Antonio Damasio Quotes - Page 2

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• Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

  Antonio Damasio

  People, Interesting, Political

  Interviewwith David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

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• ...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

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• 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

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• 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

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• You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.

  Antonio Damasio

  Fall, Focus, Problem

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.

  Antonio Damasio

  Biographies, Reason, Enormous

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

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• But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago. The difference is maybe very small or it may be huge.

  Antonio Damasio

  Ideas, Differences, Years

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

  Antonio Damasio

  Mean, Mind, Special

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

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• 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

  "Self Comes To Mind". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.wired.com. November 8, 2010.

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• 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

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• To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.

  Antonio Damasio

  Mind, Different, Body

  "Feeling Our Emotions". Interview with Manuela Lenzen, www.scientificamerican.com. April 1, 2005.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• There is a sequence of events in our lives and so there's a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there's a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.

  Antonio Damasio

  Firsts, Events, Stories

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• 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

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• Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.

  Antonio Damasio

  Self, Culture, Individual

  "Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio Explains Consciousness" by Antonio Damasio, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 16, 2010.

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• All of that is constantly operating when you not only learn, but when you recall. But as you recall in a different light, the weights with which something is more probably going to be or not recalled on the next instance, are going to be changed. So you're constantly changing the way, for instance, synapses are going to fire very easily or not so easily.

  Antonio Damasio

  Fire, Light, Way

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

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• 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, Mind, Brain

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• There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value - sorry for the pun - we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event.

  Antonio Damasio

  Sorry, Emotional, Thinking

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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 quest to understand consciousness". TED Talk, www.ted.com. March 2011.

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• 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.

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• A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.

  Antonio Damasio

  Simple, Self, Organization

  "What Is Consciousness?" by David Hirschman, bigthink.com.

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