Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 014303622X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Since Descartes famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am," science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.
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Their condition is often missed or glossed over in discussions of anosognosia. For a rare exception see A. Marcel.10) No less dramatic than the oblivion that anosognosic patients have regarding their sick limbs is the lack of concern they show for their overall situation, the lack of emotion they exhibit, the lack of feeling they report when questioned about it. The news that there was a major stroke, that the risk of further trouble in brain or heart looms large, or the news that they are.
Treatment of any topic; and I will not justify every opinion I express. Remember, this is a conversation. Subsequent chapters return to our main story and will address biological regulation, its expression in emotion and feeling, and the mechanisms whereby emotion and feeling may be used in decision making. Before going any further, I must repeat something I said in the introduction. The text is an open-ended exploration rather than a catalogue of agreed-upon facts. I am considering hypotheses.
The bridge between rational and nonrational processes, between cortical and subcortical structures. EMOTIONS About a century ago, William James, whose insights on the human mind have been rivaled only by Shakespeare’s and Freud’s, produced a truly startling hypothesis on the nature of emotion and feeling. Consider his words: If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no.
Was to gain insights as I struggled to explain my idea of what body, brain, and mind are about. We agreed not to turn the conversation into a boring lecture, not to disagree violently, and not to try to cover too much. I would talk about established facts, about facts in doubt, and about hypotheses, even when I could come up with nothing but hunches to support them. I would talk about work in progress literally, about several research projects then under way, and about work that would start long.
And who examines them, one after the other, to make a choice. Here the samples would be so numerous that a whole lifetime would not suffice to examine them. This is not the actual state of things. The sterile combinations do not even present themselves to the mind of the inventor. Never in the field of his consciousness do combinations appear that are not really useful, except some that he rejects but which have to some extent the characteristics of useful combinations. All goes on as if the.