70 Quotes by Antonio Damasio

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.

Present continuously becomes past, and by the time we take stock of it we are in another present, consumed with planning the future, which we do on the stepping-stones of the past. The present is never here. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.

...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.

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.

We used to believe that we were thinking beings who just happen to feel. We now know that we are feeling beings who think.

Neither anguish nor the elation that love or art canbring about are devalued by understanding some of the myriadbiological processes that make them what they are. Precisely theopposite should be true: Our sense of wonder should increase beforethe intricate mechanisms that make such magic possible. Feelingsform the base for what humans have described for millennia as thehuman soul or spirit.

It is also true that the separate brain units, byvirtue of where they are placed in a system, contribute differentcomponents to the system's operation and are thus not interchangeable.

Phineas Gage's case is not the only importanthistorical source in the effort to understand the neural basis ofreasoning and decision making;

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