Word: damasios
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...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...
...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...
...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...