Word: damasio
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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...
...scientists who both offer the vision and raise the alarms. People with exceptional, photographic memories, they note, sometimes complain of mental overload. "Such people," says University of Iowa neurologist Dr. Antonio Damasio, "have enormous difficulty making decisions, because every time they can think of 20 different options to choose from." There is luxury and peace in forgetting, sometimes; it literally clears the mind, allows us to focus on the general rather than the specific and immediate evidence in front of us. Maybe it even makes room for reflection on questions like when better is not necessarily good...
...greatest in the prefrontal cortex, a dopamine-rich area of the brain that controls impulsive and irrational behavior. Addicts, in fact, display many of the symptoms shown by patients who have suffered strokes or injuries to the prefrontal cortex. Damage to this region, University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio and his colleagues have demonstrated, destroys the emotional compass that controls behaviors the patient knows are unacceptable...