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Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio. Damasio’s research on the somatic marker hypothesis — the finding that emotion and body state are integral to good decision-making and that damage to the body-brain integration circuits produces measurable impairment in real-world judgment — provides the most mechanistically precise available account of how the physiological disruptions that chronic loneliness produces translate into impaired decision quality. His patients with damage to the prefrontal-emotional integration circuits performed normally on standard cognitive tests while making consistently poor real-world decisions: they had lost access to the somatic signals that calibrate judgment in the situations where analytical processing alone is insufficient. The founder whose chronic loneliness has elevated their cortisol, disrupted their HPA axis, and introduced persistent threat noise into their somatic signal system is experiencing a functional version of exactly this impairment. Descartes’ Error is the book that explains why.