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The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

Amazon.com Price:  $9.83 (as of 01/05/2019 17:34 PST- Details)

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Description

The publication of this book is an event in the making. In every single place the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio’s new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research the usage of PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes’ Error, Damasio revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body’s reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can also be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic.

As you read this, at some level you’re aware that you’re reading, thanks to a standard human feature commonly known as consciousness. What is it–a spiritual phenomenon, an evolutionary tool, a neurological side effect? The best scientists love to tackle big, meaningful questions like this, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio jumps right in with The Feeling of What Happens, a poetic examination of interior life through lenses of research, medical cases, philosophical analysis, and unashamed introspection. Damasio’s perspective is, fortunately, becoming increasingly common in the scientific community; despite all of the protestations of old-guard behaviorists, subjective consciousness is a plain fact to most of us and the demand for new methods of inquiry is in spite of everything being met.

These new methods don’t seem to be without rigor, though. Damasio and his colleagues examine patients with disruptions and interruptions in consciousness and take deep insights from these tragic lives at the same time as offering greater comfort and meaning to the victims. His thesis, that our sense of self arises from our want to map relations between self and others, is firmly rooted in medical and evolutionary research but stands up well to self-examination. His examples from the weird world of neurology are unsettling yet deeply humanizing–real people with serious problems spring to life in the pages, but they are never reduced to their deficits. The Feeling of What Happens captures the spirit of discovery as it plunges deeper than ever into the darkest waters yet. –Rob Lightner

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