Antonio Damasio

Interestingly enough, not all feelings result from the body's reaction to external stimuli. Sometimes changes are purely simulated in the brain maps.

The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.

You still have only one self and one identity. However, self, identity and personality are not things, they are not objects, and they certainly are not rigid. Instead, they are biological processes built within the brain from numerous interactive components, step by step, over a period of time.

Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.