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.