Antonio Damasio Quotes About Emotions

Quotes about: Emotions

• 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

  Thinking, Brain, Important

  Source: bigthink.com

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you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn.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

  Antonio Damasio (2008). “Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain”, p.204, Random House

• Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

  Antonio Damasio

  Leadership, Emotion, Reason

• 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

  Antonio Damasio (2003). “Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain”, p.42, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Feeling of an emotion is a process that is distinct from having the emotion in the first place. So it helps to understand what is an emotion, what is a feeling, we need to understand what is an emotion.

  Antonio Damasio

  Feelings, Needs, Firsts

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• The emotion is the execution of a very complex program of actions. Some actions that are actually movements, like movement that you can do, change your face for example, in fear, or movements that are internal, that happen in your heart or in your gut, and movements that are actually not muscular movements, but rather, releases of molecules.

  Antonio Damasio

  Heart, Movement, Faces

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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

  Opportunity, Purpose, Body

  "Big Think Interview With Antonio Damasio". Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• 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

  Essence, Joy, Variation

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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 going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it's going to be the same.

  Antonio Damasio

  Essence, Missing, Together

  "Big Think Interview With Antonio Damasio". Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

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

  Antonio Damasio

  Intelligent, Luxury, Outcomes

• If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you're having the emotion.

  Antonio Damasio

  Brain, Different, Needs

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• 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

• 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

• Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and you're being confronted by different things, not necessarily very important or significance for your ultimate life, but you are constantly reacting to the world.

  Antonio Damasio

  Thinking, Important, Different

  Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

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