ANTONIO DAMASIO 
DESCARTES' ERROR
EMOTION, REASON, AND THE HUMAN BRAIN
Grosset / Putnam 1994
 
 
 

 

DAMASIO 11

Keywords: reason - the traditional views on the nature of rationality could not be correct - the mechanisms of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude - Reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks - certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality -

human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organization - Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason - the lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason - the qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding thinking mode: fastmoving and idea rich, when the body-state is in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum -the mind exists in and for an integrated organism; our minds would not be the way they are if it were not for the interplay of body and brain during evolution, during individual development, and at the current moment - the mind had to be first about the body, or it could not have been - mental phenomena can be fully understood  only in the context of an organism's interacting in an  environment

DAMASIO 83

Keywords: reasoning and decision making - broad-based knowledge and reasoning strategies - emotion and feeling are part and parcel of the neural machinery for biological regulation - Personal and social decisions are fraught with uncertainty and have an impact on survival, directly or indirectly. Thus they require a vast repertoire of knowledge concerning the external world and the world within the organism - The brain and the body are indissociably integrated by mutually targeted biochemical and neural circuits - neural substrate of those images - images - perceptual, recalled from real past, and recalled from plans of the future - are constructions of your organism's brain - We do not know, and it is improbable that we will ever know, what "absolute" reality is like

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
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