Antonio Damasio
António R. Damasio ( born February 25, 1944 in Lisbon ) is a Portuguese neuroscientist. He was especially known for his work on consciousness research.
Life
António Rosa Damasio is married to Hanna Damasio. Both have received their academic training at the University of Lisbon and completed his doctorate in medicine. In 1971 they founded the " Centro de Estudos Egas Moniz de Linguagem " ( Study Centre for Language Egas Moniz ).
Shortly after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, they were invited to set up the research department of the New University of Lisbon. The project could not be financed. From 1976 to 2005 she taught at the University of Iowa. Since 2005 Antonio Damasio is a professor of neurology and psychology at the University of Southern California and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute.
Research priorities by Hanna Damasio range of neuroanatomical basis of cognition and in the development of new techniques of neuroimaging that allow in vivo studies of brain structures.
Work areas
António Damasio's studies refer in part to the area of the brain anatomical substrates of complex behavior and on the other on the neural basis of language and cognition as well as the relationship of feeling, emotion and reason.
One of his areas of work is the direct correlation of morphological failures in the CT and MRI with the functional neurological deficits in the affected patients. In particular, this method is very successful in stroke to detect localized brain processes, because the loss of function adjusts within a very short time and thus clearly be seen.
Damasio is a staff member of the Mind and Life Institute, and a to the " Mind and Life " dialogues involved scientists.
Descartes' Error
In his memoirs, Descartes 'Error ( in the original: Descartes ' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain ), I feel, therefore I am ( The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness ) and The Spinoza - effect ( looking for Spinoza ), he mainly studied the interactions between body and consciousness and is - by numerous empirical evidence - to the conclusion that the centuries adopted, especially postulated by Descartes, separation between body and mind ( dualism ) is a mistake. Instead, he concludes that a indissoluble connection between body and mind, which are constantly tugging on each other.
His thesis of the inseparability of mind and matter underpinned Damasio including through two case studies.
Case 1: Phineas Gage
In 1848 Phineas Gage, the then 25 -year-old foreman at a railway company, the victim of a serious accident. When an explosion in the laying of rails by the U.S. state of Vermont, a 6 kg pierced heavy, 1.10 m long and 3 cm thick iron rod with a peak of 6 mm from beneath the left cheek bone to the anterior cranial bones by Gages Skull and thereafter to fly for another 30 m. The result is a 4-5 cm large, crater-like wound.
Despite the obviously serious accident Gage during the entire time conscious. He is able to report on the entire circumstances of the accident, and survived him. His injury heals within two months, only the loss of the left eye is physically irreversible. The doctors do not detect any impairment of perception, memory, intelligence, language ability or motor skills.
Nevertheless, it comes in the aftermath of the accident to eye-catching personality changes in Gage: Was he previously responsible, prudent, balanced and friendly, it appears his surroundings now increasingly impatient, moody, fickle and disrespectful. In addition, there is a disruption of its decision-making ability: He makes decisions that run counter to its interests obviously, he can not reasonably plan its future and suffers as a result of a professional and social decline.
Case 2: Elliot
As a "modern Phineas Gage " Damasio describes one of his patients, the tumor due to a part of the prefrontal cortex was removed. After the surgery also Elliot's personality changed radically. While it also comes with him not to restrict cognitive, motor or sensory abilities, but he has a sensitive disruption of its decision-making ability and a lack of feelings on. Pictures of situations that once excited him, now solve with him from no reaction. The correlation between emotional poverty and inability to make decisions leads to Damasio 's theory of somatic markers.
The theory of the somatic marker
Damasio suggested that Elliot's insensitivity prevents him from various action alternatives attach emotional values that will help other people in making decisions.
Damasio theorizes that all human experiences in the course of its growing are stored in an emotional experience memory. This experience memory is divided according to Damasio on a physical signal system, which helps the person in decision making and Damasio describes as somatic markers. At the presentation of various alternative courses of action, the somatic marker so give a certain experience to date through feedback that will help the people present in the decision-making process by first excluding all emotionally intolerable action.
Somatic markers are thus an automatic body's own system for evaluating predictions. They often unconsciously act as an "alarm bell " or start signal, take a principle but not the thinking from, but help in thinking by alternatives - leave are to be assessed as favorable or dangerous, appear as such - a result of individual experience.
As a neural system that allows the acquisition of somatic markers, Damasio believes the prefrontal cortical areas have localized in the brain. His theory of somatic markers explains the connection between Phineas Gage's and Elliot's numbness and inability to make a decision, and presents the apparently indissoluble connection between rational decision making and feelings on.
The core awareness
The study of consciousness is considering two "actors", namely the organism and the object and their relationships to each other. The organism is concerned with establishing reference to an object, and the object of this relationship causes a change produced in the organism. Individual perspective, individual possession of the thought and individual authorship are the crucial aspects that contributes the core - consciousness to the spiritual process. The nature of the core - consciousness is an idea of himself, a sense of themselves as individual beings, the other is busy with the recognition of their existence and of existence. The core consciousness is generated pulsating for any content of which we are aware, again and again. It is the realization that materializes when we encounter an object, generate a neural pattern for both business and leisure (automatic), now that the concise presentation of the object has been formed in our perspective, belongs to us and we can even act on it. There is no inferential process that we perform there, no linguistic processes - there's just the idea of that object and immediately the feeling that we own it. The core consciousness is the direct perception of our individual organism in the act of knowing, where the time is essential, so that the causal connection between the idea of an object and our " possession " is produced.
Empirical evidence
To prove the theory of somatic marker Damásio carried out several experiments. One of these is the so-called " gambling experiment":
In this experiment, which was conducted in healthy patients and patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex, these were each given a loan of $ 2000 and should increase this by means of a card game whose rules they did not know, as far as possible.
To select the subjects were four stacks of playing cards, hereafter A, B, C and D mentioned. They took a card on deck A or B, they won $ 100, while picking up a card on deck C or D earned only $ 50 profit. After a randomly determined number of cards brought them picking up a map of stacks A and B, however, a loss which could be up to $ 1,250. By the reception of the stack of cards C and D took place in similar intervals to losses. Here, however, this amounted to an average of $ 100, so that the stack C and D in the long term proved to be profitable, while stacks A and B led to losses in the long term.
Not damaged as the damaged subjects initially showed a preference for batch A and B, in which they won more. While due to the high losses are not injured parties after about 30 cards changed to C and D, the patients remained with damage to the frontal lobe in their preference for batch A and B, even though they were fully aware that they are also at much higher penalties led. After half a pre-determined playing time these subjects were bankrupt and had to take out an additional loan.
Damasio led forth from this experiment that the punishment or reward the frontal lobe injured - ie subjects without somatic markers - these not to "label" bad alternatives leads to emotional reactions, so these always immediately rewarding option is preferred. Hanna Damasio substantiated these findings by examining the skin line reactions of subjects during such an experiment. In the first phase of the experiment, the reward or punishment generated after flipping each card in both healthy volunteers and frontally damaged patients a skin reaction line. After a certain number of cards, however, such a reaction was produced in healthy subjects even before they picked a card from the adverse stack. This reaction increased with increasing playing time in intensity, ie, the healthy subjects gradually learned to predict, while the prefrontal damaged patients showed no anticipatory reaction a bad score. Damasio concluded that the brains of the prefrontal -damaged subjects did not learn to predict poor outcomes - the automatic sifting process by which the likely quality of the stack is input into the thinking, is so disturbed.
" Basal control systems of the body to create [ ... ] a prerequisite for conscious cognitive processes."
Feelings and emotions
Damasio distinguishes between emotions ( " emotions" ), which he describes as caused by somatic marker body states and feelings ( " feelings" ), representing the conscious perception of emotional body states. Thus, the person learns in the course of its development, for example, the body condition, which is connected to the knee-jerk flight of a danger than fear, so a conscious feeling, perceiving. While the emotions are innate and produce a physical external observable behavior, the feelings are based on experiences and thus enable further protection strategies against external threats.
The German translations of the English terms emotions and feelings, borrowed from the Damasio of the psychologist and philosopher William James, are no uniform distinction in all texts. Thus we find in the work I feel, therefore I am in a preliminary note of the translator and lecturer of the department that is translated in this work, unlike Descartes' Error "emotion and feeling " with " emotion and feeling ". In the text, the lights of the neurons, translated by Claudia Kotte, author Damasio shows the circumferentially his differences manure to jump at the end of the exposition of the concept " emotion " without distinction to the term "feeling".
Re - citation
The childhood researcher Alice Miller has her book The Revolt of the body preceded by a quote from Antonio R. Damasio: Emotions are not a luxury but a complex tool in the struggle for existence.