Antonio Damasio Quotes

35 quotes in 587 categories

• 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you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn.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…
• 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…
• More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the…
• Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us…
• A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
• How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?
• Scott Fitzgerald said famously that 'he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for.' But he also forgot that without consciousness, he…
• 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 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.
• 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,…
• Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• ...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…
• Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are…
• 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…

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