Quotes from António R. Damásio

The proclamation of bruised feelings, the desperate plea for the correction of individual pain and suffering, the inchoate cry for the loss of a never-achieved sense of inner balance and happiness to which most humans aspire are not likely to diminish soon.4 It would be foolish to ask medicine alone to heal a sick culture, but it is just as foolish to ignore that aspect of human disease.

For one thing, part of the process is not even neural; that is, it does not involve regular nervous firing along chains of neurons. The process is humoral: chemical signals traveling in the blood capillaries bathe certain regions of the nervous system that are devoid of blood-brain barrier and can thus inform those brain regions directly about aspects of the ongoing homeostatic state.17

In most instances, the central nervous system does not act directly on the outside world. The "interior" and the nervous system form an interactive complex; the "exterior" and the nervous system do not.

The good news, however, is that the self also has made reason and scientific observation possible, and reason and science, in turn, have been gradually correcting the misleading intuitions prompted by the unaided self. Overcoming

Feelings are primarily about the quality of the state of life in the body's old interior, in any situation, during repose, during a goal-directed activity, or, importantly, during the response to the thoughts one is having, whether they are caused by a perception of the outside world or by a recollection of a past event as stored in our memories.

The head, the chest, and the abdomen were the most commonly engaged theaters of feeling. They are indeed the stages on which feelings are created.

The manifest ownership of mental contents by the integrated organism where they arise is the distinctive trait of a conscious mind.

Othello goes through in his mind before he develops jealousy and anger

Our perceptions and the ideas they evoke continuously generate a parallel description in terms of language. That description is also constructed with images. All the words we use, in any language, spoken, written, or appreciated by touch, as in Braille, are made of mental images. This is true of the auditory images of the sounds of letters and words and inflections and of the corresponding visual symbol/letter codings that stand for those sounds.

We often end up learning that an emotion is happening not as the triggering situation unfolds but because the processing of the situation causes feelings; that is, it causes conscious mental experiences of the emotional event. After the feeling begins we may (or may not) realize why we are feeling a certain way.

Spontaneous feelings signify the overall state of life regulation of an organism as good, bad, or in between.

The rise of human cultures should be credited to both conscious feeling and creative intelligence.

All mind is made of images

the process of consciousness itself relies on images.

Genes often operate in bundled fashion, a bit like toxic mortgages.

La medicina no empezó como un deporte intelectual pensado para ejercitar nuestro ingenio ante un diagnóstico enigmático o un misterio fisiológico, sino que lo hizo como consecuencia de ciertos sentimientos específicos de los pacientes y de los sentimientos que estos despertaban en los primeros médicos;

The difference is staggering, by a factor of 10. In the human gut alone, there are usually around 100 trillion bacteria, while in one entire human being there are only about 10 trillion cells, counting all types.

somatic markers depend on learning within a system that can connect certain categories of entity or event with the enactment of a body state, pleasant or unpleasant. Incidentally

Because the brain is the body's captive audience, feelings are winners among equals. And

We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think

Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.

Willpower is just another name for the idea of choosing long-term outcomes rather than short-term ones.

Anger is a good example of a negative emotion whose benefits have been diminishing in evolution.

WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.1 These are Pascal's words, and it is easy to see how perceptive he was about the virtual nonexistence of the present, consumed as we are by using the past to plan what-comes-next, a moment away or in the distant future. That