As you read this, at some level you're aware that you're reading, thanks to a standard human feature commonly referred to as consciousness. What is it--a spiritual phenomenon, an evolutionary tool, a neurological side effect? The best scientists love to tackle big, meaningful questions like this, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio jumps right in with The Feeling of What Happens, a poetic examination of interior life through lenses of research, medical cases, philosophical analysis, and unashamed introspection. Damasio's perspective is, fortunately, becoming increasingly common in the scientific community; despite all the protestations of old-guard behaviorists, subjective consciousness is a plain fact to most of us and the demand for new methods of inquiry is finally being met.

These new methods are not without rigor, though. Damasio and his colleagues examine patients with disruptions and interruptions in consciousness and take deep insights from these tragic lives while offering greater comfort and meaning to the sufferers. His thesis, that our sense of self arises from our need to map relations between self and others, is firmly rooted in medical and evolutionary research but stands up well to self-examination. His examples from the weird world of neurology are unsettling yet deeply humanizing--real people with serious problems spring to life in the pages, but they are never reduced to their deficits. The Feeling of What Happens captures the spirit of discovery as it plunges deeper than ever into the darkest waters yet. --Rob Lightner


From Publishers Weekly
Tackling a great complex of questions that poets, artists and philosophers have contemplated for generations, Damasio (Descartes' Error) examines current neurological knowledge of human consciousness. Significantly, in key passages he evokes T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and William James. In Eliot's words, consciousness is "music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all." It, like Hamlet, begins with the question "Who's there?" And Damasio holds that there is, as James thought, a "stream of" consciousness that utilizes every part of the brain. Consciousness, argues Damasio, is linked to emotion, to our feelings for the images we perceive. There are in fact several kinds of consciousness, he says: the proto-self, which exists in the mind's constant monitoring of the body's state, of which we are unaware; a core consciousness that perceives the world 500 milliseconds after the fact; and the extended consciousness of memory, reason and language. Different from wakefulness and attention, consciousness can exist without language, reason or memory: for example, an amnesiac has consciousness. But when core consciousness fails, all else fails with it. More important for Damasio's argument, emotion and consciousness tend to be present or absent together. At the height of consciousness, above reason and creativity, Damasio places conscience, a word that preceded conciousness by many centuries. The author's plain language and careful redefinition of key points make this difficult subject accessible for the general reader. In a book that cuts through the old nature vs. nurture argument as well as conventional ideas of identity and possibly even of soul, it's clear, though he may not say so, that Damasio is still on the side of the angels. Agent, Michael Carlisle; 9-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In his breathtaking Descartes's Error, Damasio linked emotion and feeling to reason. Now he links them to consciousness itself, showing that "consciousness begins as the feeling of what happens" when we see a dazzling shaft of sunlight or feel its heat on our skin. Damasio dazzles us, too, writing with an authority backed by years of research yet so lucidly that we feel it is child's play. (LJ 9/1/99) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, William H. Calvin
This is a must-read book for anyone wanting a neurologist's perspective on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries, human consciousness and how it exceeds that of the other apes.


Scientific American, Thomas Metzinger
...I believe that the book's clear, beautiful language, its fascinating case studies and the way in which it brings difficult scientific issues to life for readers with many different interests may actually make it a landmark in the interdisciplinary project of consciousness research.


Anthony Clare, Sunday Times, London 1/24/2000
"...a monumental book rich in a profusion of testable hypotheses, invigorating findings and clinical narratives, written in a language that manages simultaneously to be sturdily hard-headed and gloriously poetic; a gem of a work indeed."


From Booklist
Neurologist Damasio explained why emotions are essential to our survival in Descartes's Error (1994). Now, in another paradigm-shifting performance, he seeks to delineate the nature of consciousness and the biological source of our sense of self. Damasio approaches these elusive and tantalizing subjects with assurance and palpable excitement, aligning theory with life, as Oliver Saks does, by chronicling the poignant yet instructive experiences of people suffering neurological disorders. His goal is to understand how we cross the "threshold that separates being from knowing"; that is, how we not only know things about the world, via our senses, but how we are aware simultaneously of a self that is experiencing this "feeling of what happens." Drawing on his fluent understanding of the workings of the brain and of evolution, Damasio conjectures the existence of two levels of consciousness: a core consciousness and self, and an extended consciousness and an autobiographical self. He then postulates the crucial roles emotion, memory, and "wordless storytelling" play in our existence. At its base, Damasio concludes, consciousness means that we feel both pain and pleasure; in its higher manifestations, it enables us to transcend and articulate these feelings through language, creativity, and conscience. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
The most intriguing unsolved problem in psychology may be the origin of consciousness; here, a noted neurologist proposes that the root of the answer lies in emotion. In Descartes' Error (1994), Damasio argued that the attempt to treat reason and emotion as separate entities was a profound mistake. Now he argues that the body's ability to sense and react to its own processes and its environment holds the key to consciousness. The problem of consciousness can be broken down into two related problems: how the brain engenders images of the outside world and how it engenders a sense of self. In other words, we need to know not only how the brain creates a ``movie'' from its sensory data, but also how it generates the ``audience'' that watches the movie. Damasio distinguishes between core consciousness, the nonverbal awareness of one's state of being, and extended consciousness, which entails a sense of other times and places, and which evolves over the lifetime of the creature possessing it. Damasio argues that most higher organisms possess core consciousness and many possess some form of extended consciousness; but in its highest manifestations, such as art and science, extended consciousness is characteristic of humanity. The author fleshes out his arguments with case histories and our current knowledge of the physiology of the brain. Damasio is particularly concerned to distinguish his views from the classical model of consciousness as a sort of miniature person inside the brain. He insists on the role of emotionthe responses of core consciousness to its experiencesin creating extended consciousness, which in one sense is core consciousness augmented by memory. While his argument demands close attention, its well worth the effort to follow him. Its clear that he has his finger on many of the key issues of the origins and meaning of consciousness in this fascinating study. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

In The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio R. Damasio, a world-renowned neurologist and the author of the bestselling Descartes' Error, provides readers with more striking illuminations regarding how the "three pounds of flesh" we all carry inside our skulls functions. In Descartes' Error, Damasio made a compelling argument for the inclusion of emotion, along with cognition, as a significant component of the reasoning process. In The Feeling of What Happens, he examines the mystery of consciousness.

Damasio, the Van Allen Professor and head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center, breaks what he terms "the problem of consciousness" into two parts. The first is the question of how each of us forms a continuous "movie in the brain." The second is the question of how the brain becomes cognizant of the formation of this "movie in the brain," and in the process, gives rise to a "sense of self in the act of knowing."

The Feeling of What Happens is a fascinating and haunting quest to solve these riddles. One of the keys to unraveling these mysteries of consciousness, Damasio posits, lies in perspective. Damasio shows convincingly that the brain and the rest of the body, as they interface with the material world, give rise to the individual's sense of self, as well as to emotions and cognition. In doing so, he explodes what he terms the "homunculus" model of consciousness.

The homunculus model, toward which Damasio evinces a pronounced disdain, purports that somewhere in the brain exists an entity -- envisioned as a sort of mini-person -- in charge of knowing and using knowledge to interpret data in the form of images. According to the model of consciousness set forth by Damasio in The Feeling of What Happens, consciousness is felt, continuously and spontaneously, rather than relayed by some shrunken third party -- which would, after all, have to have a consciousness itself. And what would that consciousness consist of...yet a smaller homunculus?

Damasio shows that consciousness has played a role in our evolutionary development and is seated deeply at specific, elaborately interconnected sites in the base of the brain. This essential sense of self is not a simple thing. It is rather a richly layered and nuanced interplay of mental patterns. It is informed (and to a certain extent defined) by stimuli in the material world and in the body and by feelings, which effect changes in its constitution that we ultimately come to "know," and finally come to know that we know.

Clinical writing for a wide audience is an art, and Damasio, who is a groundbreaking researcher as well as a bestselling author, is a master of this form. His writing combines an intimate and expansive grasp of his subject matter, an effusive and contagious enthusiasm, and a knack for explaining sophisticated concepts clearly. Readers familiar with works by such authors as Lewis Thomas and especially the masterful Oliver Sacks will find Damasio on equal footing with these writers in his ability to convey sophisticated science without oversimplification or -- worse -- dense tedium.

Oliver Sacks comes to mind because he, like Damasio, writes about patients with lesions in their brains that deactivate some function the rest of us take for granted, such as the ability to access long-term memory or to recognize faces. Damasio and Sacks approach this subject from very different angles, however. In such works as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks's tactic is to start with a particular individual with a compelling neurological syndrome and to draw wide-reaching implications regarding how the rest of us function. One of the reasons Sacks does this is because until very recently, observing how the brain works (or how a part of it fails to work in the normal way) could be accomplished only by observing the behavior of individuals or by conversing with them. Actually getting inside the skull and examining the living brain was impossible then.

While case studies of patients with brain lesions are important components of Damasio's arguments, his pioneering research entails an entirely new way of investigating the conundrums that these patients (and "normal" subjects) present. Current medical imaging technologies have allowed Damasio and his collaborators (including his wife, Hanna, who is also a world-renowned neurologist) to directly observe the mechanisms of consciousness itself -- the inner lives of others.

While one can't really know any consciousness but his or her own, magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography scanning, and other techniques provide snapshots of the brain's inner workings. The result is that where Oliver Sacks would start with observations of quixotic behavior and build up to more general questions about the inner workings of the brain, Damasio provides a detailed description of the mechanical mind and uses clinical studies of individuals to make discrete points and illustrate his arguments.

But although he can, in a certain sense, probe inside their skulls, Damasio shows a profound and catching affection for the human clinical subjects of his and others' research. This is particularly evident in his descriptions of patients with various degrees of amnesia, and of David, a 46-year-old man who, because of the ravages of encephalitis, is incapable of learning any new facts.

Damasio, in posing the question of whether or not David is conscious, (the answer is a resounding affirmative), helps illustrate that long-term memory is not a prerequisite to consciousness. In further investigations, Damasio argues that consciousness, on the other hand, is a prerequisite not only to long-term memory, but to cognition as well. Intriguingly, Damasio asserts that emotions are a more fundamental level-of-life regulation than even consciousness.

Damasio's explorations of the levels of being that form the self will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in the workings of the mind or philosophy. In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio attacks the question of who we are with a passion and vigor that make his quest as engrossing to the reader as it is to the author.

—--David S. Rossmann

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The superb researcher, humanist, and author of Descartes' Error binds the body to the spirit in an exploration of consciousness The publication of this book is an event in the making. All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic.

FROM THE CRITICS

William H. Calvin - NY Times Book Review

This is a must-read book for anyone wanting a neurologist's perspective on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries, human consciousness and how it exceeds that of the other apes.

Dan Stern - Salon

I remember wondering as I took my Intro to Bio midterm why I couldn't answer certain questions about the brain. The very machinery that had told me to put one foot in front of the other in order to get me to that classroom was now holding out on me about its own nature. "What are the components of neurons?" Not a clue. What was relaying this question through my mind? Neurons. It doesn't get much more paradoxical than that.

Consciousness -- our sense of self-identity or self-awareness -- eludes us in the same bizarre manner. We experience it as the voice inside our head that contemplates our own existence and makes us who we are; but what, exactly, consciousness is remains a mystery. Talk about not knowing yourself. The fashionable new field of consciousness studies -- which at this point is as primitive as physics was prior to Newton -- has given rise to practically as many theories of the mind as there are cells in the brain.

Some say there is no mystery at all -- that consciousness studies is simply what students from the psychedelic '60s entertain themselves with now that they are the professors and researchers of the neural '90s. Skeptics say that science isn't even capable of dissecting this subjective phenomenon. And others proceed cautiously, equipped with the latest neuroimaging techniques and insight gleaned from case studies of neurological impairment (Alzheimer's, epilepsy, amnesia), in the process gradually learning the neurobiology behind the conscious self. Antonio Damasio, a renowned neuroscientist, belongs to this latter camp.

In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio illustrated the significance of emotion in reasoning, doing away with the Cartesian dualism of rationalist philosophy, which separated the body from the mind. In his new book, The Feeling of What Happens, he fleshes out this premise and attempts to merge body and mind in a unified theory of consciousness. His central claim here: Consciousness is the feeling of what happens -- the mind noticing the body's reaction to stimuli.

There is a difference, he states, between a "feeling" and "knowing that we have a feeling"; we can have feelings without an awareness of them. His neurobiological breakdown of the way we achieve this feeling of a feeling, which he defends like a long, technical proof, forms the bulk of the book. The prose this time is less appropriate for a lay audience than for an academic one -- certainly you need a basic knowledge of the brain and an intense passion for the subject matter. It's not beach reading.

Consciousness is not a monolith. Damasio separates it into simple and complex kinds -- namely core consciousness (the fundamental feeling of knowing) and extended consciousness (what most theorists have in mind when addressing the higher-order glory of self-awareness). His breakthrough moment came when he saw consciousness in terms of two players, the organism and the object (e.g., an emotion), and of the relationship between those players.

One of the greatest challenges in consciousness studies is its inherent semantic confusion -- there isn't a shared lexicon to utilize. And though Damasio notes this problem, he adds to the turmoil by introducing several new terms (e.g., "proto-self") and using old ones like "emotion" and "feeling" in admittedly unconventional ways. Emotions, feelings of emotions, awareness of a feeling of an emotion -- this is obscure material, and his argument can be hard to follow.

Damasio seems to have taken a few intriguing case studies and unusual experiments and extrapolated a theory of consciousness from the scant though sometimes compelling evidence they offer. His metaphorical speculations are a necessary step toward decoding consciousness and providing a basis for future research. But have paradigms shifted as a result of this step? As Damasio himself would concede: no. It's far too early to tell whether his theory will hold up or perish like a fleeting image in the brain.

Anthony Clare - Sunday Times (London)

..a monumental book rich in a profusion of testable hypotheses, invigorating findings and clinical narratives, written in a language that manages simultaneously to be sturdily hard-headed and gloriously poetic; a gem of a work indeed.

Thomas Metzinger - Scientific American

...I believe that the book's clear, beautiful language, its fascinating case studies and the way in which it brings difficult scientific issues to life for readers with many different interests may actually make it a landmark in the interdisciplinary project of consciousness research.

J. Madeleine Nash - Time Magazine

In a new book titled The Feeling of What Happens, the noted neuroscientist not only argues that human consciousness is comprehensible but offers an arrestingly original explanation of its workings. What makes his views so noteworthy is that they're grounded not in theoretical musings but in years of clinical research on patients who are epileptic or have suffered brain damage through strokes, disease or traumatic injuries.Read all 10 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Not only does the story of our coming-to-being as conscious creatures read in Damasio's hands like a grand detective novel, it reasons like the most incisive philosophy, and it is sinewed to the bone with the delicate truths of poetic imagery. There is no simpler way to say this: read the book to learn who you are. — Jorie Graham

This is an extraordinary book. I know of nothing like it.  — (Jerome Kagan, Starch Professor of Psychology, Harvard University)

Antonio Damasio's astonishing book takes us on a scientific journey into the brain that reveals the invisible world within us as if it were visible to our sight. You will never again look at yourself or at another without wondering what goes on behind the eyes that so meet. — Jonas Salk

Antonio Damasio has done it again. Writing for the layman as well as the scientist, with the clear language of the artist and poet, he uses his long experience in neurological research to construct a compelling solution for the problem of consciousness.  — (Victoria A. Fromkin, Professor of Linguistics, UCLA)