Word: damasio
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Southern California, has found that the brains of people with ASP look different from those of the rest of the population, with less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates behavior and social judgment. Just last month University of Iowa neurobiologist Antonio Damasio reported findings from a study showing that early brain injuries affect the long-term ability to distinguish between right and wrong...
...latest Nature Neuroscience, Dr. Antonio Damasio and his colleagues describe two young adults--a woman, 20, and a man, 23--who suffered early injuries to the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain thought to serve as a kind of moral and social compass. The woman was run over by a car at 15 months; the man had a brain tumor removed at three months. Both made remarkable recoveries until they began to display serious behavioral problems...
...Damasio knows that adults with injuries to the prefrontal cortex develop very similar problems, often quitting their jobs, gambling away their savings and alienating family and friends. But in those cases, the people still seem to know the difference between right and wrong. By contrast, the two young adults never seemed to have developed a moral compass in the first place...
Their cases could, of course, be just medical oddities, but Damasio thinks otherwise. In his view, more subtle malfunctions of the prefrontal cortex, including physical or psychological trauma caused by childhood abuse, could be at the root of many troubled lives. If so, his two cases may explain a much wider societal problem that cries out for medical and psychological intervention...
...though, Damasio admits he hasn't explained consciousness completely either. Perhaps, he muses, so-called mysterians like Rutgers' McGinn have it right, and a full understanding of consciousness and its origins--like that of life itself--will always elude us. But, he insists, "it's not justified to say we'll never understand consciousness just because there is an explanatory gap right now." Rather, he sees the quest as a beginning. The brain, he firmly believes, holds answers to questions that we have not yet even thought of asking...