Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story. — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
It's very interesting to think about the distinction with mind, which I just made in very general terms, but it can be… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one's own organism and the world around… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
Scott Fitzgerald said famously that 'he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for.' But he also forgot that… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
You know, mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities, visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it, what we are like and… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli.… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
We can be more or less conscious when you create grades of focus on a subject that is flowing in our stream… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think. — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story. — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
I got interested in the emotions after studying patients who had lost the ability to emote and feel under certain circumstances. Many of those… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes. — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
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… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image
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… — Antonio Damasio Copy Share Image