Quotes from António R. Damásio

The new world of communication is a blessing for the citizens of the world trained to think critically and knowledgeable about history. But what about citizens who have been seduced by the world of life as entertainment and commerce? They have been educated, in good part, by a world in which negative emotional provocation is the rule rather than the exception and where the best solutions for a problem have to do primarily with short-term self-interests. Can they really be blamed?

Singing a song with lyrics requires the time-locked integration of varied fragments of recall: the melody that guides the singing, the memory of the words, the memories related to the motor execution.

The sensing and responding level of perception precedes minds, historically speaking, and is also present in minded organisms now.

Feelings accompany the unfolding of life in our organisms, whatever one perceives, learns, remembers, imagines, reasons, judges, decides, plans, or mentally creates.

Once feeling would have been removed, you would have become unable to classify images as beautiful or ugly, pleasurable or painful, tasteful or vulgar, spiritual or earthy. If no feelings were available, you might still be trained, at great effort, to make aesthetic or moral classifications of objects or events. So might a robot, of course.

No hay ser, en el sentido propio del término, sin una experiencia mental espontánea de la vida, sin una sensación de existencia.

Feelings work as motives to respond to a problem and as monitors of the success of the response or lack thereof.

This is not to say that human feelings are not more complex and layered and elaborate than those of animals. How could they not be? But as I see it, the distinction in humans has to do with the web of associations that feeling states establish with all sorts of ideas and especially with the interpretations we can make of our present moment and of our anticipated future.

Memory, language, imagination, and reasoning are leading participants in cultural processes

The humans who first devised the Golden Rule, that we should treat others the way we want others to treat us, formulated the precept with the help of what they felt when they were treated badly or when they saw others badly treated. Logic played a role as it worked on facts, to be sure, but some of the critical facts were feelings.

Feelings provide us with a moment-to-moment perspective on the state of our health.

When do nervous systems enter the evolutionary march? One good estimate is the Precambrian period, which ended 540 to 600 million years ago, an old vintage for certain but not that old when we compare it with the age of first life. Life, even multicellular life, managed quite well without nervous systems for about 3 billion years. We should reflect on this time line before we decide when perception, intelligence, sociality, and emotions made their first appearance on the world stage.

It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.

If artificial intelligence and engineering can take us there, why not? Provided the engineered creatures are under human supervision, provided they have no way of acquiring autonomy and turning against us, and provided we will not have the means to program robots such that they can destroy the world, why not? It must be added that there are several dark scenarios regarding not so much future robots as future AI programs that do have doomsday potential and that need to be watched for.

Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the "I.

Where Do Emotive Responses Come From? The answer to this question is clear. Emotive responses originate in specific brain systems—sometimes in a specific region—responsible for commanding the varied components of the response: the chemical molecules that must be secreted, the visceral changes that must be accomplished, the movements of face, limbs, or whole body that are part of a particular emotion, be it fear, anger, or joy.

The formulation I presented should not diminish our determination to control external circumstances to the advantage of individuals and society, or our resolve to develop, invent, or perfect the cultural instruments with which we can make the world better: ethics, law, art, science, technology.

Life would not be viable without the traits imposed by homeostasis, and we know that homeostasis has existed ever since life began. But feelings—the subjective experiences of the momentary state of homeostasis within a living body—did not emerge when life did. I propose that they emerged only after organisms were endowed with nervous systems, a far more recent development that began to occur only about 600 million years ago.

Of special note are certain divisional arrangements of main functions that are organized and coordinated by different brain components. For example, several nuclei in the brain stem, hypothalamus, and telencephalon are in charge of producing the behaviors to which I referred above, known as drives, motivations, and emotions with which the brain responds to a variety of internal and external conditions with preset programs of actions (e.g., secretion of certain molecules, actual movements

We are incessant narrators of stories about almost anything in our lives, mostly about the important things but not only, and we happily color our narratives with all the biases of our past experiences and of our likes and dislikes. There is nothing fair and neutral about our narratives unless we go to the effort of reducing our preferences and prejudices, which we are well advised to do on things that matter for our lives and the lives of others.

Les organismes sont continuellement en train de changer, passant par une série "d'états": chacun de ces derniers correspond une configuration dans laquelle les diverses composantes de l'organisme présentent un niveau d'activité donnée.

neurobiology not only can assist us with the comprehension and compassion of the human condition, but that in so doing it can help us understand social conflict and contribute to its alleviation.

This is not to suggest that neurobiology can save the world, but simply that the gradual accrual of knowledge about human beings can help us find better ways for the management of human affairs.

e seres humanos que inventam flautas, escrevem poesia, acreditam eu Deus, conquistam o Planeta e o espaço em seu redor, combatem doenças para atenuar o sofrimento, mas também não hesitam em destruir outros seres humanos para seu ganho pessoal, inventam a internet, descobrem maneiras de a transformar num instrumento de progresso e de catástrofe e, ainda por cima, se interrogam sobre as bactérias, formigas, abelhas - e si próprios.