Antonio R. Damasio Quotes

#1. I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.

Antonio R. Damasio

#2. The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventro-medial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.

Antonio R. Damasio

#3. Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.

Antonio R. Damasio

#4. Because the brain is the body's captive audience, feelings are winners among equals. And

Antonio R. Damasio

#5. The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.

Antonio R. Damasio

#6. The good news, however, is that the self also has made reason and scientific observation possible, and reason and science, in turn, have been gradually correcting the misleading intuitions prompted by the unaided self. Overcoming

Antonio R. Damasio

#7. Somatic markers depend on learning within a system that can connect certain categories of entity or event with the enactment of a body state, pleasant or unpleasant. Incidentally,

Antonio R. Damasio

#8. When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions.

Antonio R. Damasio

#9. It is also true that the separate brain units, by
virtue of where they are placed in a system, contribute different
components to the system's operation and are thus not interchangeable.

Antonio R. Damasio

#10. 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 R. Damasio

#11. WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.

Antonio R. Damasio

#12. 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 R. Damasio

#13. Perhaps the most indispensable thing we can do as
human beings, every day of our lives, is remind ourselves and others
of our complexity, fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness.

Antonio R. Damasio

#14. Most of our decision making was shaped by somatic states related to punishment and reward. But

Antonio R. Damasio