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Antonio Damasio

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“In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data.”

SelfEmbodied Cognition
Book:Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
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“The varied players—objects and events, currently present or recalled from memory—do not pluck the strings of any violins or cellos and do not press the keys of countless pianos, but the metaphor captures the situation. Objects and eventsdo “play,” in the sense that they, as distinct entities within the organism’s mind, can act on certain neural structures of the organism, “affect” their state, and change those other structures for a passing moment. Over the “playing time,” their actions result in a certain kind of music, the music of our thoughts and feelings and of the meanings that emerge from the inner narratives they help construct. The result may be subtle or not so. Sometimes it amounts to an operatic performance. You can attend it passively, or you can intervene, modify the score to a greater or smaller extent, and produce unpredicted results.”

FeelingsAwarenessThoughtsConciousnessThe MindInner OrchestraOrigin Of Thoughts And FeelingsThe Strange Order Of Things
Book:El extraño orden de las cosas
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“What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological and sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social causes or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the "culture of complaint") that is cause for alarm.”

EmotionsDrugsPop PsychologyPop Science
Book:Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
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“Para mi es imposible pensar que tipo de emocion de miedo quedaria si no estuvieran presentes la sensacion de latidos acelerados o de respiracion entrecortada, ni la sensacion de labios temblorosos o de piernas debilitadas, ni de carne de gallina o de retorcijones de tripas. Puede alguien imaginarse el estado de ira sin sentir que el pecho estalla, la cara se ruboriza, los orificios nasales se dilatan, los dientes se aprietan, sin notar el impulso hacia la accion vigorosa? Puede sentirse rabia en cambio con los musculos relajados, la respiracion calmada y una cara placida?”

MenteCuerpo
Author:Antonio Damasio
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“You know, mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities, visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it, what we are like and what the world is like. But this very, very important quality of subjectivity, this quality that allows us to take a distant view and say, "I am here, I exist, I have a life and there are things around me that refer to me." That me-ness, M-E-hyphen, that is what really constitutes consciousness.”

KnowsWorldMindImportantDifferentNamesViewsConsciousnessQualityVisualsSubjectivitySensoryAuditoryHyphens
Author:Antonio Damasio
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“I think it's reasonable to say that even thought, in all likelihood, we have slightly different experiences of reality, they are similar enough to us not to clash. In other words, I'm not, it's very unlikely, in fact, let's say impossible, for you to say the situation in which you and I are in right now, relative to the machinery that is capturing this.”

ThinkingDifferentEnoughFactsRealitySituationImpossibleRight NowReasonableRelativeMachineryUnlikelyClashLikelihoodDifferent Experiences
Author:Antonio Damasio
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“People who are great thinkers, in science or in art, people who are great performers, have to have that kind of capacity. Without that kind of capacity, it's extremely difficult to manage a high level of performance because you're going to get a lot of extraneous material chipping away at the finery of your thinking or the finery of your motor execution.”

PeopleThinkingKindArtDifficultLevelsMaterialsCapacityPerformancesManagePerformersThinkerExecutionMotorHigh LevelGreat ThinkersChipping Away
Author:Antonio Damasio
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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.”

FirstsStoriesCertainBornOur LivesEventsWalkingAspectStructureSequenceSequencingSequence Of Events
Author:Antonio Damasio
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“If something produces an undue amount of pleasure or undue amount of displeasure, it's going to be judged differently and it's going to be introduced in your narrative with a different size, with a different development. So that is the next element to superimpose on the sequencing element. And in fact, that element is so powerful that very often it can trump the sequencing event, that the sequencing aspect.”

IfsDifferentFactsNextPleasurePowerfulEventsProduceDevelopmentTrumpAmountElementsAspectSizeNarrativeJudgedDispleasureSequencing
Author:Antonio Damasio
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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.”

HeartHappensActionFacesCan DoEmotionExampleMovementProgramComplexesReleaseGutsInternalsYour FaceExecutionMolecules
Author:Antonio Damasio
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