Customer Reviews

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

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2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Damasio is not one to let traditional concepts restrain expression of good research. This book overturns many long-held ideas, replacing them with fresh insights on how our minds and bodies interact. Not afraid to tackle the big questions, Damasio offers a rich, substantial analysis of how our brains and bodies interact. That interaction is called our "mind". It's not always easy to see how these two aspects of ourselves are so intimately merged, but Damasio makes it all clear in this book. Why does consciousness feel to us in the manner it does?

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]

Damasio breaks down into minute, qualitative descriptive detail how the boby/brain functions in humans, and ergo, de facto, many mammals. This book's strength is that Damasio backs up his claims regarding neural anatomy, physiology, and function with specific examples from comparative neuropathology. The book's weakness is that he goes on at length with qualitative descriptions for non-intuitive notions like how the body and brain function as a singular unit, and how emotions and feelings are integral along with body/brain physiology. I say this is the book's weakness because Damasio often bogs down and even tries to describe phenomena that are possibly ineffable, but these attempts at qualitative description are also one of the strengths of this book. This may seem contradictory, but possibly the book would have read differently if the author had stuck to purely quantitative case studies. However he did not, so we get through Damasio's several qualitative, alternate descriptions of singular phenomena an attempt to flesh out and make organic the dry clinical data. On the one hand the book could have been more concise without the extended descriptive sections, on the other hand the book possibly becomes richer and more meaningful because of them; this is up to the reader to decide.

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.

I have to take a middle-ground stand here. I agree with both the negative and positive reviews. Damasio has written what could have been a terrific book; yet he missed the mark by a mile. He writes like a sociologist instead of neuroscientist: he repeats his thesis twenty different ways. It seems he didn't have enough information to make a real book, so he restates the same points, and it gets tiring.

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.

I came to this book expecting a lot. Damasio's ambition is to explain the relationship between the self and the emotions. His central tenet is that the self is made of several building blocks, and that awareness of our emotions is the essential path to the self.

Does he prove his point? Not in the least. Damasio is wonderfully unaware of the pitfalls of verbal reasoning. In general, he's happy to state and restate his thesis, then to spend a few pages on brain anatomy, or on a tired case neuropathology, to conclude with yet again a restatement of his thesis.

Reading the reviews, I'm amazed that so many readers respond so positively to this kind of writing. Especially accounting for the dismal prose of Damasio. Although I find the topic fascinating, the turgidness of Damasio's writing is so bad that I really forced myself to finish the book. Many sentences are so convoluted, such a crucible of vague terms, that they hardly mean anything.

In short, and contrary to most reviewers here, I found this book terrible.

There are dozens of pioneering neuroscientists who have made major contributions to the neurosciences. In my opinion, Mr.Damasio is not one of them. Mr.Damasio's greatest achievement appears to be obtaining publicity and credit for theories or discoveries not his own. This includes his recent claim to have discovered an association between frontal lobe damage and loss of moral behavior--an association that has been repeatedly established beginning over 100 years ago with the famous case of Mr.Gage, and his claim to a theory of language detailed and researched by Dr.Rhawn Joseph in a series of papers published throughout the 1980s. If it is original thinking the reader is searching for, search elsewhere.

What is most amazing about this book is the audacity of the author who willingly takes credit for the work, ideas, research, and theories of others. Damasio, however, has many friends, who are willing to go along with a wink and a nod, and write fabulous reviews about a truly inspid book written by a man who has never had an original thought. Some of these "friends" have a financial stake in his success, such as the New York Times--an organization which in fact created him as a celebrity in order to market him. This book represents more marketing hype and you will note in the wonderful reviews it has received, that not a single reviewer (i.e. friend of Damasio) can detail anything significant about this book other than to offer up platitudes. Yet, this book is about platitudes and is written by a man who has become the "Joyce Brothers of Neurology."

This book is a mish-mash of introductory neuroscience, pseudo-philosophy and grand ideas that sum up to little more than another overstated work on consciousness. Unlike in his first book, "Decartes Error," Damasio writes with a grandiose and imprecise style leading the reader to believe that little more than speculation supports his points. If you are really curious to read this because everyone you know is talking about it, then check it out from the library. But do yourself the favor of spending money to buy it because in 5 months when the hoopla has died, reading this book will not even be useful for conversation at cocktail parties.

Damasio challenges his reader at every turn, and those without a solid grounding in neurology may find themselves floundering. Those who have read Daniel Stern will wonder how Damasio can use his words--proto consciousness/self, core consciousness/self--without attribution and without making the connection to Stern's research with babies (late in the book--much too late for this reader--he mentions a visitor to their lab who implied the connection). Unlike Descartes' Error, here Damasio is muddy, particular in his use of the word "emotion" for what should more properly be called "affect" (see Tompkins and, especially, Nathanson, Shame and Pride). When writing about such complex ideas, clarity is a virtue, metaphor a plus--here we have neither.

I haven't read this book, but my biology professor in college is one of the foremost researchers in the field of neuroscience, and has told me that the ideas and theories set forth by Damasio are very respected in their field. My professor, like many other researchers and science scholars, has read the book several times, and his only criticism of it is that the writing is horrible and hard to get through. He said the sentences are belabored and ridiculous, but worth reading anyhow because of the groundbreaking information set forth in this book. Other books he recommends: Phantoms of the Brain, the less scientific The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and an unrelated one: Botany of Life.

These descriptions of the neurology of thought and sensation helped me to understand that seemingly simple behaviors and mental processes are both staggeringly complex, and surprisingly mechanistic (or electro-mechanistic).

What seems to be the straightforward, almost effortless sensation of awareness turns out to be a deceptively complex process, malfunctions of which reveal its complexity.

I have found that, for those who find it difficult to follow the thread of this sort of material, the book-on-tape version is both easily reviewable (rewind) and extremely well read.