Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain »

"From one of the most significant neuroscientists at work today, a pathbreaking investigation of a question that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists for centuries: how is consciousness created?" "Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness---what we think of as a mind with a self---is to begin with a biological process created by a living organism. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the introspective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told. He also advances a radical hypothesis regarding the origins and varieties of feelings, which is central to his framework for the biological construction of consciousness: feelings are grounded in a near fusion of body and brain networks, and first emerge from the historically old and humble brain stem rather than from the modern cerebral cortex." Damasio suggests that the brain's development of a human self becomes a challenge to nature's indifference and opens the way for the appearance of culture, a radical break in the course of evolution and the source of a new level of life regulation---sociocultural homeostasis. He leaves no doubt that the blueprint for the work-in-progress he calls sociocultural homeostasis is the genetically well-established basic homeostasis, the curator of value that has been present in simple life-forms for billions of years. Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking journey into the neurobiological foundations of mind and self.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Antonio Damasio has a remarkable scientific imagination and an admirable literary style. The combination makes for fascinating reading. From the clinical data and the neuropsychological experimental work that has gathered both pace and precision in recent years, he draws compelling insights, forming a map of possibilities about the nature of that ultimate mystery, consciousness. He writes with such flair and confidence that it is almost as if he makes the mystery dissolve into knowledge before our eyes.

PART I STARTING OVER

1 Awakening 3

Goals and Reasons

Approaching the Problem

The Self as Witness

Overcoming a Misleading Intuition

An Integrated Perspective

The Framework

A Preview of Main Ideas

Life and the Conscious Mind

2 From Life Regulation to Biological Value 31

The Implausibility of Reality

Natural Will

Staying Alive

The Origins of Homeostasis

Cells, Multicellular Organisms, and Engineered Machines

Biological Value

Biological Value in Whole Organisms

The Success of Our Early Forerunners

Developing Incentives

Connecting Homeostasis, Value, and Consciousness

PART II WHAT'S IN A BRAIN THAT A MIND CAN BE?

3 Making Maps and Making Images 63

Maps and Images

Cutting Below the Surface

Maps and Minds

The Neurology of Mind

The Beginnings of Mind

Closer to the Making of Mind?

4 The Body in Mind 89

The Topic of the Mind

Body Mapping

From Body to Brain

Representing Quantities and Constructing Qualities

Primordial Feelings

Mapping Body States and Simulating Body States

The Source of an Idea

The Body-Minded Brain

5 Emotions and Feelings 108

Situating Emotion and Feeling

Defining Emotion and Feeling

Triggering and Executing Emotions

The Strange Case of William James

Feelings of Emotion

How Do We Feel an Emotion?

The Timing of Emotions and Feelings

The Varieties of Emotion

Up and Down the Emotional Range

An Aside on Admiration and Compassion

6 An Architecture for Memory 130

Somehow, Somewhere

The Nature of Memory Records

Dispositions Came First, Maps Followed

Memory at Work

A Brief Aside on Kinds of Memory

A Possible Solution to the Problem

More on Convergence-Divergence Zones

The Model at Work

The How and Where of Perception and Recall

PART III BEING CONSCIOUS

7 Consciousness Observed 157

Defining Consciousness

Breaking Consciousness Apart

Removing the Self and Keeping a Mind

Completing a Working Definition

Kinds of Consciousness

Human and Nonhuman Consciousness

What Consciousness is Not

The Freudian Unconscious

8 Building a Conscious Mind 180

A Working Hypothesis

Approaching the Conscious Brain

Previewing the Conscious Mind

The Ingredients of a Conscious Mind

The Protoself

Constructing the Core Self

The Core Self State

Touring the Brain as It Constructs a Conscious Mind

9 The Autobiographical Self 210

Memory Made Conscious

Constructing the Autobiographical Self

The Issue of Coordination

The Coordinators

A Possible Role for the Posteromedial Cortices

The PMCs at Work

Other Considerations on the Posteromedial Cortices

A Closing Note on the Pathologies of Consciousness

10 Putting It Together 241

By Way of Summary

The Neurology of Consciousness

The Anatomical Bottleneck Behind the Conscious Mind

From the Ensemble Work of Large Anatomical Divisions to the Work of Neurons

When We Feel Our Perceptions

Qualia I

Qualia II

Qualia and Self

Unfinished Business

PART IV LONG AFTER CONSCIOUSNESS

11 Living with Consciousness 267

Why Consciousness Prevailed

Self and the Issue of Control

An Aside on the Unconscious

A Note on the Genomic Unconscious

The Feeling of Conscious Will

Educating the Cognitive Unconscious

Brain and Justice

Nature and Culture

Self Comes to Mind

The Consequences of a Reflective Self

Appendix 299

Notes 319

Acknowledgments 343

Index 345