The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

As you read this, at some level you're aware that you're reading, thanks to a standard human feature commonly referred to as consciousness. What is it--a spiritual phenomenon, an evolutionary tool, a neurological side effect? The best scientists love to tackle big, meaningful questions like this, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio jumps right in with The Feeling of What Happens, a poetic examination of interior life through lenses of research, medical cases, philosophical analysis, and unashamed introspection. Damasio's perspective is, fortunately, becoming increasingly common in the scientific community; despite all the protestations of old-guard behaviorists, subjective consciousness is a plain fact to most of us and the demand for new methods of inquiry is finally being met.

These new methods are not without rigor, though. Damasio and his colleagues examine patients with disruptions and interruptions in consciousness and take deep insights from these tragic lives while offering greater comfort and meaning to the sufferers. His thesis, that our sense of self arises from our need to map relations between self and others, is firmly rooted in medical and evolutionary research but stands up well to self-examination. His examples from the weird world of neurology are unsettling yet deeply humanizing--real people with serious problems spring to life in the pages, but they are never reduced to their deficits. The Feeling of What Happens captures the spirit of discovery as it plunges deeper than ever into the darkest waters yet. --Rob Lightner -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Neurologist Damasio explained why emotions are essential to our survival in Descartes's Error (1994). Now, in another paradigm-shifting performance, he seeks to delineate the nature of consciousness and the biological source of our sense of self. Damasio approaches these elusive and tantalizing subjects with assurance and palpable excitement, aligning theory with life, as Oliver Saks does, by chronicling the poignant yet instructive experiences of people suffering neurological disorders. His goal is to understand how we cross the "threshold that separates being from knowing"; that is, how we not only know things about the world, via our senses, but how we are aware simultaneously of a self that is experiencing this "feeling of what happens." Drawing on his fluent understanding of the workings of the brain and of evolution, Damasio conjectures the existence of two levels of consciousness: a core consciousness and self, and an extended consciousness and an autobiographical self. He then postulates the crucial roles emotion, memory, and "wordless storytelling" play in our existence. At its base, Damasio concludes, consciousness means that we feel both pain and pleasure; in its higher manifestations, it enables us to transcend and articulate these feelings through language, creativity, and conscience. Donna Seaman -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

The 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 emotionthe responses of core consciousness to its experiencesin creating extended consciousness, which in one sense is core consciousness augmented by memory. While his argument demands close attention, its well worth the effort to follow him. Its 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) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

In 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)
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