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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

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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
Brain
Instruments
Came
Memory
Language
Trade
Prompted
Culture
Creativity
Autobiographical
Science
Memories
Extended
Art
Technology
Reasoning
Self
Imagination
Religions
Justice
Arts

More quotes by Antonio Damasio

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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
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How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?
Antonio Damasio
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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
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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.
Antonio Damasio
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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
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Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
Antonio Damasio
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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
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We remove ourselves from the experience itself to a surrogate of the experience, which is whatever measure you take from the brain, be it the electroencephalogram or magnet encephalography or say functional magnetic resonance. So it's pretty tough to make those comparisons.
Antonio Damasio
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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
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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.
Antonio Damasio
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To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.
Antonio Damasio
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Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.
Antonio Damasio
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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.
Antonio Damasio
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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
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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.
Antonio Damasio
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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
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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 Damasio
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Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.
Antonio Damasio
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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
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Emotion is set in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified by our experience so individually we have variations on the pattern. But in essence, your emotion of joy and mine are going to be extremely similar.
Antonio Damasio