25 Quotes by Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist and professor of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy at the University of Southern California. Damasio is known for his research on the neural basis of emotion and decision-making, particularly in relation to the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. His work has contributed to our understanding of the role of emotions in rational decision-making and has implications for fields such as economics, law, and public policy. Damasio is also a prolific author and has written several books, including "Descartes' Error" and "The Feeling of What Happens." (Bio)
Antonio Damasio Quotes
Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body. (Meaning)
We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think. (Meaning)
A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.
There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.
Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.
Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they have hunger or thirst, they can satisfy that. It's this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you.
Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.
Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.
When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.
Emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity, either/or, or something in between.
Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.
A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind.
We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.
The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.
Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.
You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.
Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.
To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.
When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.
If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.
But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago. The difference is maybe very small or it may be huge.
― Antonio Damasio Quotes
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Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
