Quotes from António R. Damásio

Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems. That partnership is responsible for the emergence of conscious, feeling minds that are, in turn, responsible for what is most distinctive about humanity: cultures and civilizations. Feelings are at the center of the book, but they draw their powers from homeostasis.

Once it becomes clear that feelings of emotion are primarily perceptions of our body state during a state of emotion, it is reasonable to say that all feelings of emotion contain a variation on the theme of primordial feelings, whatever the primordial feelings of the moment are, augmented by other aspects of body change that may or not be related to interoception.

As pinturas, e muito mais tarde, os textos serviram de marcos e de pausas para reflexão, alertas, divertimento e prazer. Ajudaram a clarificar o que deveriam ter sido confrontos confusos com a realidade. Ajudaram a deslindar e a organizar o conhecimento. Proporcionaram um caminho para a compreensão do que significam as coisas.

stress, which impairs memory, reduces neurogenesis.

The idea, in essence, is that cultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition.

The peak-end effect described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky could contribute as well. We would be prone to creating strong memories for the more rewarding aspects of a past scene and obscure the rest. Memory is imperfect.

The sciences alone cannot illuminate the entirety of human experience without the light that comes from the arts and humanities.

But the brain's representation of the body has another major implication: because we can depict our own body states, we can more easily simulate the equivalent body states of others.

Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures.

Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting.

The simple idea, then, is that feelings of pain and feelings of pleasure, from degrees of well-being to malaise and sickness, would have been the catalysts for the processes of questioning, understanding, and problem solving that most profoundly distinguish human minds from the minds of other living species.

The purpose of this chapter is to make clear why subjectivity and integrated experience are essential enablers of the cultural mind. In the absence of subjectivity, nothing matters; in the absence of some degree of integrated experience, the reflection and discernment that are required for creativity are not possible.

This book is dedicated to presenting some facts behind the making of minds that think, create narratives and meaning, remember the past and imagine the future; and to presenting some facts behind the machinery of feeling and consciousness responsible for the reciprocal connections among minds, the outside world, and its respective life.

It has long been known that interoceptive signals are largely conveyed to the central nervous system either by neurons whose axons are devoid of myelin, the C fibers, or by neurons whose axons are very lightly myelinated, the A delta fibers.

But we may well ask, who are the players in these imaginary orchestras, exactly? And here is the answer: the objects and events in the world around our organisms, actually present or recalled from memory, and the objects and events in the world inside.

In the end, human creativity is rooted in life and in the breathtaking fact that life comes equipped with a precise mandate: resist and project itself into the future, no matter what. It may be helpful to consider these humble but powerful origins as we cope with the instabilities and uncertainties of the present.

And as this happens, our growing sense of whatever the world outside may be, is apprehended as a modification in the neural space in which body and brain interact. It is not only the separation between mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is probably just as fictional. The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained.

In brief, images were advantageous even if an organism were not conscious of the images formed within it. The organism would not yet be capable of subjectivity and would be unable to inspect the images in its own mind, but still the images could automatically guide the execution of a movement; the movement would be more precise in terms of its target and succeed rather than fail.

La historia de nuestra civilización es, hasta cierto punto, la historia de un esfuerzo persuasivo por extender los mejores «sentimientos morales» a círculos cada vez más amplios de humanidad

the memory of images, for example, the memory of a scene that we perceive in visual and auditory terms—is achieved by converting explicit images into a "neural code" that will later allow, by working in reverse, a more or less complete reconstruction in the process of image recall.

Loss of the hippocampus in both cerebral hemispheres disrupts the formation of and access to long-term memory of integrated scenes. Unique events are no longer recalled even if objects and events can still be recognized outside a unique context. One is able to recognize a house as a house, but not the particular house where one has lived. The contextual, episodic knowledge acquired by personal, individual experience is no longer accessible. The generic, semantic knowledge is still recoverable.

The ability to generate images opened the way for organisms to represent the world around them, a world that included every possible kind of object and other whole organisms; and, just as important, it allowed organisms to represent the world inside each of them. Before the emergence of mapping and images and minds, organisms could acknowledge the presence of other organisms and of external objects and respond accordingly.

The learning and recall of motor-related activities rely on different brain structures, namely, the cerebellar hemispheres, the basal ganglia, and the sensorimotor cortices. The critical learning and recall required for a musical performance or for the practice of sports rely on such structures in close association with the hippocampal system.

Creative intelligence was the means by which mental images and behaviors were intentionally combined to provide novel solutions for the problems that humans diagnosed and to construct new worlds for the opportunities humans envisioned.