70 Quotes by Antonio Damasio

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.

We’re seeing it the same way, we’re hearing the same way, we have the same conception of the situation. And so, for all purposes, we are operating with a very similar perception.

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.

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

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.

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.

You’re not the same after, say, an incredible love affair that went very well or a love affair that went bad. Or something that happens to your health, or something that happened to somebody else’s health, that is close to you. Or something that happens professionally.

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.

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.