Latest Antonio Damasio Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it's the most important, it's not.

  Antonio Damasio

  Thinking, Brain, Important

  Source: bigthink.com

• Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and you're being confronted by different things, not necessarily very important or significance for your ultimate life, but you are constantly reacting to the world.

  Antonio Damasio

  Thinking, Important, Different

  Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

  Antonio Damasio

  Dog, Essence, Wags

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

• If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you're having the emotion.

  Antonio Damasio

  Brain, Different, Needs

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• Emotion is set in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified by our experience so individually we have variations on the pattern. But in essence, your emotion of joy and mine are going to be extremely similar.

  Antonio Damasio

  Essence, Joy, Variation

  Source: bigthink.com

• We may express them [emotions] physically slightly differently, and it's of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the process is going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it's going to be the same.

  Antonio Damasio

  Essence, Missing, Together

  "Big Think Interview With Antonio Damasio". Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• Emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity, either/or, or something in between.

  Antonio Damasio

  Opportunity, Purpose, Body

  "Big Think Interview With Antonio Damasio". Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• Feeling of an emotion is a process that is distinct from having the emotion in the first place. So it helps to understand what is an emotion, what is a feeling, we need to understand what is an emotion.

  Antonio Damasio

  Feelings, Needs, Firsts

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• The emotion is the execution of a very complex program of actions. Some actions that are actually movements, like movement that you can do, change your face for example, in fear, or movements that are internal, that happen in your heart or in your gut, and movements that are actually not muscular movements, but rather, releases of molecules.

  Antonio Damasio

  Heart, Movement, Faces

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• All of that is constantly operating when you not only learn, but when you recall. But as you recall in a different light, the weights with which something is more probably going to be or not recalled on the next instance, are going to be changed. So you're constantly changing the way, for instance, synapses are going to fire very easily or not so easily.

  Antonio Damasio

  Fire, Light, Way

  Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• There's that effect that is very physical, very down there at the synaptic level, which really means microscopic cellular level, but also molecular level, because all of those structures are operating on an electrochemical basis and so the changes there are very important.

  Antonio Damasio

  Mean, Important, Levels

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• You're not the same after, say, an incredible love affair that went very well or a love affair that went bad. Or something that happens to your health, or something that happened to somebody else's health, that is close to you. Or something that happens professionally.

  Antonio Damasio

  Incredibles, Affair, Wells

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

  Antonio Damasio

  People, Interesting, Political

  Interviewwith David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago. The difference is maybe very small or it may be huge.

  Antonio Damasio

  Ideas, Differences, Years

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• If something produces an undue amount of pleasure or undue amount of displeasure, it's going to be judged differently and it's going to be introduced in your narrative with a different size, with a different development. So that is the next element to superimpose on the sequencing element. And in fact, that element is so powerful that very often it can trump the sequencing event, that the sequencing aspect.

  Antonio Damasio

  Powerful, Development, Narrative

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that happened before and when you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it's going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you.

  Antonio Damasio

  Important, Stories, May

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value - sorry for the pun - we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event.

  Antonio Damasio

  Sorry, Emotional, Thinking

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.

  Antonio Damasio

  Biographies, Reason, Enormous

  Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• There is a sequence of events in our lives and so there's a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there's a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.

  Antonio Damasio

  Firsts, Events, Stories

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• We can be more or less conscious when you create grades of focus on a subject that is flowing in our stream of consciousness.

  Antonio Damasio

  Focus, Consciousness, Grades

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• People who are great thinkers, in science or in art, people who are great performers, have to have that kind of capacity. Without that kind of capacity, it's extremely difficult to manage a high level of performance because you're going to get a lot of extraneous material chipping away at the finery of your thinking or the finery of your motor execution.

  Antonio Damasio

  Art, Thinking, People

  Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

• You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.

  Antonio Damasio

  Fall, Focus, Problem

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• I think it's reasonable to say that even thought, in all likelihood, we have slightly different experiences of reality, they are similar enough to us not to clash. In other words, I'm not, it's very unlikely, in fact, let's say impossible, for you to say the situation in which you and I are in right now, relative to the machinery that is capturing this.

  Antonio Damasio

  Reality, Thinking, Different Experiences

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• We're seeing it the same way, we're hearing the same way, we have the same conception of the situation. And so, for all purposes, we are operating with a very similar perception.

  Antonio Damasio

  Perception, Hearing, Purpose

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• We remove ourselves from the experience itself to a surrogate of the experience, which is whatever measure you take from the brain, be it the electroencephalogram or magnet encephalography or say functional magnetic resonance. So it's pretty tough to make those comparisons.

  Antonio Damasio

  Brain, Tough, Resonance

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.