The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

Pt. IIntroduction1Ch. 1Stepping into the Light3Pt. IIFeeling and Knowing33Ch. 2Emotion and Feeling35Ch. 3Core Consciousness82Ch. 4The Hint Half Hinted107Pt. IIIA Biology for Knowing131Ch. 5The Organism and the Object133Ch. 6The Making of Core Consciousness168Ch. 7Extended Consciousness195Ch. 8The Neurology of Consciousness234Pt. IVBound to Know277Ch. 9Feeling Feelings279Ch. 10Using Consciousness296Ch. 11Under the Light312AppendixNotes on Mind and Brain317Endnotes336Acknowledgments366Index369About the Author386

\ From Barnes & NobleIn The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio R. Damasio, a world-renowned neurologist and the author of the bestselling Descartes' Error, provides readers with more striking illuminations regarding how the "three pounds of flesh" we all carry inside our skulls functions. In Descartes' Error, Damasio made a compelling argument for the inclusion of emotion, along with cognition, as a significant component of the reasoning process. In The Feeling of What Happens, he examines the mystery of consciousness. \ Damasio, the Van Allen Professor and head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center, breaks what he terms "the problem of consciousness" into two parts. The first is the question of how each of us forms a continuous "movie in the brain." The second is the question of how the brain becomes cognizant of the formation of this "movie in the brain," and in the process, gives rise to a "sense of self in the act of knowing."\ The Feeling of What Happens is a fascinating and haunting quest to solve these riddles. One of the keys to unraveling these mysteries of consciousness, Damasio posits, lies in perspective. Damasio shows convincingly that the brain and the rest of the body, as they interface with the material world, give rise to the individual's sense of self, as well as to emotions and cognition. In doing so, he explodes what he terms the "homunculus" model of consciousness.\ The homunculus model, toward which Damasio evinces a pronounced disdain, purports that somewhere in the brain exists an entity -- envisioned as a sort of mini-person -- in charge of knowing and using knowledge to interpret data in the form of images. According to the model of consciousness set forth by Damasio in The Feeling of What Happens, consciousness is felt, continuously and spontaneously, rather than relayed by some shrunken third party -- which would, after all, have to have a consciousness itself. And what would that consciousness consist of...yet a smaller homunculus?\ Damasio shows that consciousness has played a role in our evolutionary development and is seated deeply at specific, elaborately interconnected sites in the base of the brain. This essential sense of self is not a simple thing. It is rather a richly layered and nuanced interplay of mental patterns. It is informed (and to a certain extent defined) by stimuli in the material world and in the body and by feelings, which effect changes in its constitution that we ultimately come to "know," and finally come to know that we know.\ Clinical writing for a wide audience is an art, and Damasio, who is a groundbreaking researcher as well as a bestselling author, is a master of this form. His writing combines an intimate and expansive grasp of his subject matter, an effusive and contagious enthusiasm, and a knack for explaining sophisticated concepts clearly. Readers familiar with works by such authors as Lewis Thomas and especially the masterful Oliver Sacks will find Damasio on equal footing with these writers in his ability to convey sophisticated science without oversimplification or -- worse -- dense tedium.\ Oliver Sacks comes to mind because he, like Damasio, writes about patients with lesions in their brains that deactivate some function the rest of us take for granted, such as the ability to access long-term memory or to recognize faces. Damasio and Sacks approach this subject from very different angles, however. In such works as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks's tactic is to start with a particular individual with a compelling neurological syndrome and to draw wide-reaching implications regarding how the rest of us function. One of the reasons Sacks does this is because until very recently, observing how the brain works (or how a part of it fails to work in the normal way) could be accomplished only by observing the behavior of individuals or by conversing with them. Actually getting inside the skull and examining the living brain was impossible then.\ While case studies of patients with brain lesions are important components of Damasio's arguments, his pioneering research entails an entirely new way of investigating the conundrums that these patients (and "normal" subjects) present. Current medical imaging technologies have allowed Damasio and his collaborators (including his wife, Hanna, who is also a world-renowned neurologist) to directly observe the mechanisms of consciousness itself -- the inner lives of others.\ While one can't really know any consciousness but his or her own, magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography scanning, and other techniques provide snapshots of the brain's inner workings. The result is that where Oliver Sacks would start with observations of quixotic behavior and build up to more general questions about the inner workings of the brain, Damasio provides a detailed description of the mechanical mind and uses clinical studies of individuals to make discrete points and illustrate his arguments.\ But although he can, in a certain sense, probe inside their skulls, Damasio shows a profound and catching affection for the human clinical subjects of his and others' research. This is particularly evident in his descriptions of patients with various degrees of amnesia, and of David, a 46-year-old man who, because of the ravages of encephalitis, is incapable of learning any new facts.\ Damasio, in posing the question of whether or not David is conscious, (the answer is a resounding affirmative), helps illustrate that long-term memory is not a prerequisite to consciousness. In further investigations, Damasio argues that consciousness, on the other hand, is a prerequisite not only to long-term memory, but to cognition as well. Intriguingly, Damasio asserts that emotions are a more fundamental level-of-life regulation than even consciousness.\ Damasio's explorations of the levels of being that form the self will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in the workings of the mind or philosophy. In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio attacks the question of who we are with a passion and vigor that make his quest as engrossing to the reader as it is to the author.\ —--David S. Rossmann\ \ \ \ \ \ Bruce G. CharltonIf I were able to nominate one individual for the Noble prize it would be Damasio...both Descartes' Error and The Feeling of What Happens are essential reading. Although they masquerade as 'popular science' they are ground-breaking classics of psychology and neuroscience. These are books to buy, keep and ponder upon. Do so, and you will be ahead of the ruck by at least a decade\ — Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine\ \ \ Anthony Clare..a monumental book rich in a profusion of testable hypotheses, invigorating findings and clinical narratives, written in a language that manages simultaneously to be sturdily hard-headed and gloriously poetic; a gem of a work indeed.\ — Sunday Times (London)\ \ \ \ \ William H. CalvinThis is a must-read book for anyone wanting a neurologist's perspective on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries, human consciousness and how it exceeds that of the other apes. \ — NY Times Book Review\ \ \ \ \ J. Madeleine NashIn a new book titled The Feeling of What Happens, the noted neuroscientist not only argues that human consciousness is comprehensible but offers an arrestingly original explanation of its workings. What makes his views so noteworthy is that they're grounded not in theoretical musings but in years of clinical research on patients who are epileptic or have suffered brain damage through strokes, disease or traumatic injuries.\ — Time Magazine\ \ \ \ \ Thomas Metzinger...I believe that the book's clear, beautiful language, its fascinating case studies and the way in which it brings difficult scientific issues to life for readers with many different interests may actually make it a landmark in the interdisciplinary project of consciousness research. \ — Scientific American\ \ \ \ \ Dan SternI remember wondering as I took my Intro to Bio midterm why I couldn't answer certain questions about the brain. The very machinery that had told me to put one foot in front of the other in order to get me to that classroom was now holding out on me about its own nature. "What are the components of neurons?" Not a clue. What was relaying this question through my mind? Neurons. It doesn't get much more paradoxical than that.\ Consciousness -- our sense of self-identity or self-awareness -- eludes us in the same bizarre manner. We experience it as the voice inside our head that contemplates our own existence and makes us who we are; but what, exactly, consciousness is remains a mystery. Talk about not knowing yourself. The fashionable new field of consciousness studies -- which at this point is as primitive as physics was prior to Newton -- has given rise to practically as many theories of the mind as there are cells in the brain.\ Some say there is no mystery at all -- that consciousness studies is simply what students from the psychedelic '60s entertain themselves with now that they are the professors and researchers of the neural '90s. Skeptics say that science isn't even capable of dissecting this subjective phenomenon. And others proceed cautiously, equipped with the latest neuroimaging techniques and insight gleaned from case studies of neurological impairment (Alzheimer's, epilepsy, amnesia), in the process gradually learning the neurobiology behind the conscious self. Antonio Damasio, a renowned neuroscientist, belongs to this latter camp.\ In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio illustrated the significance of emotion in reasoning, doing away with the Cartesian dualism of rationalist philosophy, which separated the body from the mind. In his new book, The Feeling of What Happens, he fleshes out this premise and attempts to merge body and mind in a unified theory of consciousness. His central claim here: Consciousness is the feeling of what happens -- the mind noticing the body's reaction to stimuli.\ There is a difference, he states, between a "feeling" and "knowing that we have a feeling"; we can have feelings without an awareness of them. His neurobiological breakdown of the way we achieve this feeling of a feeling, which he defends like a long, technical proof, forms the bulk of the book. The prose this time is less appropriate for a lay audience than for an academic one -- certainly you need a basic knowledge of the brain and an intense passion for the subject matter. It's not beach reading.\ Consciousness is not a monolith. Damasio separates it into simple and complex kinds -- namely core consciousness (the fundamental feeling of knowing) and extended consciousness (what most theorists have in mind when addressing the higher-order glory of self-awareness). His breakthrough moment came when he saw consciousness in terms of two players, the organism and the object (e.g., an emotion), and of the relationship between those players.\ One of the greatest challenges in consciousness studies is its inherent semantic confusion -- there isn't a shared lexicon to utilize. And though Damasio notes this problem, he adds to the turmoil by introducing several new terms (e.g., "proto-self") and using old ones like "emotion" and "feeling" in admittedly unconventional ways. Emotions, feelings of emotions, awareness of a feeling of an emotion -- this is obscure material, and his argument can be hard to follow.\ Damasio seems to have taken a few intriguing case studies and unusual experiments and extrapolated a theory of consciousness from the scant though sometimes compelling evidence they offer. His metaphorical speculations are a necessary step toward decoding consciousness and providing a basis for future research. But have paradigms shifted as a result of this step? As Damasio himself would concede: no. It's far too early to tell whether his theory will hold up or perish like a fleeting image in the brain.\ — Salon\ \ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyTackling a great complex of questions that poets, artists and philosophers have contemplated for generations, Damasio (Descartes' Error) examines current neurological knowledge of human consciousness. Significantly, in key passages he evokes T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and William James. In Eliot's words, consciousness is "music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all." It, like Hamlet, begins with the question "Who's there?" And Damasio holds that there is, as James thought, a "stream of" consciousness that utilizes every part of the brain. Consciousness, argues Damasio, is linked to emotion, to our feelings for the images we perceive. There are in fact several kinds of consciousness, he says: the proto-self, which exists in the mind's constant monitoring of the body's state, of which we are unaware; a core consciousness that perceives the world 500 milliseconds after the fact; and the extended consciousness of memory, reason and language. Different from wakefulness and attention, consciousness can exist without language, reason or memory: for example, an amnesiac has consciousness. But when core consciousness fails, all else fails with it. More important for Damasio's argument, emotion and consciousness tend to be present or absent together. At the height of consciousness, above reason and creativity, Damasio places conscience, a word that preceded conciousness by many centuries. The author's plain language and careful redefinition of key points make this difficult subject accessible for the general reader. In a book that cuts through the old nature vs. nurture argument as well as conventional ideas of identity and possibly even of soul, it's clear, though he may not say so, that Damasio is still on the side of the angels. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalIn his breathtaking Descartes's Error, Damasio linked emotion and feeling to reason. Now he links them to consciousness itself, showing that "consciousness begins as the feeling of what happens" when we see a dazzling shaft of sunlight or feel its heat on our skin. Damasio dazzles us, too, writing with an authority backed by years of research yet so lucidly that we feel it is child's play. (LJ 9/1/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Zachary F. MainenThe Feeling of What Happens clarifies the concept of consciousness and brings it home to biology, laying a vital foundation for future scientific exploration of the subject nature of experience. Damasio's book ought to provide inspiration not only to cognitive neuroscience, but to any discipline concerned with the nature of mind. \ —Nature Magazine\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThe most intriguing unsolved problem in psychology may be the origin of consciousness; here, a noted neurologist proposes that the root of the answer lies in emotion. In Descartes' Error (1994), Damasio argued that the attempt to treat reason and emotion as separate entities was a profound mistake. Now he argues that the body's ability to sense and react to its own processes and its environment holds the key to consciousness. The problem of consciousness can be broken down into two related problems: how the brain engenders images of the outside world and how it engenders a sense of self. In other words, we need to know not only how the brain creates a "movie" from its sensory data, but also how it generates the "audience" that watches the movie. Damasio distinguishes between core consciousness, the nonverbal awareness of one's state of being, and extended consciousness, which entails a sense of other times and places, and which evolves over the lifetime of the creature possessing it. Damasio argues that most higher organisms possess core consciousness and many possess some form of extended consciousness; but in its highest manifestations, such as art and science, extended consciousness is characteristic of humanity. The author fleshes out his arguments with case histories and our current knowledge of the physiology of the brain. Damasio is particularly concerned to distinguish his views from the classical model of consciousness as a sort of miniature person inside the brain. He insists on the role of emotion—the responses of core consciousness to its experiences—in creating extended consciousness, which in one sense is core consciousness augmented by memory. While hisargument demands close attention, it's well worth the effort to follow him. It's clear that he has his finger on many of the key issues of the origins and meaning of consciousness in this fascinating study. (Author tour)\ \