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

Categorized in : Bird Feelings Pain

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

Antonio Damasio

machines feelings thinking

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

Antonio Damasio

self mind brain

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

body mind brain

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

decision sides feelings

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

Antonio Damasio

emotion leadership reason

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

self sleep morning

The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.

Antonio Damasio

states self

So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it's the most important, it's not.

Antonio Damasio

important brain thinking

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

Antonio Damasio

simple brain add

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you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn.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

sadness expression heart

Emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity, either/or, or something in between.

Antonio Damasio

body purpose opportunity

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

problem management faces

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

technology justice art

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.

Antonio Damasio

arise body mind

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

variation essence joy

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

machinery unexpected self

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.

Antonio Damasio

psychology mind brain

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

Antonio Damasio

luxury outcomes intelligent

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

creativity memories art

The mechanism of primary emotions does not describe the full range of emotional behaviors. They are, to be sure, the basic mechanism. However, I believe that in terms of an individual's development they are followed by mechanisms of secondary emotions, which occur once we begin experiencing feelings and forming systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on the one hand, and primary emotions, on the other.

Antonio Damasio

emotional believe hands