Antonio Damasio Quotes

Antonio Damasio — Portuguese Scientist born on February 25, 1944,

Antonio Damasio (Portuguese: António Damásio) is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California and an Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute Damasio is the author of several books and heads the Brain and Creativity Institute) His book Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. "Antonio Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making".. (wikipedia)

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.

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.

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.

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.

Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.

Antonio Damasio Quotes

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