Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Yet the patient had ceased being able to make basic decisions. He began investing his money poorly, ignoring the advice of friends, and flubbing assignments at work. It seemed mystifying that a rational, intelligent person would act in such ways, until it dawned on Damasio that impaired logic might not be the problem. He began to notice that when the patient talked about his life, his tone was weirdly flat. Shown images of houses burning and bloody accidents, he confessed to feeling nothing. The same pattern surfaced in other patients who’d suffered damage to the same part of the brain—smart, reasonable people who seemed oddly detached and who began doing things (investing in shady businesses, mistreating friends) that suggested poor judgment and character. Patients who had suffered the brain lesion early in life were particularly damaged—lying, stealing, and showing an alarming lack of guilt, remorse, or empathy. What caused this behavior was not a dearth of reason but an inability to generate emotions, scientists studying the inner workings of the brain have come to believe, and it is these emotions that inform our moral judgments and enable us to care about other people.