Quotes by Antonio Damasio

About Antonio Damasio:

Antonio Damasio is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California and an Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute Dr. Damasio is the author of several books and heads the Brain and Creativity Institute) His book "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain", explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. "Antonio Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making"
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

You still have only one self and one identity. However, self, identity and personality are not things, they are not objects, and they certainly are not rigid. Instead, they are biological processes built within the brain from numerous interactive com...

Antonio Damasio

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.

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you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn.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

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

Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.

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...

Antonio Damasio

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

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

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

Interestingly enough, not all feelings result from the body's reaction to external stimuli. Sometimes changes are purely simulated in the brain maps.

Antonio Damasio

To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.

Antonio Damasio

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.

Antonio Damasio

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

Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs.

Antonio Damasio

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 lo...

Antonio Damasio

Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.

Antonio Damasio

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

I got interested in the emotions after studying patients who had lost the ability to emote and feel under certain circumstances. Many of those patients also had major impairments in their ability to make decisions.

Antonio Damasio

When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so...

Antonio Damasio

Author Bio

  • NameAntonio Damasio
  • Descriptionneuroscientist and professor at the University of Southern California
  • AliasesAntonio Damasio; António Rosa Damásio
  • BornFebruary 25, 1944
  • CountryPortugal
  • ProfessionNeurologist; Neuroscientist; Psychologist; Author
  • AwardsPessoa Prize; Doctor Honoris Causa; Princess Of Asturias Award - Technical And Scientific Research; Ariëns Kappers Medal