of our minds are always representations of some kind of ensemble.”
Ensemble is the key word here. As Whitman had written thirty years before, “I will not make poems with reference to parts / But I will make poems with reference to ensemble.” When James introspected, he realized that Whitman’s poetry revealed an essential truth: our feelings emerge from the interactions of the brain and the body, not from any single place in either one. This psychological theory, first described in the 1884 article “What Is an emotion?”* is Whitman, pure and simple. Like Whitman, James concluded that if consciousness was severed from the body, “there would be nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff ’ out of which the emotion can be constituted.” As usual, James’s experimental evidence consisted of ordinary experience. He structured his argument around vivid examples stolen straight from real life, such as encountering a bear in the woods. “What kind of an emotion of fear,” he wondered, “would be left [after seeing the bear] if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?” James’s answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear, for an emotion begins as the perception of a bodily change. When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is the stage.
At first glance, this theory of emotion seems like the height of materialism, a reduction of feeling to a physical state. But James was actually making the opposite point. Inspired by Whitman’s poetic sense of unity, James believed that our emotions emerged from the constant interaction of the body and the brain. Just as fear cannot be abstracted from its carnal manifestations, it also cannot be separated from the mind, which endows the body’s flesh with meaning. As a result, science cannot define feeling without also taking consciousness — what the feeling is about — into account. “Let not this view be called materialistic,” James warns his reader. “Our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiologi-cal ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, spiritual facts they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensation theory. They carry their own inner measure of worth with them.”
The Body Electric
Modern neuroscience is now discovering the anatomy underlying Whitman’s poetry. It has taken his poetic hypothesis — the idea that feelings begin in the flesh — and found the exact nerves and brain regions that make it true. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who has done extensive work on the etiology of feeling, calls this process the body loop. In his view, the mind stalks the flesh; from our muscles we steal our moods.
How does the brain generate our metaphysical feelings from the physical body? According to Damasio, after an “emotive stimulus” (such as a bear) is seen, the brain automatically triggers a wave of changes in the “physical viscera,” as the body prepares for action. The heart begins to pound, arteries dilate, the intestines contract, and adrenaline pours into the bloodstream. These bodily changes are then detected by the cortex, which connects them to the scary sensation that caused the changes in the first place. The resulting mental image — an emulsion of thought and flesh, body and soul — is what we feel. It is an idea that has passed through the vessel of the body.
Over the course of his distinguished career, Damasio has chronicled the lives of patients whose brains have been injured and who, as a result, are missing this intricate body-brain connection. Although they maintain full sensory awareness, these patients are unable to translate their sensations into emotions. The pounding of the heart never becomes a feeling of fear. Because the mind is divorced from the flesh, the patient lives in a cocoon of numbness — numb even to his or her own tragedy.
Damasio’s research has elaborated on the necessity of our carnal emotions. His conclusions are Whitmanesque. “The body contributes more than life support,” Damasio writes. “It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind.” In fact, even when the body does not literally change, the mind creates a feeling by hallucinating a bodily change. Damasio calls this the asif body loop, since the brain acts as if the body were experiencing a real physical event. By imagining a specific bodily state — like a fast heartbeat, or a surge of adrenaline — the mind can induce its own emotions.
One of Damasio’s most surprising discoveries is that the feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought. Although we typically assume that our emotions interfere with reason, Damasio’s emotionless patients proved incapable of making reasonable decisions. After suffering their brain injuries, all began displaying disturbing changes in behavior. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; others became dishonest and antisocial; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details. According to Damasio, their frustrating lives are vivid proof that rationality requires feeling, and feeling requires the body. (As Nietzsche put it, “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”)
Of course, it’s hard to make generalizations about the brain based on a few neurological patients. In order to understand how the body loop functions in the normal mind, Damasio devised an ingenious experiment he called the gambling task. The experiment went as follows: a subject — the player — was given four decks of cards, two black and two red, and $2,000 worth of play money. Each card told the player that he had either won or lost money. The subject was instructed to turn over a card from one of the four decks and to make as much money as possible.
But the cards weren’t distributed at random. Damasio rigged the game. Two of the decks were full of high-risk cards. These decks had bigger payouts ($100), but also contained extravagant monetary punishments ($1,250). The other two decks, by comparison, were staid and conservative. Although they had smaller payouts ($50), they rarely punished the player. If the gamblers only drew from these two decks, they would come out way ahead.
At first, the card-selection process was entirely random. The player had no reason to favor any specific deck, and so they sampled from each pile, searching for money-making patterns. On average, people had to turn over about fifty cards before they began to only draw from the profitable decks. It took about eighty cards before the average experimental subject could explain why they favored those decks. Logic is slow.
But Damasio wasn’t interested in logic. He was interested in the body. He attached electrodes to the subjects’ palms and measured the electrical conductance of their skin. (As Whitman noted in “I Sing the Body Electric,” the body is electric, our nerves singing with minor voltages.)* In general, higher levels of conductance in the skin signal nervousness. What Damasio found was that after drawing only ten cards, the hand of the experimental subject got “nervous” whenever it reached for one of the negative decks. While the brain had yet to completely understand the game (and wouldn’t for another forty cards), the subject’s hand “knew” what deck to draw from. Furthermore, as the hand grew increasingly electric, the subject started drawing more and more frequently from the advantageous decks. The unconscious feelings generated by the body preceded the conscious decision. The hand led the mind.
Whitman would have loved this experiment. In the same poem where he declares the body electric, he also exclaims about “the curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand.” Long before Damasio, Whitman understood that “the spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body.” This is why he listened so closely to his flesh: it was the place where his poetry began.
But Whitman also knew that his poems were not simply odes to the material body. This was the mistake that his Victorian critics made: by taking his references to orgasms and organs literally, they missed his true poetic epiphany. The moral of Whitman’s verse was that the body wasn’t merely a body. Just as leaves of grass grow out of the dirt, feelings grow out of the flesh. What Whitman wanted to show was how these two different substances — the grass and the dirt, the body and the mind — were actually inseparable. You couldn’t write poems about one without acknowledging the presence of the other. As Whitman declared, “I will make the poems of materials,