Descartes' Error Quotes

“The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.”
― Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Willpower is just another name for the idea of choosing long-term outcomes rather than short-term ones.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ...
In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.
The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Present continuously becomes past, and by the time we take stock of it we are in another present, consumed with planning the future, which we do on the stepping-stones of the past. The present is never here. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.”
― Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.”
― Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“The popular antidepressant Prozac, which acts by blocking the reuptake of serotonin and probably increasing its availability, has received wide attention; the notion that low serotonin levels might be correlated with a tendency towards violence has surfaced in the popular press. The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that "causes" a certain manifestation. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. A satisfactory explanation can arise only from a more comprehensive view of the entire process, in which the relevant variables of a specific problem, such as depression or social adaptability, are analyzed in detail.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“feel an emotion it is necessary but not sufficient that neural signals from viscera, from muscles and joints, and from neurotransmitter nuclei—all of which are activated during the process of emotion—reach certain subcortical nuclei and the cerebral cortex. Endocrine and other chemical signals also reach the central nervous system via the bloodstream among other routes.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.1 These are Pascal’s words, and it is easy to see how perceptive he was about the virtual nonexistence of the present, consumed as we are by using the past to plan what-comes-next, a moment away or in the distant future. That”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“most of our decision making was shaped by somatic states related to punishment and reward. But”
― Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological and sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social causes or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the "culture of complaint") that is cause for alarm.”
― Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“common sense observations of human behavior support a similar dissociation in reasoning abilities which cuts in both directions. We all know persons who are exceedingly clever in their social navigation, who have an unerring sense of how to seek advantage for themselves and for their group, but who can be remarkably inept when trusted with a nonpersonal, nonsocial problem. The reverse condition is just as dramatic: We all know creative scientists and artists whose social sense is a disgrace, and who regularly harm themselves and others with their behavior. The absent-minded professor is the benign variety of the latter type. At work, in these different personality styles, are the presence or absence of what Howard Gardner has called “social intelligence,” or the presence or absence of one or the other of his multiple intelligences such as the “mathematical.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“somatic markers depend on learning within a system that can connect certain categories of entity or event with the enactment of a body state, pleasant or unpleasant. Incidentally,”
― Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“If ensuring the survival of the body proper is what the brain first evolved for, then, when minded brains first appeared, they began by minding the body. And to ensure body survival as effectively as possible, nature, I suggest, stumbled on a highly effective solution: representing the outside world in terms of the modifications it causes in the body proper, that is, representing the environment by modifying the primordial representations of the body proper whenever an interaction between organism and environment takes place.”
― Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Because the brain is the body’s captive audience, feelings are winners among equals. And”
― Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“Em larga medida, o pensamento é feito de imagens.”
― Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“And as this happens, our growing sense of whatever the world outside may be, is apprehended as a modification in the neural space in which body and brain interact. It is not only the separation between mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is probably just as fictional. The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“All that you can know for certain is that they are real to yourself, and that other beings make comparable images. We share our image-based concept of the world with other humans, and even with some animals; there is a remarkable consistency in the constructions different individuals make of the essential aspects of the environment (textures, sounds, shapes, colors, space). If our organisms were designed differently, the constructions we make of the world around us would be different as well. We do not know, and it is improbable that we will ever know, what “absolute” reality is like.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“The proclamation of bruised feelings, the desperate plea for the correction of individual pain and suffering, the inchoate cry for the loss of a never-achieved sense of inner balance and happiness to which most humans aspire are not likely to diminish soon.4 It would be foolish to ask medicine alone to heal a sick culture, but it is just as foolish to ignore that aspect of human disease.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“This is not to suggest that neurobiology can save the world, but simply that the gradual accrual of knowledge about human beings can help us find better ways for the management of human affairs.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“neurobiology not only can assist us with the comprehension and compassion of the human condition, but that in so doing it can help us understand social conflict and contribute to its alleviation.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“The formulation I presented should not diminish our determination to control external circumstances to the advantage of individuals and society, or our resolve to develop, invent, or perfect the cultural instruments with which we can make the world better: ethics, law, art, science, technology.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the “I.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“But there is more to a feeling than this essence. As I will explain, the qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding thinking mode: fast moving and idea rich, when the body-state is in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum, slow moving and repetitive, when the body-state veers toward the painful band. In this perspective, feelings are the sensors for the match or lack thereof between nature and circumstance. And by nature I mean both the nature we inherited as a pack of genetically engineered adaptations, and the nature we have acquired in individual development, through interactions with our social environment, mindfully and willfully as well as not. Feelings, along with the emotions they come from, are not a luxury. They serve as internal guides, and they help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Les organismes sont continuellement en train de changer, passant par une série "d'états": chacun de ces derniers correspond une configuration dans laquelle les diverses composantes de l'organisme présentent un niveau d'activité donnée.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Othello goes through in his mind before he develops jealousy and anger,”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

“In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data.”
― Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain