Antonio Damasio famous quotes

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Self #Brain #Mind

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Leadership #Emotion #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

#Morning #Sleep #Self

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

#Pain #Bird #Feelings

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 #Feelings #Facts

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Pain #Compassion #Brain

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

#Intelligent #Luxury #Outcomes

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

#Brain #Mind #Body

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Perception #Mind #Links

I got interested in the emotions after studying patients who had lost the ability to emote and feel under certain circumstances. Many of those patients also had major impairments in their ability to make decisions.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Decision #Emotion #Patient

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Self #Feelings #Would Be

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Simple #Self #Brain

Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Running #Writing #Hands

For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Ocean #Discovery #Joy

When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Brain #Skins #Looks

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

#Self #Unexpected #Machinery

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 listen.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Writing #Mahler #Composer

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

#Mind #Body #Arise

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 meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Beautiful #Intelligent #Leaving

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

#Heart #Sadness #Expression

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

#Believe #Emotional #Hands

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 #Brain #Mind

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

#Art #Technology #Justice

How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?
-- Antonio Damasio

#Self #Brain #Stability

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 would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Brain #Scott Fitzgerald #True Happiness

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

#Art #Memories #Creativity

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 the anticipated future.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Memories #Past #Self

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 minds right now.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Self #Brain #Mind

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 existence.
-- Antonio Damasio

#Self #Feelings #Brain

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

#Thinking #Feelings #Machines

...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 Damasio

#Powerful #Simple #Light