The Strange Order of Things Quotes

“Anger is a good example of a negative emotion whose benefits have been diminishing in evolution.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems. That partnership is responsible for the emergence of conscious, feeling minds that are, in turn, responsible for what is most distinctive about humanity: cultures and civilizations. Feelings are at the center of the book, but they draw their powers from homeostasis.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“The sciences alone cannot illuminate the entirety of human experience without the light that comes from the arts and humanities.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“In the scenario I currently favor, life was regulated at first without feelings of any sort. There was no mind and no consciousness. There was a set of homeostatic mechanisms blindly making the choices that would turn out to be more conducive to survival. The arrival of nervous systems, capable of mapping and image making, opened the way for simple minds to enter the scene. During the Cambrian explosion, after numerous mutations, certain creatures with nervous systems would have generated not just images of the world around them but also an imagetic counterpart to the busy process of life regulation that was going on underneath. This would have been the ground for a corresponding mental state, the thematic content of which would have been valenced in tune with the condition of life, at that moment, in that body. The quality of the ongoing life state would have been felt.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“To say that simple life-forms without nervous systems have pain is unnecessary and probably not correct. They certainly have some of the elements required to construct feelings of pain, but it is reasonable to hypothesize that for pain itself to emerge, as a mental experience, the organism needed to have a mind and that for that to pass, the organism needed a nervous system capable of mapping structures and events. In other words, I suspect that life-forms without nervous systems or minds had and have elaborate emotive processes, defensive and adaptive action programs, but not feelings. Once nervous systems entered the scene, the path for feelings was open. That is why even humble nervous systems probably allow some measure of feeling.5 It is often asked, not unreasonably, why feelings should feel like anything at all, pleasant or unpleasant, tolerably quiet or like an uncontainable storm. The reason should now be clear: when the full constellation of physiological events that constitutes feelings began to appear in evolution and provided mental experiences, it made a difference. Feelings made lives better. They prolonged and saved lives. Feelings conformed to the goals of the homeostatic imperative and helped implement them by making them matter mentally to their owner as, for example, the phenomenon of conditioned place aversion appears to demonstrate.6 The presence of feelings is closely related to another development: consciousness and, more specifically, subjectivity.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“The aspect of mind that dominates our existence, or so it seems, concerns the world around us, actual or recalled from memory, with its objects and events, human and not, as represented by myriad images of every sensory stripe, often translated in verbal languages and structured in narratives. And yet, a remarkable yet, there is a parallel mental world that accompanies all those images, often so subtle that it does not demand any attention for itself but occasionally so significant that it alters the course of the dominant part of the mind, sometimes arrestingly so. That is the parallel world of affect, a world in which we find feelings traveling alongside the usually more salient images of our minds.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“stress, which impairs memory, reduces neurogenesis.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“As pinturas, e muito mais tarde, os textos serviram de marcos e de pausas para reflexão, alertas, divertimento e prazer. Ajudaram a clarificar o que deveriam ter sido confrontos confusos com a realidade. Ajudaram a deslindar e a organizar o conhecimento. Proporcionaram um caminho para a compreensão do que significam as coisas.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

“The sensing and responding level of perception precedes minds, historically speaking, and is also present in minded organisms now.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“But the extraordinary complexity of a living organism, the human variety being the best example, could only have come to be with the help of the supporting, coordinating, and controlling devices of the nervous system. All these systems are entirely part of the body that they serve. In and of themselves, they, too, are made up of living cells, like all the rest. Their cells also require regular nourishment to preserve their integrity, and they, too, are at risk of disease and death, just like any other cell in the body.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“a comprehensive view of homeostasis must include the application of the concept to systems in which conscious and deliberative minds, individually and in social groups, can both interfere with automatic regulatory mechanisms and create new forms of life regulation that have the very same goal of basic automated homeostasis, that is, achieving viable, upregulated life states that tend to produce flourishing. I see the effort of constructing human cultures as a manifestation of this variety of homeostasis.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“In a simple way, the region of unlikeness called life, at the level of humble cells—without and with a nucleus—or of large multicellular organisms such as we humans are, can be defined by these two traits: the ability to regulate its life by maintaining internal structures and operations for as long as possible, and the possibility of reproducing itself and taking a stab at perpetuity. It is as if, in an extraordinary way, each of us, each cell in us, and every other cell were part of one single, gigantic, supertentacular organism, the one and only organism that began 3.8 billion years ago and still keeps going.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“In the end, human creativity is rooted in life and in the breathtaking fact that life comes equipped with a precise mandate: resist and project itself into the future, no matter what. It may be helpful to consider these humble but powerful origins as we cope with the instabilities and uncertainties of the present.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“The humans who first devised the Golden Rule, that we should treat others the way we want others to treat us, formulated the precept with the help of what they felt when they were treated badly or when they saw others badly treated. Logic played a role as it worked on facts, to be sure, but some of the critical facts were feelings.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“Feelings work as motives to respond to a problem and as monitors of the success of the response or lack thereof.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“The simple idea, then, is that feelings of pain and feelings of pleasure, from degrees of well-being to malaise and sickness, would have been the catalysts for the processes of questioning, understanding, and problem solving that most profoundly distinguish human minds from the minds of other living species.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“Another reason why feelings would succeed where plain ideas fail has to do with the unique nature of feelings. Feelings are not an independent fabrication of the brain. They are the result of a cooperative partnership of body and brain, interacting by way of free-ranging chemical molecules and nerve pathways. This particular and overlooked arrangement guarantees that feelings disturb what might otherwise be an indifferent mental flow. The source of feeling is life on the wire, balancing its act between flourishing and death. As a result, feelings are mental stirrings, troubling or glorious, gentle or intense. They can stir us subtly, in an intellectualized sort of way, or intensely and noticeably, grabbing the owner’s attention firmly. Even at their most positive, they tend to disturb the peace and break the quiet.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“In their need to cope with the human heart in conflict, in their desire to reconcile the contradictions posed by suffering, fear, anger, and the pursuit of well-being, humans turned to wonder and awe and discovered music making, dancing, painting, and literature. They continued their efforts by creating the often beautiful and sometimes frayed epics that go by such names as religious belief, philosophical inquiry, and political governance. From cradle to grave, these were some of the ways in which the cultural mind addressed the human drama.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“The idea, in essence, is that cultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“I have no doubt that intellect, sociality, and language have played key roles in the process, and it goes without saying that the organisms capable of cultural invention, along with the specific faculties used in the invention, are present in humans by the grace of natural selection and genetic transmission. The idea is that something else was required to jump-start the saga of human cultures. That something else was a motive. I am referring specifically to feelings, from pain and suffering to well-being and pleasure.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“No hay ser, en el sentido propio del término, sin una experiencia mental espontánea de la vida, sin una sensación de existencia.”
― António R. Damásio, El extraño orden de las cosas: La vida, los sentimientos y la creación de las culturas

“La medicina no empezó como un deporte intelectual pensado para ejercitar nuestro ingenio ante un diagnóstico enigmático o un misterio fisiológico, sino que lo hizo como consecuencia de ciertos sentimientos específicos de los pacientes y de los sentimientos que estos despertaban en los primeros médicos;”
― António R. Damásio, El extraño orden de las cosas: La vida, los sentimientos y la creación de las culturas

“Creative intelligence was the means by which mental images and behaviors were intentionally combined to provide novel solutions for the problems that humans diagnosed and to construct new worlds for the opportunities humans envisioned.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“Now consider this. A small number of invertebrate species, a mere 2 percent of all species of insects, is capable of social behaviors that do rival in complexity many human social achievements. Ants, bees, wasps, and termites are the prominent examples.10 Their genetically set and inflexible routines enable the survival of the group. They divide labor intelligently within the group to deal with the problems of finding energy sources, transform them into products useful for their lives, and manage the flow of those products. They do so to the point of changing the number of workers assigned to specific jobs depending on the energy sources available. They act in a seemingly altruistic manner whenever sacrifice is needed. In their colonies, they build nests that constitute remarkable urban architectural projects and provide efficient shelter, traffic patterns, and even systems of ventilation and waste removal, not to mention a security guard for the queen. One almost expects them to have harnessed fire and invented the wheel. Their zeal and discipline put to shame, any day, the governments of our leading democracies. These creatures acquired their complex social behaviors from their biology, not from Montessori schools or Ivy League colleges. But in spite of having come by these astounding abilities as early as 100 million years ago, ants and bees, individually or as colonies, do not grieve for the loss of their mates when they disappear and do not ask themselves about their place in the universe. They do not inquire about their origin, let alone their destiny. Their seemingly responsible, socially successful behavior is not guided by a sense of responsibility, to themselves or to others, or by a corpus of philosophical reflections on the condition of being an insect. It is guided by the gravitational pull of their life regulation needs as it acts on their nervous systems and produces certain repertoires of behavior selected over numerous evolving generations, under the control of their fine-tuned genomes. Members of a colony do not think as much as they act, by which I mean that upon registering a particular need—theirs, or the group’s, or the queen’s—they do not ponder alternatives for how to fulfill such a need in any way comparable to ours. They simply fulfill it. Their repertoire of actions is limited, and in many instances it is confined to one option. The general schema of their elaborate sociality does resemble that of human cultures, but it is a fixed schema. E. O. Wilson”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“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.”
― Antonio Damasio, El extraño orden de las cosas

“e seres humanos que inventam flautas, escrevem poesia, acreditam eu Deus, conquistam o Planeta e o espaço em seu redor, combatem doenças para atenuar o sofrimento, mas também não hesitam em destruir outros seres humanos para seu ganho pessoal, inventam a internet, descobrem maneiras de a transformar num instrumento de progresso e de catástrofe e, ainda por cima, se interrogam sobre as bactérias, formigas, abelhas - e si próprios.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

“Let us then set aside the most salient images of the conscious mind, the ones that largely make up the contents of stories, and concentrate on the images that construct the critical enabler of consciousness: subjectivity.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“The purpose of this chapter is to make clear why subjectivity and integrated experience are essential enablers of the cultural mind. In the absence of subjectivity, nothing matters; in the absence of some degree of integrated experience, the reflection and discernment that are required for creativity are not possible.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“The peak-end effect described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky could contribute as well. We would be prone to creating strong memories for the more rewarding aspects of a past scene and obscure the rest. Memory is imperfect.”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind