Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.
Antonio DamasioThere are ways in which you can make that distinction objective to a certain degree. For example, by looking at responses that could be generated in the brain to exactly the same stimulus and there could be differences there.
Antonio DamasioWe may express them [emotions] physically slightly differently, and it's of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the process is going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it's going to be the same.
Antonio DamasioI cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
Antonio Damasio