Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
Antonio R. Damasio
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: B00XTB4F58
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Spinoza examined the role emotion played in human survival and culture. Yet hundreds of years and many significant scientific advances later, the neurobiological roots of joy and sorrow remain a mystery. Today, we spend countless resources doctoring our feelings with alcohol, prescription drugs, health clubs, therapy, vacation retreats, and other sorts of consumption; still, the inner workings of our minds-what feelings are, how they work, and what they mean-are largely an unexplored frontier.
With scientific expertise and literary facility, bestselling author and world famous neuroscientist Antonio Damasio concludes his groundbreaking trilogy in Looking for Spinoza, exploring the cerebral processes that keep us alive and make life worth living.
The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
Computational Neuroscience: A First Course (Springer Series in Bio-/Neuroinformatics)
HarperCollins, 1999); Marc D. Hauser, Wild Minds (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). 17 Robert Hinde, "Relations between levels of complexity in the behavioral sciences," Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease 177 (1989): 655–67. 18 Cornelia Bargmann, "From the nose to the brain," Nature 384 (1996): 512–13. 19 For a modern discussion of possible interactions between the world of affect and that of evolution, see Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Emotions (cited.
1967). 3 Diogo Aurélio argues the point convincingly (Imaginaçâo e Voder, Lisbon: Colibri, 2000). See also Carl Gebhardt, "Rembrandt y Spinoza," Revista de Occidente. 4 Simon Schama, An Embarrassment of Riches (cited earlier). 5 Hana Debora was the second wife of Miguel de Espinoza and was half his age. She descended from an impressive line of physicians, philosophers, and theologians and was raised in the northern Portuguese city of Porto by her mother Maria Nunes. She came to Amsterdam to.
Comparable homeostatic regulation. These nerve cells are not impartial bystanders. They are not innocent conveyances or blank slates or mirrors waiting for something to reflect. Signaling and mapping neurons have a say on the matter signaled, and on the transient maps assembled from the signals. The neural patterns that the body-sensing neurons assume hail from all the body activities they are meant to portray. Body activities shape the pattern, give it a certain intensity and a temporal profile,.
The Inquisition was upon him and he became convinced that he and his family were in danger. He persuaded them to move to Holland. All three brothers, his mother, and his wife, their servants and their caged birds, the elaborate furniture, the delicate china, and the rich linen that filled their manorial Porto residence and the summer house boarded a boat on the Douro River under the cover of the night.6 And off they were, like so many before and after, bound up the Atlantic coast for a Dutch or.
Exhaustion left him no other choice. The punishment day was thoroughly publicized and eagerly anticipated, great theater and great circus rolled into one. The synagogue was packed with men, women, and children sitting and standing with hardly any space to move, all waiting for the unusual entertainment to begin. The air was thick with excited breath and the silence was broken only by the grating of shoes against the sand grains that covered the wooden floors. At the appropriate moment da Costa.