António Damásio quotes

António Damásio is a Portuguese neuroscientist and professor, renowned for his groundbreaking research on the relationship between emotions and decision-making in the brain. His work has had a profound influence on neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. He has authored several influential books and continues to shape our understanding of the human mind. Here are 42 of his quotes:

When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.

António Damásio

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.

António Damásio

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

António Damásio

Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.

António Damásio

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

António Damásio

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.

António Damásio

The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

António Damásio

Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they have hunger or thirst, they can satisfy that. It's this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you.

António Damásio

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

António Damásio

Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.

António Damásio

Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.

António Damásio

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.

António Damásio

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

António Damásio

Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.

António Damásio

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

António Damásio

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

António Damásio

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

António Damásio

The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.

António Damásio

I got interested in the emotions after studying patients who had lost the ability to emote and feel under certain circumstances. Many of those patients also had major impairments in their ability to make decisions.

António Damásio

...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.

António Damásio

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

António Damásio

In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one's own organism and the world around that organism. That is really the heart of consciousness.

António Damásio