved into saying now is that this happens with any emotional, any or sensory challenges.

Let’s put it that way. Any sensory challenges, not just from a brain trauma. Right. So we’re also talking from things like, well, trauma where you get vagus nerve interference issues and those types of things. Right. Other types of illnesses, depression, mental illness, any, any illness or any challenge that disrupts the the flow of coordinated sensory information from the body into the higher regions will always affect decision making in interference type ways.

It’s fascinating. Yeah. So it’s pretty. So I thought I thought that was pretty cool. Just the way he kind of came to it and kind of understood, especially the the idea that someone could make a hypothetical decision or hypothetical answer that’s like, oh, that’s perfectly normal. And then you go outside and you make a completely opposite decision. So for those of you listening.

Have you ever seen this? Have you ever seen that you’re talking to a friend or maybe to yourself and you’re talking about a situation to make a decision and they’re like, oh, this is what I’m going to do. And then they go out in the world and they make like the opposite decision or a different decision. Like we just talked about that, like, why did you do that differently?

Yeah. If you’ve ever seen us live do a Q&A. We say we don’t answer hypothetical questions. Right. Because hypotheticals actually don’t even have that that way. Right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So let’s just kind of segue now just into how does this actually validate sensation based motivation coaching. Really. Well, I can see in a couple of ways. And you can probably come up with some ideas to one way if that feelings are important, like necessary.

Yeah, feelings are necessarily important that really that the body is the body is an intelligent information system right. It actually is an intelligent information system. And when we like to think that, we can ignore it like it’s optional, we did. Right. And a lot of people that it’s optional. I check in with my body or I don’t check them in my body.

Yeah. And a lot of people just think I make decisions rationally. And this is something we talk about a lot to when I, when I travel and teach and say there are no rational human beings, because if you look at the way you were wired, sensory information comes in from the periphery. It comes into the subconscious centers of the brain, and it gets processed there before it even goes on to the decision making centers of the brain.

So there are no rational human beings. We’re always making decisions and we’re always rationalizing what we feel internally. But to Damasio point, if someone does not have a feeling internally, then they have nothing really to rationalize. They have no reference, a reference point, they don’t have a valence to guide them and what might be an appropriate or inappropriate decision, because that’s what’s guiding us, is our sensory state, is what’s actually guiding us from moment to moment to moment.

We’re not even aware that it’s happening. We think we’re calculating in our head all of the data and all the rational stuff. But really what we’re doing is we’re calculating how we feel about something that we’re experiencing, which is interesting because when you’re in a change process, which we do a lot of change work with people, that’s something we have to educate people on, because oftentimes you actually can’t trust your feelings in the sense that if your subconscious is driving the drive in the train, it’s going to feed your conscious mind.

Certain feeling states, right to stop you from creating what it is that you want to create in your life. Yeah, well, that and if you don’t modify the feeling states, then you’re always going to have to like make a decision and then recalibrate the decision afterwards. Like there’s always going to be this lag time in that. Whereas if you modify the sensations, you can actually come up with innovative new decisions and reactions and stuff.

Yeah. So that Segway is actually kind of like the other, I think, really powerful validation for sensation based motivation coaching is that if we know that your decision making is always informed by the sensory cueing or context that’s coming from your body, which, by the way, you know, is your subconscious mind. It’s how your subconscious mind is influencing you to make decisions.

If you can repatriation the programs or repatriate the patterns, let’s just say we’re repatriating patterns and programs in our in our physiology, you know, through subconscious centers. Then what will happen is you’ll start feeding your conscious mind contextual information in line with what is that you want to create. Right. Because when it’s just going to ask, we’re in a change process.

We want to create something different. I was just going to ask you, what does this have to do with manifestation? You basically just answered that, you know, like if we don’t have this kind of skill, we’re going to miss a lot. Yeah, we’re not only going to miss a lot, but you’re actually going to make decisions that are not in alignment with where you want to go.

So consciously, just like the hypothetical, where do you want to go? Oh, this is where I want to go. This is how I’ll do it in coaching sessions, right? A lot of times we’re building on hypotheticals with people of like pathways, right. And then they go out to the world and they don’t do actually what they said they were going to do.

Right. But I mean, from a manifestation process, you’re going to miss a lot because, you know, when you’re manifesting, you really got to keep your eyes open for how the universe is cooperating to help you. Yeah, sure. Right. So yeah. Yeah. So you’re going to miss that piece also again, because you’re filtering out you’re filtering it out what you don’t what’s not in alignment with the sensory cueing that is helping your decision making.

Right. Because you’ll get an opportunity. To your point, I think what you’re saying is you have an opportunity come up and the opportunity from an outside perspective, we’re working with a client, we might say, or a student, and we’ll say, well, there’s the opportunity right there. And they don’t feel it. They were like, oh, I don’t feel like that’s the opportunity.

Exactly. And the reason they don’t feel like it’s the opportunity is because their programing isn’t opportunity programing, right? It’s defense programing. Exactly right. But the point is that what’s feeding their decision making is coming from their sensory experience, from the interior, from their sensory base. So when you can do the work to repatriate the sensory base in alignment with growth, in alignment with your manifestation, then all of a sudden this is you make are automatically ongoing in in response to the thing that you want sort of thing.

You know what strikes me as I’m listening to you talk about this is I’m thinking about how, wow, we really do make a lot of decisions in a day. But these people that he studied actually destroyed their lives. Like, decision making is so important that you can destroy your life if you can’t do it, you know? So imagine if you could develop the skill to be able to your point, to be able to make decisions in alignment with your growth.

Right. What that could do. Yeah. You know, I’m even thinking about last night, Ani, when I got that text from the fraud department at our bank. Yeah. And the and there was a text saying, you know, you have a certain number of charges. Did you make these charges? If you did, click yes. If you didn’t call this number.

So I didn’t know that wasn’t the process that our bank normally used. But I was like, maybe they changed their process on this. So I called the number and as soon as I called the number, the guy in the other side started asking me questions that I didn’t think the bank would normally ask me. You know, I was like, but it wasn’t super over.

It wasn’t super over. It asked me about, you know, my my four digits, my social, my last socialist. I’m like, yeah, that’s something you might ask. And then he started asking about was your birthday. And I’m like, I don’t know, you should know my birth date. And some didn’t feel right. And so he, I said, I’m not going to give you my birthday.

He’s like, okay, what about your zip code? I can verify it that way. So I said, okay, give him my zip code. And he’s like, so I have this card number for you. And he gave me the first four digits of the card number, first four, just not last four, which is again different than you would normally get.

And so something just didn’t feel right for me. So every question I asked him, he gave me an answer. I was like, does this feel like this is legit or not legit? It was pretty slick. I mean, you know, I got to give him credit for that convincing. And so but if I didn’t have the capacity to have sensor information flow into my eyes, I would have been like, oh my God.

Yeah, I don’t want these fake charges on my thing. Here’s all of my information. Cancel my card. And by the way, it was all robbing the card at the same time. Yeah, but that’s all coming from those sensory base of information coming up into my decision making. Right. So I could have made a different decision and given them all the information and all your money and lost all our money, right, right.

Bank account. And that’s what the patients that Damasio is working with were doing. They were not they didn’t have an emotional context around just doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe I need to ask a different question to vet. Is this because I was asking questions to try to just come at it from different angles, to discern whether or not this was right or not sort of thing.

And every question I asked, you know, it took me, it took me about 4 or 5 rounds of questions to say, no, no, this is definitely not legit sort of thing, but that’s kind of just a working scenario of how this kind of happens, right? So it’s an amazing book. Check it out. De cards error. It’s a it’s a really very cool read.

You’re going to be hearing more about Antonio de Maceo on our podcast. So we go through talking about interception in the origin of feeling. And there’s like so many different great works that he does. But I was just really blown away and I wanted to share with everyone here, just like how much this validates again, the sensation based motivation concept and and methodology that we’ve been developing over the last ten, 12, 15, actually 20 years with cross mapping.

Yeah, cross mappings over 20 years old that we started working with. So it just was a really cool, a really cool thing to bring forward. And I’m just super excited to keep kind of studying and thinking about that. And it validates all of us who know we have emotions, period. So keep checking it with the sensory states. And as you’re making decisions, you know, tap into the flow of sensation that comes up through and ask yourself, hey, is this flow of sensation?

Is it how is it informing? Just in a very open way? How is it informing my decision making, right, with a lot of open mindedness and curiosity, and it’ll just be kind of like an interesting experiment? Yeah. So check that out. So let us know how. Let us know how it goes. Send us an email, a note comment, whatever it happens to be, and share this with a friend if it really feels like it landed for you.

We’ll see you next week. Take care.