The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness [Hardcover]

Essential to Damasio's analysis of consciousness is his division of it. "Core" consciousness is the brain's "automatic" processes - breathing, heartbeat and the countless other biological functions. "Extended" consciousness is the realm of memory, conception, "thinking" and other aspects we generally associate with the mind. The latter are those featured in most cognitive studies, which he argues are inadequate. Damasio stresses repeatedly that the "core" - "extended" distinction isn't absolute. The links between core and extended consciousness are multiple and varied. They occur in many places in the brain and its association with the rest of the body. He calls for further studies on those interactions as the foundation for a better understanding of full consciousness.

Damasio has particularly fine presentation skills. He puts us at ease in describing his patients, his theories and how they fit together. His patients, after all, are only us with some brain disturbance. Many are people we could encounter daily. They have, however, suffered some malady that disconnects essential parts of their brains' mechanism. Damasio explains in an intimate conversational style what they are suffering. Consciousness in these people has been impaired. The impairment is in the realm of emotion and feeling.

Those two terms are the core of Damasio's thesis. Unlike mainstream cognitive scientists, he separates them, with one being the "public" expression and the other private. Feelings belong to us, where emotions are shared with the world. He is breaking new ground in cognitive studies with his work. The result is a highly detailed book, with intense examination of brain operations. A reader unfamiliar with these topics may find the book increasingly challenging as you progress through the topics. The rewards for persistence, however, are rich. Damasio has provided an innovative scenario of how consciousness is structured. This book deserves serious attention and will remain fundamental for some time.[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Having said this, the book itself endeavors to demonstrate how consciousness emerges from gross neuroanatomy and physiology. In this Damasio is successful in using neuropathology to define terms such as: homeostasis, consciousness, language, mental images, neuronal maps, cathexis, and hedonic tone (although he does not use these two latter terms explicitly). In all honesty Damasio is very strict about defining his terms. Even though the author writes to a popular audience some knowledge of neuroanatomy and physiology is helpful in reading this book for maximum effect; although this book would be a good beginning for those interested in neurology. In General, the appendix, 'Notes on Mind and Brain,' should probably be read prior to reading the main body of text, especially if the reader is weak in basic neurology. In any event, Damasio is big on forming neologisms although he spends adequate time defining and explaining them. As a neurologist, he always couches his arguments in materialist, Darwinistic terms.

A good way to describe the structure of this often rambling, inchoate book, is to briefly compare it to Dr. Paul McLean's triune brain model. The triune brain posits the reptilian brain (brain stem) as primary, the mammal brain (thalamus, limbic, etc.) as secondary, and the primate brain (cortex) emerging evolutionarily later as tertiary. Damasio uses a similar foundation in positing the proto-self, the core self, and the autobiographical self (I told you there were a lot of neologisms), but he does so in a way that has them all hang together as a synchronous, functioning unit. The proto-self is rather the sense of homeostatic organism state, where the core self is the 'transcient but conscious reference to the individual organism in which events are happening' (to get a taste of Damasio's descriptive effluence), and the autobiographical self is the more cortical, temporal sense of self derived from transcendental yet highly efficacious ideas about past and future. It can all get pretty incoherent, but a complete reading of the book supplies numerous neural correlates which shore up the author's assertions.

In the end it is hard not to recommend this book because, in the reading of it, the author lights upon accurate though transitory descriptions of what it means to have a brain and be conscious. He places emotions and feelings (better see his definitions of these two terms) in their proper place in neural events. Indeed Damasio does well in defining a neural basis for epistemology [p. 130, 137, 138, 296, 305, 316] and idealism [p. 320, 322]. In closing Damasio admits that 'we cannot characterize yet all the biological phenomena that take place between (a) our current description of a neural pattern, at varied neural levels, and (b) our experience of the image that originated in the activity within the neural maps.' Indeed we may never be able accomplish such a correlation absolutely, but in the reading of a book such as this one, and say, Edelman's "A Universe of Consciousness," we see we are not very far off either.

The subject is facinating. The brain anatomy is facinating. The book, however, is not. My recommendation is only lukewarm--and I'm sure there are other books out there that tell the same story in more readable writing.