ABOUT THIS BOOKOne of the most important and original neuroscientists at work today tackles a question that has confounded neurologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists for centuries: how consciousness is created.
Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In this revelatory work, he debunks the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting astounding new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as “self”—is in fact a biological process created by the brain. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the personal, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces the evolutionary perspective, which entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told.
Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking investigation of consciousness as a dynamic, unpredictable faculty that is instrumental in defining and explaining who we understand ourselves to be.
Watch this series of videos of Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind (11/9), as he describes the inspiration behind the book and reflects on how consciousness is created.
Antonio Damasio is the director of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute. Damasio’s books include Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain; The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review); and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. He lives in Los Angeles.
