Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

by Antonio Damasio

Overview

A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious.
 
Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307474957
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/06/2012
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	521,883
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Antonio Damasio is University Professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Neurology, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Damasio’s other books include Descartes’ Error; The Feeling of What Happens; and Looking for Spinoza. He has received the Honda Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, and, shared with his wife Hanna, the Pessoa, Signoret, and Cozzarelli prizes. Damasio is a fellow of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

1
 Awakening
 
When I woke up, we were descending. I had been asleep long enough to miss the announcements about the landing and the weather. I had not been aware of myself or my surroundings. I had been unconscious.
 
Few things about our biology are as seemingly trivial as this com­modity known as consciousness, the phenomenal ability that consists of having a mind equipped with an owner, a protagonist for one’s exis­tence, a self inspecting the world inside and around, an agent seemingly ready for action.
 
Consciousness is not merely wakefulness. When I woke up, two brief paragraphs ago, I did not look around vacantly, taking in the sights and the sounds as if my awake mind belonged to no one. On the con­trary, I knew, almost instantly, with little hesitation if any, without effort, that this was me, sitting on an airplane, my flying identity com­ing home to Los Angeles with a long  to-do list before the day would be over, aware of an odd combination of travel fatigue and enthusiasm for what was ahead, curious about the runway we would be landing on, and attentive to the adjustments of engine power that were bringing us to earth. No doubt, being awake was indispensable to this state, but wake­fulness was hardly its main feature. What was that main feature? The fact that the myriad contents displayed in my mind, regardless of how vivid or well ordered, connected with me, the proprietor of my mind, through invisible strings that brought those contents together in the forward-moving feast we call self; and, no less important, the fact that the connection was felt. There was a feelingness to the experience of the connected me.
 
Awakening meant having my temporarily absent mind returned, but with me in it, both property (the mind) and proprietor (me) accounted for. Awakening allowed me to reemerge and survey my mental domains, the sky-wide projection of a magic movie, part documentary and part fiction, otherwise known as the conscious human mind.
 
We all have free access to consciousness, bubbling so easily and abun­dantly in our minds that without hesitation or apprehension we let it be turned off every night when we go to sleep and allow it to return every morning when the alarm clock rings, at least 365 times a year, not counting naps. And yet few things about our beings are as remarkable, foundational, and seemingly mysterious as consciousness. Without consciousness—that is, a mind endowed with subjectivity—you would have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone know who you are and what you think. Had subjectivity not begun, even if very modestly at first, in living creatures far simpler than we are, memory and reasoning are not likely to have expanded in the prodigious way they did, and the evolutionary road for language and the elaborate human version of con­sciousness we now possess would not have been paved. Creativity would not have flourished. There would have been no song, no paint­ing, and no literature. Love would never have been love, just sex. Friendship would have been mere cooperative convenience. Pain would never have become suffering—not a bad thing, come to think of it— but an equivocal advantage given that pleasure would not have become bliss either. Had subjectivity not made its radical appearance, there would have been no knowing and no one to take notice, and conse­quently there would have been no history of what creatures did through the ages, no culture at all.
 
Although I have not yet provided a working definition of conscious­ness, I hope I am leaving no doubt as to what it means not to have con­sciousness: in the absence of consciousness, the personal view is sus­pended; we do not know of our existence; and we do not know that anything else exists. If consciousness had not developed in the course of evolution and expanded to its human version, the humanity we are now familiar with, in all its frailty and strength, would never have developed either. One shudders to think that a simple turn not taken might have meant the loss of the biological alternatives that make us truly human. But then, how would we ever have found out that something was missing?
 
We take consciousness for granted because it is so available, so easy to use, so elegant in its daily disappearing and reappearing acts, and yet, when we think of it, scientists and nonscientists alike, we do puzzle. What is consciousness made of? Mind with a twist, it seems to me, since we cannot be conscious without having a mind to be conscious of. But what is mind made of? Does mind come from the air or from the body? Smart people say it comes from the brain, that it is in the brain, but that is not a satisfactory reply. How does the brain do mind?
 
The fact that no one sees the minds of others, conscious or not, is especially mysterious. We can observe their bodies and their actions, what they do or say or write, and we can make informed guesses about what they think. But we cannot observe their minds, and only we our­selves can observe ours, from the inside, and through a rather narrow window. The properties of minds, let alone conscious minds, appear to be so radically different from those of visible living matter that thoughtful folk wonder how one process (conscious minds working) meshes with the other process (physical cells living together in aggre­gates called tissues).
 
But to say that conscious minds are mysterious—and on the face of it they are—is different from saying that the mystery is insoluble. It is dif­ferent from saying that we shall never be able to understand how a liv­ing organism endowed with a brain develops a conscious mind.

Table of Contents

PART I STARTING OVER

1 Awakening 3

Goals and Reasons

Approaching the Problem

The Self as Witness

Overcoming a Misleading Intuition

An Integrated Perspective

The Framework

A Preview of Main Ideas

Life and the Conscious Mind

2 From Life Regulation to Biological Value 31

The Implausibility of Reality

Natural Will

Staying Alive

The Origins of Homeostasis

Cells, Multicellular Organisms, and Engineered Machines

Biological Value

Biological Value in Whole Organisms

The Success of Our Early Forerunners

Developing Incentives

Connecting Homeostasis, Value, and Consciousness

PART II WHAT'S IN A BRAIN THAT A MIND CAN BE?

3 Making Maps and Making Images 63

Maps and Images

Cutting Below the Surface

Maps and Minds

The Neurology of Mind

The Beginnings of Mind

Closer to the Making of Mind?

4 The Body in Mind 89

The Topic of the Mind

Body Mapping

From Body to Brain

Representing Quantities and Constructing Qualities

Primordial Feelings

Mapping Body States and Simulating Body States

The Source of an Idea

The Body-Minded Brain

5 Emotions and Feelings 108

Situating Emotion and Feeling

Defining Emotion and Feeling

Triggering and Executing Emotions

The Strange Case of William James

Feelings of Emotion

How Do We Feel an Emotion?

The Timing of Emotions and Feelings

The Varieties of Emotion

Up and Down the Emotional Range

An Aside on Admiration and Compassion

6 An Architecture for Memory 130

Somehow, Somewhere

The Nature of Memory Records

Dispositions Came First, Maps Followed

Memory at Work

A Brief Aside on Kinds of Memory

A Possible Solution to the Problem

More on Convergence-Divergence Zones

The Model at Work

The How and Where of Perception and Recall

PART III BEING CONSCIOUS

7 Consciousness Observed 157

Defining Consciousness

Breaking Consciousness Apart

Removing the Self and Keeping a Mind

Completing a Working Definition

Kinds of Consciousness

Human and Nonhuman Consciousness

What Consciousness is Not

The Freudian Unconscious

8 Building a Conscious Mind 180

A Working Hypothesis

Approaching the Conscious Brain

Previewing the Conscious Mind

The Ingredients of a Conscious Mind

The Protoself

Constructing the Core Self

The Core Self State

Touring the Brain as It Constructs a Conscious Mind

9 The Autobiographical Self 210

Memory Made Conscious

Constructing the Autobiographical Self

The Issue of Coordination

The Coordinators

A Possible Role for the Posteromedial Cortices

The PMCs at Work

Other Considerations on the Posteromedial Cortices

A Closing Note on the Pathologies of Consciousness

10 Putting It Together 241

By Way of Summary

The Neurology of Consciousness

The Anatomical Bottleneck Behind the Conscious Mind

From the Ensemble Work of Large Anatomical Divisions to the Work of Neurons

When We Feel Our Perceptions

Qualia I

Qualia II

Qualia and Self

Unfinished Business

PART IV LONG AFTER CONSCIOUSNESS

11 Living with Consciousness 267

Why Consciousness Prevailed

Self and the Issue of Control

An Aside on the Unconscious

A Note on the Genomic Unconscious

The Feeling of Conscious Will

Educating the Cognitive Unconscious

Brain and Justice

Nature and Culture

Self Comes to Mind

The Consequences of a Reflective Self

Appendix 299

Notes 319

Acknowledgments 343

Index 345

Editorial Reviews

Self Comes to Mind is a Big Idea book penned by a luminous thinker. . . . [A] beautifully sprawling and marvelous work.” —The Dallas Morning News

“Will give pleasure to anyone interested in original thinking about the brain. . . . Breathtakingly original.” —Financial Times 
 
“Damasio introduces some novel ideas. . . . Intriguing.” —New Scientist

“Adventurous, courageous, and intelligent. Antonio Damasio is one of the leading workers in the field of consciousness research. . . . I have great admiration for this book and its author.” —John Searle, The New York Review of Books

“Damasio’s most  ambitious work yet. . . . A lucid and important work.” —Wired.com

“A very interesting book . . . cogent, painstaking, imaginative, knowledgeable, honest, and persuasive . . . Damasio’s quest is both thorough and comprehensive.” —New York Journal of Books

“Damasio’s continental European training sensitizes him to the reductionist traps that ensnare so many of his colleagues. His is the only one of the many consciousness books weighing down my shelves that feels it necessary to mention Freud’s . . . use of the term unconscious.” —The Guardian (Book of the Week)

“A delight. You will embark on an intellectual journey well worth the effort.” —The Wilson Quarterly
 
“Readers of [Damasio’s] earlier books will encounter again the clar­ity and the richness of a scientific theory nourished by the practice of the neurologist.” —L’Humanité (France)

“Some scientific heavyweights have dared approach consciousness. Among them, Antonio Damasio has the immense advantage of a dual knowledge of the human brain, as scientist and clinician. In Self Comes to Mind he gives us a fascinating window of this inter­face between the brain and the world, which is grounded in our own body.” —Le Figaro (France)

“The marvel of reading Damasio’s book is to be convinced one can follow the brain at work as it makes the private reality that is the deepest self.” —V. S. Naipaul, Nobel laureate and author of A Bend in the River

“Damasio makes a grand transition from higher- brain views of emotions to deeply evolutionary, lower- brain contributions to emotional, sensory, and homeostatic experiences. He affi rms that the roots of consciousness are affective and shared by our fellow animals. Damasio’s creative vision leads relentlessly toward a nat­ural understanding of the very font of being.” —Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience and Baily Endowed Chair for Animal Well- Being Science, Washington State University

“I was totally captivated by Self Comes to Mind. Damasio presents his seminal discoveries in the fi eld of neuroscience in the broader contexts of evolutionary biology and cultural development. This trailblazing book gives us a new way of thinking about ourselves, our history, and the importance of culture in shaping our common future.” —Yo-Yo Ma

From the Publisher

As he has done previously, USC neuroscientist Damasio (Descartes' Error) explores the process that leads to consciousness. And as he has also done previously, he alternates between some exquisite passages that represent the best popular science has to offer and some technical verbiage that few will be able to follow. He draws meaningful distinctions among points on the continuum from brain to mind, consciousness to self, constantly attempting to understand the evolutionary reasons why each arose and attempting to tie each to an underlying physical reality. Damasio goes to great lengths to explain that many species, such as social insects, have minds, but humans are distinguished by the "autobiographical self," which adds flexibility and creativity, and has led to the development of culture, a "radical novelty" in natural history. Damasio ends with a speculative chapter on the evolutionary process by which mind developed and then gave rise to self. In the Pleistocene, he suggests, humans developed emotive responses to shapes and sounds that helped lead to the development of the arts. Readers fascinated from both a philosophical and scientific perspective with the question of the relationships among brain, mind, and self will be rewarded for making the effort to follow Damasio's arguments. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Damasio (Director/Univ. of Southern California Brain and Creativity Inst.; Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003, etc.) seeks to understand "the mystery of consciousness."

"Consciousness is a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one's own existence and of the existence of surroundings"—i.e., where the self introduces the property of subjectivity to the mix. The mind emerges as it composes patterns, "mapping" the world as it interacts with it, just as it maps its own processes. It will appropriate the sensory experiences and make them its own. "Ultimately consciousness allows us to perceive maps as images," writes Damasio, "to manipulate those images, and to apply reasoning to them." The author entertains the unconventional idea that mind processing begins at the brain-stem level, not in the cerebral cortex alone, and charts the interaction of the brain stem, the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, taking elementary mind processes through to imagination, reasoning and eventually language. He provides a well-rendered explanation for the role of consciousness in the natural selection of evolution by meeting an organism's needs through orientation and organization. Along the way, Damasio confronts such slippery characters as feelings, emotions, the will to prevail, biological value and homeostasis, and he also looks carefully at neuroanatomical reference. Consciousness, in the author's well-tempered and rangy explication, "resembles the execution of a symphony of Mahlerian proportions. But the marvel...is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds." And its many players are responsible for everything from internal housekeeping to "placing the self in an evanescent here and now, between a thoroughly lived past and an anticipated future, perpetually buffeted between the spent yesterdays and the tomorrows that are nothing but possibilities."

Awareness may be mostly mystery, but Damasio shapes its hints and glimmerings into an imaginative, informed narrative.

Kirkus Reviews