The 12 Phases™ Perspective on Damasio
Antonio Damasio is my go-to, as far as understanding the whole person is concerned.
His books are comprehensive summations of a lifetime of experience and research as a neuroscientist.
Against the background of research papers, Damasio’s books are refreshing and eloquent,
simultaneously straightforward and complex.
At the Brain & Creativity Institute (BCI) at the University of Southern California, Antonio Damasio and his wife Hanna Damasio continue to pioneer studies of the brain.
Hanna Damasio adds technical depth through her developments in brain imaging.
A BCI project of interest to me is “studies on how the brain organizes narratives” because I use narratives to map people’s life cycle against the 12 Phases™.
The real-world applications of work at the Brain & Creativity Institute gives me hope that subjective experience in research may gain credibility in the near future.
Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, is my favorite book because
it is a comprehensive summation of Damasio’s authoritative understanding of neuroscience and neuropsychology,
especially in describing the physiological processes that make us human.
So far, my blogs have been about individuality because the 12 Phases™
is primarily how deep life experiences bring forth distinct personhood.
My primary goal in this and future writing is to cover research and theories in science, so far,
that leave a particular gap that my theory would fill.
For example, I use the writings of Antonio Damasio because he describes the complete conscious human being
in the paths of neurons, the nervous system, the body, the brain, and the mind.
Damasio also indicates that creativity is a response to the biological compulsion to maintain homeostasis.
In other words, humanity progresses because of homeostasis: we solve the problems of discomfort and destructions of all kinds in our lives.
This blog gives me the opportunity to attract the interest of science-minded people, to get deeper into the scientific basis for my theory while, as yet, having no protocol for the rigors of research …
By combining my research and findings with illustrations in real-life stories, my hope is that we will build common ground in shared life experiences and our mutual interest in new ideas.
Finding connections
We don't share our private thoughts, for one very good reason:
Individuals are autonomous, first, before we connect to others.
Autonomy sometimes provokes argument; some feel that no one is an island, so therefore, there's no such thing as autonomy.
While it is true that life is a network of interpersonal connections, you cannot participate wholeheartedly without identifying the inherent priorities that guide your life.
Most of the questions about survival are answered in the requirements of systems, both internal and external.
We go to school and work on schedules created by someone else, but motivation is stronger with free-will choice.
In work, our job depends on consistent performance of the skills that earned us the job.
Relationships require commitment, and self-knowledge enables you to enter relationships successfully, as well as being willing to be constrained by love.
Family relationships also require agreements, and natural commitment arises from contributing from your abilities and desires as an individual.
If you are an advisor or supervisor, leadership skills are critical. This too is based on autonomy - who are you and where are you leading them?
Business owners may think autonomy is controlling people to have the outcomes they want, but if they lose the cooperation of their employees, authoritarian control becomes self-defeating.
Ultimately, we do all these things to survive, yes, but also to make ourselves happy.
The way you pursue necessities is your signature on their functions.
One side of you flows in time, while another part of you takes the lead, creatively, for your own satisfaction.
Happiness is an autonomous feeling because you are the sole judge of your experience, and you alone are capable of a successful pursuit of happiness.
Why we need this word …
Homeostasis is the state of harmonious well-being - not merely surviving, but also moving upward.
Damasio says that homeostasis is a biological imperative that it is non-negotiable in living organisms like us.
The difference between you, as a self-concept, and your organism is the difference between deliberate choice and unconscious self-regulating operations that sustain your life.
The “strange order” Damasio refers to is the fact that the brain and conscious choice are not the origin of human innovation; rather, the origin is in biological homeostasis.
In studying the path of recovery in twelve distinct phases, I reached a similar conclusion.
I observe the instant unconscious reaction to an unexpected event that acts to protect you when your mind is temporarily stunned.
Your body may freeze or move in quick jerks, or your voice may blurt impulsively without thinking.
This is the so-called primitive response: flight, fight, or freeze.
You do not live in a state of constant well-being. Nor is it either on or off.
Disruption initiates an immediate organismic response to protect you and, true to the dynamics of growth, keeps moving fluidly forward.
The process is simple to the 'mindless' organism: just move in a positive direction -
"positive" as led by unconscious self-interest; what I call autonomous motivation - the power of individual will.
Life supplies variety in particular circumstances to which you must respond.
Only in retrospect do we see how our unplanned responses to life events actually move according to the unseen agenda of homeostasis.
Damasio makes thorough explanations of how this occurs in neurological communications between body, brain, and mind.
Similarities in the 12 Phases™ sequence
In the 12 Phases™ sequence, there are levels in the internal experience.
Physical impulses snap electrically in the moment of disruption to protect the autonomous being.
With each of the twelve progressive phases, your organism moves steadily away from trauma/disruption, sifting for benefits in the incident, and discarding what is, or could be, harmful.
Each movement is solely autonomous: your organism is working back to homeostasis.
The unconscious, internal sensation is alternately stressed with the challenges, or relieved in the rewards of personal growth.
Being incorporated into society is also on the basis of personal strengths, carrying with it new adjustments.
The finish is a permanent addition to personally relevant growth, a lifelong process.
You change, becoming increasingly more capable with every new challenge. If those rewards also make you happy, your organism has achieved homeostasis.
In your autonomous being, no one can see how your body and brain are working together.
In fact, unless you learn the science of body and brain, you are not aware of the process.
You only feel things, an instant message from body to brain to mind.
This system of identifying the exact nature of unease is feeling, not emotion.
Damasio says that the brain receives messages from the body directly, through advanced, sheathed neurons,
and also through the more primitive, unsheathed neurons floating freely in the body's "soup."
The brain, in various sorting and communicating processes, sends information to the mind in the form of images.
Damasio says that these images are not only visuals familiar to your eyes, but may also be images of pain, or locations in the body.
Your mind receives all this information and translates it into energy that has one objective, to solve the problem and return to homeostasis.
All that is contained in your organism is the entire process, body and mind, that becomes summations in the mind.
Summations in the mind are solitary and personal; they are autonomous.
Creativity and Damasio's Gap
I see a place between the exacting descriptions of body, brain, and mind as Professor Damasio explains them, and large creative solutions that advance society.
In that gap, the twelve phases of natural development move from disruption to achieving a new level of personal authority.
This may identify the creative process as it occurs in one individual.
Creativity, in its true sense, comes from the imagination, and imagination can be pinpointed in a single person.
Human progress in innovation, the arts, and sciences as a general term does not specifically attribute creativity to individuals...
Creativity can be defined as making something that did not previously exist, however …
Just as we say the body is a marvelous system without identifying the orchestration of its individual parts,
so is creativity often discussed in terms of the achievement or product, rather than the identification of the creative process in one person for the purpose of solving a problem.
In working with artists and entrepreneurs, I observe that we create the work we love to do, and from a compelling interest in the work we love to do, we solve our own creative problems.
A sole individual creates by first pushing the imagination beyond reality. This seems a natural follow to the way Damasio says the brain presents images to the mind.
The bio-psychological system in the 12 Phases™ might explain how the origins of creativity begin in the body because the compelling interest in creating solutions belongs to the individual.
According to Damasio, the nature of our perception of a problem begins and ends in homeostasis: the problem disrupts, and natural responses in solving a problem restores homeostasis.
I believe that the 12 Phases™ system is your organism's immediate response to recover homeostasis in specific, logical, and sequential steps.
Creativity begins in intuition: your organism's access to deep unconscious knowledge.
Damasio says your organism is compelled toward well-being by homeostasis. That sense of well-being is a uniquely personal perception.
For your organism, success is being well and happy - or being unwell and unhappy, but on your way to being well and happy.
Satisfaction can be temporary in self-discovery, or permanent when you have authority in autonomous performance.
Since your condition is often in flux, fluctuations in life are actually the way you increase your well-being in stages of personal growth.
Those stages of increased well-being and establishing personal authority in autonomy are described in the twelve naturally-occurring phases.
As a unique creature finding your way in the world, you are solving your own unique problems.
The bridge between your organism and society at large is built in how you create solutions for your own peace of mind.
The discovery of the twelve phases can dispel common misunderstandings about personal failure because, in the sequence, your history shows that the "downs" often build the structure for the "ups" to occur in your life.
Being moved (motivation) toward what is important only to your (autonomous) heart's satisfaction is a natural system, and that is the puzzle we are working in this blog.
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Referenced in this blog:
Damasio books:
1989 Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychology, Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio
1984 Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
1999 The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
2002 How the Brain Creates the Mind
2003 Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
2010 Self Comes to Mind
2017 The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
2021 Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious
The Brain & Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.
This introduction on the BCI homepage captured my interest.
“Under the direction of Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio, current research at the Brain and Creativity Institute includes, among others, projects on (1) the effects of music processing on the developing brain, (2) studies on how the brain organizes narratives, and (3) the investigation of feeling and consciousness in humans and machines. Results from the Institute’s ongoing work have applications in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders, child development, and education. They are all relevant to the elucidation of the human condition.”
Mapping Memories by Life Cycle Phases™, a research tool created by Elizabeth Diane Martin.