Antonio Damasio Quotes

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.

There's that effect that is very physical, very down there at the synaptic level, which really means microscopic cellular level, but also molecular level, because all of those structures are operating on an electrochemical basis and so the changes there are very important.

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.

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.

I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.

But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago. The difference is maybe very small or it may be huge.

You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you're having the emotion.

The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.

So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it's the most important, it's not.

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

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 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.

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.

I 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.

Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and you're being confronted by different things, not necessarily very important or significance for your ultimate life, but you are constantly reacting to the world.

There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value - sorry for the pun - we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event.

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.

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.