Quote

...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.

Antonio Damasio

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Antonio Damasio
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: February 25
Academic
Neurologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Lisboa
Antonio Damasio
António Rosa Damásio
Antonio Rosa Damasio
Powerful
Momentous
Simple
Stepping
Sense
Metaphor
Light
Mental
Also
Birth
Self
Coming
Mind
Consciousness
World
Knowing

More quotes by Antonio Damasio

Image
Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
Antonio Damasio
Image
There 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 Damasio
Image
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you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn.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.
Antonio Damasio
Image
A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.
Antonio Damasio
Image
The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
Antonio Damasio
Image
I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.
Antonio Damasio
Image
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.
Antonio Damasio
Image
A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
Antonio Damasio
Image
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.
Antonio Damasio
Image
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.
Antonio Damasio
Image
I think it's possible to a certain extent to make those comparisons. The problem is the detail with which the comparison can be made. Of course, the first place to make such a comparison would be to ask for a testimony from different people and have people report on what they experience.
Antonio Damasio
Image
The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.
Antonio Damasio
Image
It's very interesting to think about the distinction with mind, which I just made in very general terms, but it can be made more profound when we think that there are many species, many creatures on earth that are very likely to have a mind, but are very unlikely to have a consciousness in the sense that you and I have.
Antonio Damasio
Image
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.
Antonio Damasio
Image
There 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 Damasio
Image
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.
Antonio Damasio
Image
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.
Antonio Damasio
Image
There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
Antonio Damasio
Image
You're not the same after, say, an incredible love affair that went very well or a love affair that went bad. Or something that happens to your health, or something that happened to somebody else's health, that is close to you. Or something that happens professionally.
Antonio Damasio
Image
Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.
Antonio Damasio