Institute Quotes by Antonio Damasio

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

— Antonio Damasio

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

— 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…

— 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…

— Antonio Damasio

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

— 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…

— Antonio Damasio

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

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

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

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

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

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