Word: damasio
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Damasio cites the case of a young woman who at age 30, shortly after the birth of her second child, entered a netherworld of nonstop epileptic seizures. The seizures damaged a region of the brain called the hippocampus, so that afterward she could no longer recall the simplest things, like having put clothes in the washer or having given her kids permission to visit friends. For six years she has lived in a free-floating present, unable to form new memories or envision the future. Her extended consciousness has been sadly diminished...
...Damasio and his wife Hanna, his closest collaborator, such patients are windows into the brain. Their seizures, strokes and diseases, while damaging the hippocampus, leave core consciousness unimpaired. That's because it evolved much earlier than extended consciousness, Damasio says, and thus is dependent on more ancient structures, especially those located within the brain stem and hypothalamus. Among the most important: a large region called the cingulate cortex, which not only receives sensory input from the skin, muscles and internal organs but also sends out signals to initiate movement and focus attention, as when emotions send our blood pressure soaring...
...demonstration of the cingulate cortex's importance to consciousness, Damasio recalls a patient he calls L. After a comparatively minor stroke, she became bedridden, lying utterly still and mute for six months even though her physical condition seemed to suggest she could have resumed her daily life. During her ordeal, she later told Damasio, she felt absolutely no desire to speak or move. "Her mind," he says, "had not been imprisoned in the jail of her immobility. Instead it appeared that there had not been much mind at all, and nothing that would resemble consciousness." It turned out that...
...Even so, Damasio doesn't regard any one region of the brain--or the brain as a whole--as the seat of consciousness. Instead he sees the brain as an interconnected system with cognition (language, memory, reason and emotion) and sensory processes (vision, hearing, touch and taste) centered in different areas. Consciousness, he says, is similarly dispersed...
...example, stroke patients with damage to the brain's language centers remain, in Damasio's view, perfectly conscious. But while language allows us to express consciousness, explaining our interior state to others, he doesn't regard language as the wellspring of consciousness, as some have claimed it is. Much closer to the wellspring, he says, are our emotions. Indeed, to him, consciousness "is the feeling of knowing that we have feelings...