Self Comes to Mind

✍ Scribed by Damasio, Antonio

• Book ID: 108501336
• Publisher: Cornerstone Digital
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 693 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1320106676

✦ Synopsis

Self Comes to Mind explores two questions that have haunted philosophers, neurologists, cognitive scientists and psychologists for centuries: how do brains construct minds, and how do minds become conscious? Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In this revelatory work, he debunks the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting astounding new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as “self”—is in fact a biological process created by the brain. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the personal, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces the evolutionary perspective, which entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told. * Beautifully told, through fascinating and moving human stories,Self Comes to Mind will ultimately reveal how our minds work—often without knowing or even controlling what we do—and allow us to glimpse the root of our fondest constructs: self, identity, personhood, and self-image.

From Publishers Weekly

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.) (c)
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Review

"'Awareness may be mostly mystery, but Damasio shapes its hints and glimmerings into an imaginative, informed narrative.'" Kirkus "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 "Damasio makes a grand transition from higher-brain views of emotions to deeply evolutionary, lower-brain contributions to emotional, sensory and homeostatic experiences. He affirms 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 "I was totally captivated by Self Comes to Mind.In this work Antonio Damasio presents his seminal discoveries in the field 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, musician "The epicenter of Self Comes to Mind concerns the neurological basis for cognition and the issue of the superposition of a "self' onto the construct which we address as reality. Damasio is both eloquent and scholarly. His command of the themes he approaches is impressive, as is the vigor with which he tackles such recondite issues as the elusive "self," inside the head. A wonderful read, and a recommended one!" Rodolfo R. Llinas, New York University