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In this eagerly awaited book, the admired
neuroscientist and humanist Antonio R. Damasio brings a
lifetime of research and a literary gift to the last frontier
of brain research -- the mystery of consciousness. How is
it that we know that we know? How is it that our conscious
and private minds have a sense of self? These are the questions
he considers in The Feeling of What Happens.
In a radical departure from current views
on consciousness, Damasio contends that explaining how we
make mental images or attend to those images will not suffice
to elucidate the mystery. A satisfactory hypothesis for
the making of consciousness must attempt to explain how
the sense of self comes to the mind.
Damasio suggests that the sense of self
does not depend on memory or on reasoning and even less
on language. The sense of self depends, he argues, on the
brain's ability to portray the living organism in the act
of relating to an object. That ability, in turn, is a consequence
of the brain's involvement in the process of regulating
life. The sense of self began as yet another device aimed
at ensuring survival.
After reading Descartes' Error, Damasio's
landmark book, Jonas Salk wrote "You will never again
look at yourself or another without wondering what goes
on behind the eyes that we meet." The Feeling of
What Happens takes you further along the same path of
discovery and shows how "consciousness is the key to
a life examined, our beginner's permit to the experiences
that make us human."
Antonio R. Damasio is the M.W. Van Allen
Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology
at the University of Iowa College of Medicine in Iowa City.
He is also Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies in La Jolla. Damasio, internationally recognized
for his research on the neuroscience of the mind, is a member
both of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of
the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Among his many awards are the Pessoa Prize, which he shared
with his wife, and, most recently, the Ipsen Prize. His
previous book, Descartes' Error, has been translated
into seventeen languages and is taught in universities worldwide.
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