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Antonio Damasio ( pt, António Damásio) is a
Portuguese-American Portuguese Americans ( pt, português-americanos), also known as Luso-Americans (''luso-americanos''), are citizens and residents of the United States who are connected to the country of Portugal by birth, ancestry, or citizenship. Americans and ...
neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, Biological neural network, n ...
. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the
University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...
, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the
Salk Institute The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vacci ...
. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the
Brain and Creativity Institute Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) is a research unit of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California, which aims to "gather new knowledge about the human emotions, decision-making, memory, and communication ...
, and has authored several books: his next to latest work, ''Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain'' (2010), explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.


Life and work

During the 1960s, Damasio studied medicine at the
University of Lisbon The University of Lisbon (ULisboa; pt, Universidade de Lisboa, ) is a public research university in Lisbon, and the largest university in Portugal. It was founded in 2013, from the merger of two previous public universities located in Lisbon, th ...
Medical School, where he also did his neurological residency and completed his doctorate in 1974. For part of his studies, he researched
behavioral neurology Behavioral neurology is a subspecialty of neurology that studies the impact of neurological damage and disease upon behavior, memory, and cognition, and the treatment thereof. Two fields associated with behavioral neurology are neuropsychiatry and ...
under the supervision of
Norman Geschwind Norman Geschwind (January 8, 1926 – November 4, 1984) was a pioneering American Behavioral neurology, behavioral neurologist, best known for his exploration of behavioral neurology through disconnection models based on lesion analysis. Earl ...
of the Aphasia Research Center in Boston. Damasio's main field is
neurobiology Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...
, especially the neural systems which underlie emotion, decision-making, memory, language and consciousness. Damasio might believe that emotions play a critical role in high-level cognition—an idea counter to dominant 20th-century views in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. Damasio formulated the
somatic marker hypothesis The somatic marker hypothesis, formulated by Antonio Damasio and associated researchers, proposes that emotional processes guide (or bias) behavior, particularly decision-making. ''Descartes' Error'' "Somatic markers" are feelings in the body th ...
, a theory about how emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously). Emotions provide the scaffolding for the construction of
social cognition Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactio ...
and are required for the self processes which undergird consciousness. "Damasio provides a contemporary scientific validation of the linkage between feelings and the body by highlighting the connection between mind and nerve cells ... this personalized embodiment of mind." The somatic marker hypothesis has inspired many
neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...
experiments carried out in laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, and has had a major impact in contemporary science and philosophy. Damasio has been named by the
Institute for Scientific Information The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysi ...
as one of the most highly cited researchers in the past decade. Current work on the biology of
moral A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. A ...
decisions,
neuro-economics Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain human decision-making, the ability to process multiple alternatives and to follow through on a plan of action. It studies how economic behavior can shape our understanding of t ...
,
social communication Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquir ...
, and drug-addiction, has been strongly influenced by Damasio's hypothesis. An article published in the Archives of Scientific Psychology in 2014 named Damasio one of the 100 most eminent psychologist of the modern era. (Diener et al. ''Archives of Scientific Psychology'', 2014, 2, 20–32). The June–July issue of ''Sciences Humaines'' included Damasio in its list of 50 key thinkers in the human sciences of the past two centuries. Damasio also proposed that emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and are rooted in reward/punishment mechanisms. He recovered William James' perspective on feelings as a read-out of body states, but expanded it with an "as-if-body-loop" device which allows for the substrate of feelings to be simulated rather than actual (foreshadowing the simulation process later uncovered by
mirror neurons A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons hav ...
). He demonstrated experimentally that the
insular cortex The insular cortex (also insula and insular lobe) is a portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus (the fissure separating the temporal lobe from the parietal and frontal lobes) within each hemisphere of the mammalian b ...
is a critical platform for feelings, a finding that has been widely replicated, and he uncovered cortical and subcortical induction sites for human emotions, e.g. in
ventromedial prefrontal cortex The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a part of the prefrontal cortex in the mammalian brain. The ventral medial prefrontal is located in the frontal lobe at the bottom of the cerebral hemispheres and is implicated in the processing of r ...
and
amygdala The amygdala (; plural: amygdalae or amygdalas; also '; Latin from Greek, , ', 'almond', 'tonsil') is one of two almond-shaped clusters of nuclei located deep and medially within the temporal lobes of the brain's cerebrum in complex verteb ...
. He also demonstrated that while the insular cortex plays a major role in feelings, it is not necessary for feelings to occur, suggesting that brain stem structures play a basic role in the feeling process. He has continued to investigate the neural basis of feelings and demonstrated that although the insular cortex is a major substrate for this process it is not exclusive, suggesting that brain stem nuclei are critical platforms as well. He regards feelings as the necessary foundation of sentience. In another development, Damasio proposed that the cortical architecture on which learning and recall depend involves multiple, hierarchically organized loops of
axon An axon (from Greek ἄξων ''áxōn'', axis), or nerve fiber (or nerve fibre: see spelling differences), is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, in vertebrates, that typically conducts electrical impulses known as action po ...
al projections that converge on certain nodes out of which projections diverge to the points of origin of convergence (the
convergence-divergence zone The theory of convergence-divergence zones Antonio Damasio, Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition, Cognition, 33 (1989) 25-62 was proposed by Antonio Damasio, in 1989, ...
s). This architecture is applicable to the understanding of
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
processes and of aspects of consciousness related to the access of mental contents. In ''The Feeling of What Happens'', Damasio laid the foundations of the "enchainment of precedences": "the nonconscious
neural In Biology, biology, the nervous system is the Complex system, highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its Behavior, actions and Sense, sensory information by transmitting action potential, signals to and from different parts of its ...
signaling In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The ''IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' ...
of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core self and core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits
extended consciousness Developed in his (1999) book, "The Feeling of What Happens", Antonio Damasio's theory of consciousness proposes that consciousness arises from the interactions between the brain, the body, and the environment. According to this theory, consciousne ...
. At the end of the chain,
extended consciousness Developed in his (1999) book, "The Feeling of What Happens", Antonio Damasio's theory of consciousness proposes that consciousness arises from the interactions between the brain, the body, and the environment. According to this theory, consciousne ...
permits conscience. Damasio's research depended significantly on establishing the modern human lesion method, an enterprise made possible by
Hanna Damasio Hanna Damasio is a scientist in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, she has developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, a ...
's structural
neuroimaging Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Incr ...
/
neuroanatomy Neuroanatomy is the study of the structure and organization of the nervous system. In contrast to animals with radial symmetry, whose nervous system consists of a distributed network of cells, animals with bilateral symmetry have segregated, defin ...
work complemented by experimental neuroanatomy (with Gary Van Hoesen and Josef Parvizi), experimental neuropsychology (with Antoine Bechara, Ralph Adolphs, and Dan Tranel) and
functional neuroimaging Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions. It is primarily used a ...
(with Kaspar Meyer, Jonas Kaplan, and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang). The experimental neuroanatomy work with Van Hoesen and Bradley Hyman led to the discovery of the disconnection of the hippocampus caused by neurofibrillary tangles in the
entorhinal cortex The entorhinal cortex (EC) is an area of the brain's allocortex, located in the medial temporal lobe, whose functions include being a widespread network hub for memory, navigation, and the perception of time.Integrating time from experience in the ...
of patients with Alzheimer's disease. As a clinician, he and his collaborators have studied and treated disorders of
behaviour Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...
and cognition, and
movement disorder Movement disorder refers to any clinical syndrome with either an excess of movement or a paucity of voluntary and involuntary movements, unrelated to weakness or spasticity. Movement disorders are synonymous with basal ganglia or extrapyramidal ...
s. Damasio's books deal with the relationship between emotions and their brain substrates. His 1994 book, '' Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain'', won the Science et Vie prize, was a finalist for the ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'' Book Award, and is translated in over 30 languages. It is regarded as one of the most influential books of the past two decades. His second book, ''The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness'', was named as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the '' New York Times Book Review'', a ''
Publishers Weekly ''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of B ...
'' Best Book of the Year, a ''
Library Journal ''Library Journal'' is an American trade publication for librarians. It was founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey. It reports news about the library world, emphasizing public libraries, and offers feature articles about aspects of professional prac ...
'' Best Book of the Year, and has over 30 foreign editions. On the basis of a single-case experiment, Damasio suggested emotions belong to the automatic vital processes of the body and thus can be recognized by a person without any form of memory. In 2003, this work was followed by the publication of ''Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain''. In it, Damasio suggested that the philosopher
Baruch Spinoza Baruch (de) Spinoza (born Bento de Espinosa; later as an author and a correspondent ''Benedictus de Spinoza'', anglicized to ''Benedict de Spinoza''; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, b ...
's thinking foreshadowed discoveries in biology and neuroscience views on the mind-body problem and that Spinoza was a protobiologist. Damasio's next to latest book is ''Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain''. In it Damasio suggests that the self is the key to conscious minds and that feelings, from the kind he designates as primordial to the well-known feelings of emotion, are the basic elements in the construction of the protoself and core self. The book received the Corinne International Book Prize. Damasio is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
, the National Academy of Medicine, the
European Academy of Sciences and Arts The European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA, la, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea) is a transnational and interdisciplinary network, connecting about 2,000 recommended scientists and artists worldwide, including 37 Nobel Prize laure ...
. He is the recipient of several prizes, amongst them the
Grawemeyer Award The Grawemeyer Awards () are five awards given annually by the University of Louisville. The prizes are presented to individuals in the fields of education, ideas improving world order, music composition, religion, and psychology. The religion awa ...
, the Honda Prize, the
Prince of Asturias Award The Princess of Asturias Awards ( es, Premios Princesa de Asturias, links=no, ast, Premios Princesa d'Asturies, links=no), formerly the Prince of Asturias Awards from 1981 to 2014 ( es, Premios Príncipe de Asturias, links=no), are a series of a ...
in Science and Technology and the Beaumont Medal from the
American Medical Association The American Medical Association (AMA) is a professional association and lobbying group of physicians and medical students. Founded in 1847, it is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Membership was approximately 240,000 in 2016. The AMA's state ...
, as well as honorary degrees from, most recently, the Sorbonne (Université Paris Descartes), shared with his wife
Hanna Damasio Hanna Damasio is a scientist in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, she has developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, a ...
. He has also received doctorates from the Universities of
Aachen Aachen ( ; ; Aachen dialect: ''Oche'' ; French and traditional English: Aix-la-Chapelle; or ''Aquisgranum''; nl, Aken ; Polish: Akwizgran) is, with around 249,000 inhabitants, the 13th-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the 28th- ...
, Copenhagen,
Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...
, Barcelona,
Coimbra Coimbra (, also , , or ) is a city and a municipality in Portugal. The population of the municipality at the 2011 census was 143,397, in an area of . The fourth-largest urban area in Portugal after Lisbon, Porto Metropolitan Area, Porto, and Bra ...
,
Leuven Leuven (, ) or Louvain (, , ; german: link=no, Löwen ) is the capital and largest city of the province of Flemish Brabant in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located about east of Brussels. The municipality itself comprises the historic ...
and numerous others. In 2013, the Escola Secundária António Damásio was dedicated in Lisbon. He says he writes in the belief that "scientific knowledge can be a pillar to help humans endure and prevail." He is married to
Hanna Damasio Hanna Damasio is a scientist in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, she has developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, a ...
, a prominent neuroscientist and frequent collaborator and co-author, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California and the director of the Dornsife Neuroimaging Center. In 2017 he was designated member of the Council of State of Portugal, replacing Antonio Guterres, the 9th Secretary-General of the United Nations. Damasio additionally serves on the board of directors of the
Berggruen Institute The Berggruen Institute is a Los Angeles-based think tank founded by Nicolas Berggruen. History In 2010, Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels sat down with a group of academics, business leaders, and political veterans in California to discus ...
, and sits on the jury for the
Berggruen Prize for Philosophy The Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture is a US$1-million award given each year to a significant individual in the field of philosophy. It is awarded by the Berggruen Institute to "thinkers whose ideas have helped us find direction, wisdo ...
.


Selected bibliography


Books

*'' Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain'', Putnam, 1994; revised Penguin edition, 2005 *''The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness'', Harcourt, 1999 *''Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain'', Harcourt, 2003 *''Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain'', Pantheon, 2010. *''The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures,'' Pantheon, 2018. *''Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious'', Pantheon, 2021


Selected articles

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


See also


References


External links


USC Faculty page

Brain and Creativity Institute
* *
Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness (TED2011)

Audio of António Damasio 2003 lecture, "Emotion, Feeling, and Social Behavior: The Brain Perspective"
at
Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, located in Seattle, Washington, is one of the largest and most comprehensive humanities centers in the United States. Housed in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington ( ...

Ideas of António Damasio – JRSM book review
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Damasio, Antonio 1944 births American people of Portuguese descent Cognitive neuroscientists Consciousness researchers and theorists Descartes scholars Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Living people Members of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts Neuropsychologists People from Lisbon Pessoa Prize winners Philosophers of mind Philosophers of science Portuguese neuroscientists Portuguese scientists Science writers Spinoza scholars Spinozists University of Iowa faculty University of Lisbon alumni University of Southern California faculty Members of the National Academy of Medicine