Word: damasio
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This incident occurred more than three decades ago, when Dr. Antonio Damasio was a medical student in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has never forgotten it. How was it possible, he wondered, for someone to be there and yet not be there, to be awake and yet not be awake, to be aware of his surroundings and at the same time be oblivious to them? The more Damasio puzzled over what had happened to the patient during an epileptic seizure, the more he felt compelled to confront a much larger question: What is it about the human brain and its networks...
...Damasio's turn. In a new book titled The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace; $28), the noted neuroscientist not only argues that human consciousness is comprehensible but also offers an arrestingly original explanation of its workings. What makes his views so noteworthy is that they're grounded not in theoretical musings but in years of clinical research on patients who are epileptic or have suffered brain damage through strokes, disease or traumatic injuries...
From these studies, Damasio, who is chairman of the University of Iowa's neurology department, concludes that consciousness is a layered edifice, like some Mayan pyramid or Mesopotamian ziggurat. It is based on an inchoate feeling of self that arises from the brain's detailed "diagram" of the body. Damasio says this diagram, which is continuously revised by the senses, can be thought of as the "protoself"; it props up the rest of the structure...
...kinds of creatures, even ones as lowly as snails, have protoselves, Damasio says, but they aren't really conscious. Consciousness, he explains, requires a nervous system sufficiently evolved and complex that the organism can hold in mind the image of a protoself's moving through and interacting with the world...
...this core consciousness, as Damasio calls it, that registers "the feeling of what happens," and it's something we share with other intelligent animals, such as dogs. But there is another form of consciousness that embellishes one's image of self with a wealth of autobiographical detail. Damasio calls this extended consciousness, and it requires such a vast capacity for memory that it's probably special only to humans and great apes. Hence, damage to the brain's memory centers can impair a person's extended consciousness while leaving core consciousness intact...