Antonio Damasio Quotes

We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.

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.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

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.

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.

A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?

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

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.

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.

In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one's own organism and the world around that organism. That is really the heart of consciousness.

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.

We can be more or less conscious when you create grades of focus on a subject that is flowing in our stream of consciousness.

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.

We're seeing it the same way, we're hearing the same way, we have the same conception of the situation. And so, for all purposes, we are operating with a very similar perception.