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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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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
Turns
Flexible
Others
Largely
Better
Stable
Self
Unexpected
Consistent
Develop
Worse
Predictable
Open
Machinery
More quotes by Antonio Damasio
To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.
Antonio Damasio
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
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
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
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
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
How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?
Antonio Damasio
We 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 Damasio
There 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
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
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
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
A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
Antonio Damasio
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
Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
Antonio Damasio
Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.
Antonio Damasio
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
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
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
...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
