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..

...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 mome….

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' op….

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness,….

Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an ….

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..

How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?.

The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of cult….

We may express them [emotions] physically slightly differently, and it's of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the proce….

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would….

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 healt….

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also ch….

Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason..

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of….

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 actuall….

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 var….

I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. ….

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive componen….

To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes..

In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one's own organism and the world around that organism. That ….

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 w….