Sublime

Damasio

One of Damasio’s most curious discoveries is how the feelings of the body influence rational thought without our even being aware of the process.

The frontal cortices appear to be instrumental in assembling the vast mental panoramas that the process of consciousness literally illuminates and identifies as ours.

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has found that the absence of emotion—the actual clinical inability to experience emotion caused by lesions to an area of the brain called the VMPFC, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex—can cause people to go broke on a gambling task.

Damasio argues that the core of our self-awareness rests on the physical sensations that convey the inner states of the body:

Consciousness is a distinctive state of mind, but the words “consciousness” and “mind” are often used as if they were synonymous and corresponded to the same process

an error that has been repeatedly committed in the quest for consciousness has been to treat it as a “special” function, even a separate “substance,” a fragrance wafting over the mind process but unconnected to it or to its underpinnings.