What happens [in a coma] is that you lose the grounding of the self, you no longer have access to any feeling of your own existence.
Antonio DamasioThere are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.
Antonio DamasioThere is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
Antonio DamasioThere is a sequence of events in our lives and so there's a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there's a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.
Antonio Damasio