Word: damasio
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Without these emotional reflexes, rarely conscious but often terribly powerful, we would scarcely be able to function. "Most decisions we make have a vast number of possible outcomes, and any attempt to analyze all of them would never end," says University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. "I'd ask you to lunch tomorrow, and when the appointed time arrived, you'd still be thinking about whether you should come." What tips the balance, Damasio contends, is our unconscious assigning of emotional values to some of those choices. Whether we experience...
...When Damasio worked with patients in whom the connection between emotional brain and neocortex had been severed because of damage to the brain, he discovered how central that hidden pathway is to how we live our lives. People who had lost that linkage were just as smart and quick to reason, but their lives often fell apart nonetheless. They could not make decisions because they didn't know how they felt about their choices. They couldn't react to warnings or anger in other people. If they made a mistake, like a bad investment, they felt no regret or shame...
Until recently, scientists assumed that the brain processed language in two neatly defined boxes: Broca's area (for speech production) and Wernicke's area (for speech comprehension). The picture now emerging is far more complex. The University of Iowa's Damasio, along with his wife Hanna, also a neurologist, has recently constructed a model for how the brain processes language based on some 200 unusual case histories, most prominent among them a patient code-named Boswell. Boswell has no function in large areas of his brain, owing to an infection. One consequence is that he has no memory of recent...
Using an MRI scanner, Hanna Damasio has examined the living brains of hundreds of patients, and she and her husband have identified regions they think may serve as convergence zones in the brain's left hemisphere. An area in the temporal lobe pulls together information about the names of objects, animals and people, for instance, while another area in the frontal cortex appears to act as the nexus for verbs. Yet a third oversees the task of assembling nouns and verbs into sentences...
...Consciousness," says Antonio Damasio, "is a concept of your own self, something that you reconstruct moment by moment on the basis of the image of your own body, your own autobiography and a sense of your intended future." Missing any one of the essential parts that it's built on diminishes consciousness but does not totally negate it. Damasio has no doubt that Boswell is conscious, though the quality of that consciousness is impossible for anyone else to imagine...