Self Comes to Mind Quotes

“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.”
― Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time.”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“We have our body in mind because it helps govern behavior in all manner of situations that could threaten the integrity of the organism and compromise life.”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“Once it becomes clear that feelings of emotion are primarily perceptions of our body state during a state of emotion, it is reasonable to say that all feelings of emotion contain a variation on the theme of primordial feelings, whatever the primordial feelings of the moment are, augmented by other aspects of body change that may or not be related to interoception.”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“away from accessible consciousness, and that is possibly where and when the self matures, thanks to the gradual sedimentation and reworking of one’s memory. As lived experiences are reconstructed and replayed, whether in conscious reflection or in nonconscious processing, their substance is reassessed and inevitably rearranged, modified minimally or very much in terms of their factual composition and emotional accompaniment. Entities and events acquire new emotional weights during this process. Some frames of the recollection are dropped on the mind’s cutting-room floor, others are restored and enhanced, and others still are so deftly combined either by our wants or by the vagaries of chance that they create new scenes that were never shot. That is how, as years pass, our own history is subtly rewritten. That is why facts can acquire a new significance and why the music of memory plays differently today than it did last year.”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting.”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“The range of phenomena denoted by the word empathy owes a lot to this arrangement.”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“But the brain’s representation of the body has another major implication: because we can depict our own body states, we can more easily simulate the equivalent body states of others.”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

“The good news, however, is that the self also has made reason and scientific observation possible, and reason and science, in turn, have been gradually correcting the misleading intuitions prompted by the unaided self. Overcoming”
― António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain