Ep15: Dr. Antoine Bechara on the "gut feeling" and decision-making

What is a gut feeling? Should we trust it? There actually is a neuroanatomic basis for the so-called gut feeling – gut feelings exist and making decisions based on gut feelings is generally advantageous. Learn how gut feelings differ from emotions and how the state of the body influences the brain. Dr. Antoine Bechara, PhD is a Professor Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Dr. Bechara received his doctorate from the University of Toronto and completed a fellowship in Behavioral Neurology from the University of Iowa. Dr. Bechara has published over 400 papers and has a Google Scholar H-index of 113. His research focuses on understanding the neural processes behind human decision-making and choices. Along with Dr. Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio, Dr. Bechara studied decision-making of patients with injury to the prefrontal cortex, ground-breaking work on the neuroanatomy behind emotion, and how emotion influences cognition. He has used the somatic marker hypothesis to show the relationship between emotion, decision-making, and memory; here is a link to one of his articles 10.1093/cercor/10.3.295).  

Transcript

[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Antoine Bechara. Dr. Antoine Bechara is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Dr. Bechara received his doctorate from the University of Toronto and completed a fellowship in Behavioral Neurology from the University of Iowa. He has published over 400 papers and has a Google Scholar H Index of 113.. His research has been highly cited and it focuses on understanding the neural processes behind human decision making and choices, along with Drs. Antonio Damasio and Hannah Damasio. Dr. Bechara studied decision making of patients with injury to the prefrontal cortex, and it's really groundbreaking work on the neuroanatomy behind emotion and how emotion influences cognition. He has what they have termed the somatic marker hypothesis to show the relationship between emotion, decision making, and memory, and there is a link to one of these important articles that they've written on the somatic marker hypothesis in the show notes, so you can check that out for more information.

[00:01:05] Welcome to Dr. Bechara. 

[00:01:08] Antoine Bechara: Thank you. Thank you. 

[00:01:09] Christine Ko: Thank you so much for doing this. I wanted to first try to put you into a more humanized context and ask you if you could share something about yourself with me. 

[00:01:18] Antoine Bechara: The very first thing people ask me, where am I from? I say, I try at first say I'm from Canada. Or I say from the United States, but they say no, where you are really from. I was born in Lebanon and I came as a young person to Canada, so that's why I was educated in Canada, and then I moved to the United States. And I've been in the United States since 1991, so I'm a US citizen as well. I spent many years at the University of Iowa clinics in the Department of Neurology, and now I move completely to academia. I'm the Chair of the Department of Psychology here at the University of Southern California. I also work closely still with my mentors, Antonio and Hannah Damasio at the Brain and Creativity Institute. 

[00:02:12] Christine Ko: Yes. Very cool. One of the articles that I read of yours that first got me introduced to your work is the article that's in the show notes where you show that lesions in a stroke victim, someone who has had a stroke. They're perfectly functional, but they can't really make decisions. Can you tell a little bit about that work? 

[00:02:31] Antoine Bechara: They'll sometimes say, my gut feeling tells me that... this is a lay term. The somatic marker hypothesis, it's more of a neuroscientific theory that describes in neural steps how actually gut feeling really happens. So in other words, yes, we use our brain to solve a lot of logical problems, a lot of things, but many important decisions in real life, they're not certain. They're very uncertain. They're very ambiguous. And the way the brain cope with that is by relying on those, what we call body states or somatic states. So those signals guide us, towards things that could be good for us, or guide us towards things that could be bad for us. Patients who have brain damage that are deprived of that ability to sense their gut, if you want to say so, they make disadvantageous decisions. A lot of people give emotion a bad reputation. People always tell, emotion is bad for you. Emotion clouds your mind. Emotion interferes with your judgment. Emotion that comes from the outside. So let's say you are very angry or you are very sad. Something rattle you outside, and you come to make an important decision. Emotion that is unrelated to what you are working can be disruptive. But the emotion that you evoke and you enact as a part of your decision. If you're deciding on where to move, what job to take, or if you're deciding on what stock to buy, that gut feeling that you may enact at that time, that's very important and very helpful. So I think we need to distinguish two different contexts of emotions. The context where emotion can be disruptive versus calmer emotion. That's actually much more beneficial. 

[00:04:40] Christine Ko: I think that makes sense to me. You can correct me if I'm wrong. Like hunger, which hunger is a somatic state, and in a way a true gut feeling. My stomach is empty and I feel that signal so I can be hungry and it can be a true signal for me to eat. Or I can be eating out of emotion, like I'm an emotional eater. Yeah. Like I'm eating for external factors, whatever they are, and not really listening to my gut. So I guess that's what you're saying. Okay. So we do have a true somatic marker of our gut feeling, but oftentimes we're acting on our external, other emotions that we have, which is often not advantageous. That outside sort of emotion that's like really high anger or something not being good for our decision making versus really listening to our somatic state. 

[00:05:22] Antoine Bechara: Yeah. 

[00:05:23] Christine Ko: Is that why mindfulness work helps? 

[00:05:26] Antoine Bechara: Maybe, yeah. From what I know, it's nothing other than training some of those areas, the ventral, medial, prefrontal cortex is one of them. Training those areas that we're talking about as part of the somatic marker circuitry, training them in that exercise, and then I wouldn't be surprised at all that it's a method for, Yeah, helping or improving the functioning. That's good. 

[00:05:51] Christine Ko: Yeah. People who meditate, they have actual major changes in their brain.

[00:05:58] Antoine Bechara: When you look at where are those changes, they're not everywhere. They're not in the visual cortex. They are in those areas that we describe as part of that circuitry, that deal with emotion and with the limbic system. 

[00:06:15] Christine Ko: Yes. This whole body of work completely fascinates me because as anyone who's been listening into this podcast knows, we were exploring emotional intelligence. And then I also explored a little bit metacognition and System 1 and System 2, that dual process theory of thinking. Emotional intelligence, there is quick emotions, quickly how we feel, which is, say our gut feeling about something. Type 1 sort of feeling. Until I read your article, I was definitely in the camp where I thought emotions cloud my judgment.

[00:06:44] Antoine Bechara: People always talk about cognitive intelligence and reasoning. We tested patients who have. prefrontal cortex damage and, and we ask whether their cognitive intelligence decline as a result of the damage or their emotional intelligence. And sure enough, their cognitive intelligence is not affected at all, but emotional intelligence goes down. So there you go. So there's another, at least, neural link between emotional intelligence and certain brain areas that is from cognitive intelligence. 

[00:07:19] Christine Ko: Yes. That's fascinating. Before I started recording, you were telling me a story about neurology, and you were telling me about what happens when there's a small stroke, meaning just in terms of the actual area of brain that's damaged, small, when it affects just that sensory portion versus the motor portion. You said there's a huge difference, and can you just tell a little bit about that? 

[00:07:42] Antoine Bechara: People most of the time, they think behavior and everything goes inside the brain. The idea behind the somatic marker hypothesis is that no, the body is very important. This is anatomical, neurological fact. In the brain stem, at the level of the pons, whoever knows neuroanatomy. So all the motor descending pathway travel in the front. All the ascending pathways, the sensory pathways coming from the body, going towards the brain, they travel in the back. So strokes can happen in any one part. They're relatively rare, but they can happen. If they hit the motor systems, the body becomes completely paralyzed. But the person is still conscious in a locked in syndrome. The person looks like they are in a coma, but they are conscious. They hear you, they understand what you are saying. If they can move, they can only move their eyelids. They can blink. But if you hit the pathways in the back, the ascending pathway, that's when a person goes into coma. So if the brain gets shut down from its communication with the body, it stops functioning. 

[00:08:55] Christine Ko: Yeah, when you told me that, I thought that was completely fascinating, that the brain needs that sensory connection to be aware, to have consciousness. 

[00:09:04] Antoine Bechara: This work, a lot of it, it's really about demonstrating that things that happen in the body, it's really impacting the brain. It's really impacting behavior. So imagine you're playing a game, you have to solve a puzzle, and then you know the outcome, and then they tell you, you won or you lost. So there is a reaction, there's an emotional reaction to winning or losing. So that's no brainer. So you get a reaction. So if you win something or you lose something, I can get a reaction. The key is, before, when you are thinking, when you are deliberating, thinking about what decision you wanna make, that's what we were focusing on. What is the role of those responses in what you do behaviorally? So basically in normal people who, and we can show it across time, physiologically, that over time, normal individual develop those anticipatory responses over time. That is, as they learn, it's as if their gut telling them, Stop. 

[00:10:19] Patients who have frontal lobe damage, they don't develop those responses. They react to winning or losing. They have an emotional reaction to that. What if you cognitively know? These choices are good and these choices are bad. Do you still need those body signals? And the answer is yes, because we do have, we describe instances of certain patients with frontal lobe damage, who cognitively come to realize that some choices are worse than others because they're losing more money on those choices. In spite of that, they keep choosing disadvantageously. They just, they keep going for the immediate high gain. There is a disconnect between what one knows. Some of them can become cognizant. They can have the cognition, they can have the knowledge and yet still choose disadvantageously. 

[00:11:26] Christine Ko: In that same article, you mentioned the word bias. 

[00:11:29] Antoine Bechara: Yes. 

[00:11:30] Christine Ko: And you use it in a particular way. 30% of those participants who were choosing advantageously for themselves, they didn't know why. You called that an unconscious bias derived from experience with reward versus punishment.

[00:11:45] Antoine Bechara: Yes, because none of those somatic states, when we say gut feeling, you're not honestly feeling anything. And that's what those somatic states are, or gut feelings. They're not conscious feelings, they are body states. But they happen. They happen as a result of experience. You try, and you win, and you lose. Your brain keeps a record of those experiences, but you are not conscious. You don't have a declarative of memory of all of that. That's why when you are confronted with a decision, body states are based on prior experience. Then that's what plays a role in telling you. We have zillions of emotional experiences. We have reward. We have punishment. But we don't keep a declarative memory of every event, and that's what a gut feeling is. It's the way the brain evoking, subconsciously emotional state or body states. They come and help tell you, yeah, Don't do this. Or, Do this. 

[00:12:53] Christine Ko: Yeah. There are different definitions even of what an emotion is in psychology. And interestingly, for psychologists who do agree with the universal emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, disgusted anger, and then maybe a sixth surprise. But some people don't. But say you have those universal emotions, those are actually encoded in our facial expressions, which are largely subconscious to us. It's not like I deliberately arrange myself a certain way to look happy, right? It's just something my face does. But also it's encoded in the body. There are other researchers have shown there are bodily states of high activation, low activation in different parts of your body that correspond in a somewhat universal manner across culture for many emotions, even beyond universal emotions. Do you agree with that research in terms of your somatic marker hypothesis? 

[00:13:43] Antoine Bechara: Yeah. Emotion. It's something that you could see in a person, or at least you can measure, with with some sophisticated instruments. What is expressed in the body. What the brain senses or subjectively experiences. Emotion versus feeling. 

[00:14:00] Christine Ko: Do you have any final thoughts? 

[00:14:02] Antoine Bechara: Most people who do brain research take the brain as an organ by itself. As if behavior and everything can happen just in the brain. And what I would say, the brain is basically useless if it's not connected to the body and the body giving it information. 

[00:14:24] Christine Ko: Thank you so much for spending time talking to me today. It was really fun for me. 

[00:14:28] Antoine Bechara: Thank you. It was fun.