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

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

Product Description
Widely praised for his innovative scientific thinking and elegant writing, Antonio Damasio achieves a new understanding of consciousness by asking-and answering-profound questions: How is it that we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? A gifted medical clinician with decades of caring for patients with brain damage, a great scientific thinker, and an extraordinary writer, Damasio offers a new understanding of the biological roots of consciousness and its role in survival. Damasio's work on feeling and emotion forever joins our minds and bodies, offering an arrestingly original way of understanding what it is to be human. After reading Damasio's landmark, Descartes' Error, Jonas Salk wrote, "You will never again look at yourself or another without wondering what goes on behind the eyes that so meet." As to The Feeling of What Happens, the New York Times wrote, "Unlike any other book here, it will change your experience of yourself."

The book will challenge and delight the most sophisticated readers, while rarely leaving the less sophisticated lost or overwhelmed. Damasio makes great use of the rich empirical database provided by the neurology of diseases of consciousness that some theorists of consciousness seem to know almost nothing about, and pay little attention to. The book also addresses in a most thoughtful and sophisticated fashion the problem(s) of self, and carefully unbundles the mostly conflated hierarchical nature of self and consciousness into separate but intimately related systems. It is tightly and carefully reasoned and empirically grounded. It integrates emotion and the body in the story of consciousness. Damasio deals skillfully with conceptual pitfalls in our commonplace terminology of "maps," "neural (neurodynamic) patterns," and "representations" (don't miss it stashed in the appendix!!) The book integrates classical RAS theory and neo-classical ERTAS (extended reticular thalamic activating system) theory into a broader theory about the ventral brain, that of "proto-self mappings and structures." Damasio admits readily this formulation is without the differential functional specificity for the proto-self structures (as perhaps the earliest functionally concerted, distributed system?) that he deeply hopes to see further developed. Further understanding of the functionally concerted and re-entrant operations of the various proto-self structures may be a great frontier in the neurology of consciousness. The core chapter of the book - The Neurology of Consciousness - in which he bridges concepts of proto-self, homeostatic and visceral regulation with traditional RAS and later ERTAS notions into a comprehensive theory of brainstem functions is brilliantly integrative and original, among the two or three finest pieces of neurological writing I have ever read. Added to this impressive menu are the delights of a literary, even at times poetic and moving, writing style.

For an in depth treatment of this book, see my review article coming out in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, or email me for reprints.


Excellent Attempt by Damasio to Explain Us to Ourselves   January 18, 2004
Earl Dennis (San Francisco, California United States)
31 out of 32 found this review helpful

Damasio breaks down into minute, qualitative descriptive detail how the boby/brain functions in humans, and ergo, de facto, many mammals. This book's strength is that Damasio backs up his claims regarding neural anatomy, physiology, and function with specific examples from comparative neuropathology. The book's weakness is that he goes on at length with qualitative descriptions for non-intuitive notions like how the body and brain function as a singular unit, and how emotions and feelings are integral along with body/brain physiology. I say this is the book's weakness because Damasio often bogs down and even tries to describe phenomena that are possibly ineffable, but these attempts at qualitative description are also one of the strengths of this book. This may seem contradictory, but possibly the book would have read differently if the author had stuck to purely quantitative case studies. However he did not, so we get through Damasio's several qualitative, alternate descriptions of singular phenomena an attempt to flesh out and make organic the dry clinical data. On the one hand the book could have been more concise without the extended descriptive sections, on the other hand the book possibly becomes richer and more meaningful because of them; this is up to the reader to decide.

Having said this, the book itself endeavors to demonstrate how consciousness emerges from gross neuroanatomy and physiology. In this Damasio is successful in using neuropathology to define terms such as: homeostasis, consciousness, language, mental images, neuronal maps, cathexis, and hedonic tone (although he does not use these two latter terms explicitly). In all honesty Damasio is very strict about defining his terms. Even though the author writes to a popular audience some knowledge of neuroanatomy and physiology is helpful in reading this book for maximum effect; although this book would be a good beginning for those interested in neurology. In General, the appendix, `Notes on Mind and Brain,' should probably be read prior to reading the main body of text, especially if the reader is weak in basic neurology. In any event, Damasio is big on forming neologisms although he spends adequate time defining and explaining them. As a neurologist, he always couches his arguments in materialist, Darwinistic terms.

A good way to describe the structure of this often rambling, inchoate book, is to briefly compare it to Dr. Paul McLean's triune brain model. The triune brain posits the reptilian brain (brain stem) as primary, the mammal brain (thalamus, limbic, etc.) as secondary, and the primate brain (cortex) emerging evolutionarily later as tertiary. Damasio uses a similar foundation in positing the proto-self, the core self, and the autobiographical self (I told you there were a lot of neologisms), but he does so in a way that has them all hang together as a synchronous, functioning unit. The proto-self is rather the sense of homeostatic organism state, where the core self is the `transcient but conscious reference to the individual organism in which events are happening' (to get a taste of Damasio's descriptive effluence), and the autobiographical self is the more cortical, temporal sense of self derived from transcendental yet highly efficacious ideas about past and future. It can all get pretty incoherent, but a complete reading of the book supplies numerous neural correlates which shore up the author's assertions.

In the end it is hard not to recommend this book because, in the reading of it, the author lights upon accurate though transitory descriptions of what it means to have a brain and be conscious. He places emotions and feelings (better see his definitions of these two terms) in their proper place in neural events. Indeed Damasio does well in defining a neural basis for epistemology [p. 130, 137, 138, 296, 305, 316] and idealism [p. 320, 322]. In closing Damasio admits that `we cannot characterize yet all the biological phenomena that take place between (a) our current description of a neural pattern, at varied neural levels, and (b) our experience of the image that originated in the activity within the neural maps.' Indeed we may never be able accomplish such a correlation absolutely, but in the reading of a book such as this one, and say, Edelman's "A Universe of Consciousness," we see we are not very far off either.


An objective study of subjectivity   June 20, 2000
Bertrand Ducharme (Quebec, Canada)
27 out of 28 found this review helpful

I much appreciated reading Damasio's book. First and for most because Damasio's study logically combines objective neurologic facts with rigorous introspective analysis. At last, «hard» science can be profitably put to work to tackle global subjective problems. Damasio seems to be at the forefront of this relatively new trend. And his book is a good reference point to help any serious reader to think about the way consciousness works.

Brain injuries mentioned in the book show that, contrary to widespread belief, consciousness does not originate in the cortex, or in a «higher» human faculty; it originates in the more primitive areas of the brain. Damasio stresses that it is a fact, not an hypothesis, independantly of what we may think of his thesis exposed in the book. The core of his thesis is that consciousness originates from the internal representation of perceived modifications to the body (to the «proto-self» ) caused by perceived external objects interacting with the body during that time. We become conscious of ourselves, of the external objects and of the interaction between the two at the same time.

Even if most of the time, the language used is very easy to understand, I had difficulties grasping his multi-levels concepts about the self and about consciousness. At first they seemed to me badly defined and arbitrary. But further attentive reading, further exposure to the neurological facts put forward by Damasio and further thinking made me see the reasons behind those concepts.

However, I still think that Damasio's notion of the self is a too passive one. He doesn't emphasize the essential role of the «inner drive» of the body (instincts, impulses, basic desires, etc.) in the making of consciousness. It seems to me that the concrete feeling of that basic inner drive is a unifying whole in front of the external world and objects. It is much more concrete and real than any other internal representation of our own body. It is that drive that made us (as babies) interact in the first place with external objects, experience with them and distinguish them from us. So, it surely must have a central role to play in the process of consciousness, maybe taking the place of Damasio's more general «proto-self».

Anyway, Damasio's book is a great one that made me think a lot and put order in my own thoughts. He is a courageous scientist trying to explain objectively what is going on subjectively. He is upgrading with the newest science what great thinkers like Hegel and Piaget had been doing (in other fields of knowledge).


The biological roots of consciousness explored.   May 21, 2002
Simon Laub (Aarhus, Denmark, Europe)
19 out of 20 found this review helpful

Like Damasio, I never believed it when people told me that language produces the conscious mind. Following Damasio's line of thought is actually a lot easier. His central idea, that our sense of self arises from our need to map >relations between the self and other objects, is thoroughly explained in the book. He backs it with numerous medical case stories,
where some are a bit unsettling. After all we are talking about real people here, real people with some serious problems. His model of consciousness works like Lego bricks, where his notions of proto-self, core-self, autobiographical-self etc. gives a very credible account of what is going on. Surely, one could think that consciousness is way to complex to begin to describe - but here you actually get some valuable insights without being thrown into the all to popular explanations!

The vital points begins to sink in, when they are explained from different angles. Still it is not an entirely trivial matter to state something like: Core self is created out of nowhere in the account where an organism is caught in he act of representing its own changing state, as it goes about representing something else.

But Damasio gets away it, and in the end you tend to believe him. It is really a wonderful book about a difficult and extremely interesting subject. A major work that you are really happy to have read.

-Simon