Download Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio R. Damasio PDF

By Antonio R. Damasio

From essentially the most major neuroscientists at paintings this present day, a pathbreaking research of a question that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists for hundreds of years: how is attention created?
 
Antonio Damasio has spent the prior thirty years learning and writing approximately how the mind operates, and his paintings has garnered approval for its singular melding of the medical and the humanistic. In Self involves Mind, he is going opposed to the long-standing concept that recognition is in some way become independent from the physique, proposing compelling new medical proof that consciousness—what we predict of as a brain with a self—is first of all a organic approach created by way of a dwelling organism. along with the 3 conventional views used to review the brain (the introspective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces an evolutionary viewpoint that involves a thorough swap within the approach the background of wakeful minds is considered and instructed. He additionally advances an intensive speculation in regards to the origins and different types of emotions, that's relevant to his framework for the organic development of attention: emotions are grounded in a close to fusion of physique and mind networks, and primary emerge from the traditionally previous and humble mind stem instead of from the fashionable cerebral cortex.
 
Damasio means that the brain’s improvement of a human self turns into a problem to nature’s indifference and opens the way in which for the looks of tradition, an intensive holiday during evolution and the resource of a brand new point of lifestyles regulation—sociocultural homeostasis. He leaves doubtless that the blueprint for the work-in-progress he calls sociocultural homeostasis is the genetically well-established uncomplicated homeostasis, the curator of worth that has been found in uncomplicated life-forms for billions of years. Self involves Mind is a groundbreaking trip into the neurobiological foundations of brain and self.

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Additional info for Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

Sample text

And we can imagine a long umbilical cord that links the barely weaned, perennially dependent conscious mind to the depths of very elementary and very unconscious regulators of the value principle. The history of consciousness cannot be told in the conventional way. Consciousness came into being because of biological value, as a contributor to more effective value management. But consciousness did not invent biological value or the process of valuation. Eventually, in human minds, consciousness revealed biological value and allowed the development of new ways and means of managing it.

As we engage in that retrospective survey, however, it becomes apparent that in order to explain the rise of such long-ago brains we need to go even deeper into the past, further back into the world of simple life-forms, devoid of both minds and brains, those life-forms that are unconscious, unminded, and unbrained. In fact, if we are to find out the rhymes and reasons behind conscious brains, we need to get closer to the beginnings of life. And here once again we come to notions that not only are surprising but undermine commonly held assumptions about the contributions of brains, minds, and consciousness to the management of life.

But when such temporary prolongations became permanent, they became the tubelike components that make neurons so distinctive—the axons and the dendrites. 5 Why is this important? Because while the operation of neurons is quite distinctive and opened the way for complex behavior and mind, neurons maintained a close kinship to other body cells. Simply looking at neurons and at the brains they constitute as radically different cells without taking their origins into account risks separating the brain from the body further than is justifiable, given its genealogy and operation.

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