Antonio Damasio
Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.Collection: Brain
More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.Collection: Psychology
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Perception
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.Collection: Incredibles
There's that effect that is very physical, very down there at the synaptic level, which really means microscopic cellular level, but also molecular level, because all of those structures are operating on an electrochemical basis and so the changes there are very important.Collection: Mean
We remove ourselves from the experience itself to a surrogate of the experience, which is whatever measure you take from the brain, be it the electroencephalogram or magnet encephalography or say functional magnetic resonance. So it's pretty tough to make those comparisons.Collection: Brain
We can be more or less conscious when you create grades of focus on a subject that is flowing in our stream of consciousness.Collection: Focus
Although when you look at people that say, from the same culture, roughly the same age, and not very difference intelligence, and you make a lot of detailed questions about the experiences of say colors, situations, and so on, you'll get very similar answers.Collection: Differences
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.Collection: Powerful
I think it's possible to a certain extent to make those comparisons. The problem is the detail with which the comparison can be made. Of course, the first place to make such a comparison would be to ask for a testimony from different people and have people report on what they experience.Collection: Thinking
Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that happened before and when you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it's going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you.Collection: Important
What happens [in a coma] is that you lose the grounding of the self, you no longer have access to any feeling of your own existence.Collection: Self
We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.Collection: Dog
If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you're having the emotion.Collection: Brain
We may express them [emotions] physically slightly differently, and it's of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the process is going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it's going to be the same.Collection: Essence
There are ways in which you can make that distinction objective to a certain degree. For example, by looking at responses that could be generated in the brain to exactly the same stimulus and there could be differences there.Collection: Differences
I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Reality
It's very interesting to think about the distinction with mind, which I just made in very general terms, but it can be made more profound when we think that there are many species, many creatures on earth that are very likely to have a mind, but are very unlikely to have a consciousness in the sense that you and I have.Collection: Thinking
How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?Collection: Self