Quotes from Antonio Damasio

Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.

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.

The exceptional status of each human being derives from the unique significance of suffering and flourishing in the context of our remembrances of the past and of the memories we have constructed of the future we incessantly anticipate.

For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.

We used to believe that we were thinking beings who just happen to feel. We now know that we are feeling beings who think.

Phineas Gage's case is not the only important historical source in the effort to understand the neural basis of reasoning and decision making...[to understand the effect of] prefrontal damage. ... The Hebb-Penfield and Ackerly-Benton shared a number of personality traits...They are bereft of a theory of their own mind and of the mind of those with whom they interact

Phineas Gage's case is not the only important historical source in the effort to understand the neural basis of reasoning and decision making;

It is also true that the separate brain units, by virtue of where they are placed in a system, contribute different components to the system's operation and are thus not interchangeable.

Phineas Gage's case is not the only important historical source in the effort to understand the neural basis of reasoning and decision making...[to understand the effect of] prefrontal damage. ... The Hebb-Penfield and Ackerly-Benton shared a number of personality traits...One way of describing their predicament is by saying that they never construct an appropriate theory about their persons.

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.

Interestingly enough, not all feelings result from the body's reaction to external stimuli. Sometimes changes are purely simulated in the brain maps.

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.

Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line.

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.

Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.

I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.