António Damasio

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António Damasio

António Rosa Damásio (born February 25, 1944 in Lisbon ) is a Portuguese neuroscientist . He was best known for his work on consciousness research .

Life

António Damásio is married to Hanna Damásio . Both received their academic training at the University of Lisbon and graduated with a doctorate in medicine. In 1971 the Damásio couple founded the "Centro de Estudos de Linguagem Egas Moniz " (Study Center for Language Egas Moniz).

Shortly after the 1974 Carnation Revolution , 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 they taught at the University of Iowa . António Damásio has been Professor of Neurology and Psychology at the University of Southern California since 2005 , where he heads the Brain and Creativity Institute.

Hanna Damásio's research focuses on the neuroanatomical basis of cognition and the development of new neuroimaging techniques that allow in vivo studies of brain structures.

Work areas

António Damásio's research relates on the one hand to the area of ​​the anatomical substrates of complex behavior and on the other hand to the neural basis of language and cognition as well as the connection between feeling , emotion and reason .

One of his areas of work is the direct correlation of morphological deficits in CT and MRT with the functional neurological deficits in the affected patient. This method is particularly successful in the case of a stroke , in order to identify localized brain processes, since the loss of function occurs within a very short time and is thus more clearly recognizable.

Damásio is an employee of the Mind and Life Institute or a scientist involved in the “Mind and Life” dialogues.

Descartes' error

In his treatises Descartes 'Errtum (in the original: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain ), I feel, so am I ( The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness ) and Der Spinoza - Effect ( Looking for Spinoza ), Damásio primarily examines the interactions between body and consciousness and comes to the conclusion - based on numerous empirical evidence - that the separation between body and mind ( dualism ) assumed for centuries, especially postulated by Descartes , is a mistake . Instead, he establishes an indissoluble connection between body and mind, which constantly influence each other.

Damásio et al. Substantiates his thesis of the inseparability between spirit and matter. a. through two case studies.

1st case: Phineas Gage

In 1848 Phineas Gage , then 25-year-old foreman at a railway company, was the victim of a serious accident. During a blast as part of the laying of rails by the US state of Vermont , a 6 kg, 1.10 m long and 3 cm thick iron rod with a tip of 6 mm from below the left cheekbone to the anterior skull bones drilled through gages Skull and then flies another 30 m. A crater-shaped wound approx. 4–5 cm in size develops.

Despite the apparently serious accident, Gage was conscious throughout the entire time and, as a survivor, was able to report on the entire course of the accident. His injury heals within two months, only the loss of the left eye is physically irreversible. The doctors found no impairment of perception , memory , intelligence , language ability or motor skills .

Nevertheless, there are noticeable changes in personality at Gage in the period after the accident : if he was previously responsible, level-headed, balanced and friendly, he now appears increasingly impatient, moody, fickle and disrespectful to those around him. In addition, his ability to make decisions is impaired : he makes decisions that obviously run counter to his interests, he can no longer plan his future properly and as a result suffers professional and social decline.

2nd case: Elliot

Damásio describes one of his patients as a "modern Phineas Gage" who had a part of the prefrontal cortex removed due to a tumor . After the surgery, Elliot's personality also changed radically. Although he does not suffer from impairment of cognitive, motor or sensory abilities, he has a sensitive disruption of his decision-making ability and a lack of emotions. Images of situations that once aroused him now do not trigger any reactions from him. The correlation between emotional poverty and inability to make decisions leads Damásio to the theory of somatic markers.

The theory of somatic markers

Damásio suspects that Elliot's callousness prevents him from attaching emotional values ​​to various alternative courses of action that help other people make decisions.

Damásio then hypothesizes the somatic markers :

Damásio believes that he has localized the prefrontal cortical fields in the brain as a neural system that allows the acquisition of somatic markers . His theory of the somatic markers explains the connection between Phineas Gages and Elliot's emotional disturbances and their inability to make decisions, and establishes the apparently inextricable connection between rational decision-making and feelings.

To test his hypothesis, he and Antoine Bechara developed the Iowa Gambling Task .

Definition of the term "awareness"

In the neurosciences , the connection between the brain and consciousness is examined. Damasio defines "consciousness" as follows: "Consciousness is a state of mind in which one has knowledge of one's own existence and the existence of an environment" . This definition corresponds to the “self-model” of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger and can therefore be found in many animals (with a nervous system ).

For Damasio, consciousness is “a trinity of wakefulness , mind and self ”. He believes that “the brain constructs consciousness by creating a self-process within an awake mind. The essence of the self is that the mind focuses on the material organism in which it is at home. The wakefulness and mind are indispensable components of consciousness, but its characteristic element is the self. ” Next to this hypothesis is the “ assumption that the self is built up in stages. The simplest level arises from that part of the brain that represents the organism (the proto-self ). The second stage results from establishing a relationship between the organism and that part of each part of the brain that represents an object to be known . The result is the core self. The third stage allows several objects, previously recorded as lived experience or foreseen future, to interact with the proto-self and generate an abundance of core-self-pulses. This is where the autobiographical self emerges . All three stages are constructed in separate but coordinated work areas of the brain. "

He is an advocate of the hypothesis of the equivalence of mind and brain: " The view presented in this book [...] involves the idea that states of mind and states of the brain are essentially equivalent ".

The core consciousness

The exploration of consciousness means looking at two “actors”, namely the organism and the object, and their relationships to one another. The organism is busy establishing a relationship with an object, and the object of this relationship causes a change in the organism. Individual perspective, individual possession of thought and individual authorship are the decisive aspects that core consciousness contributes to the mental process. The essence of core consciousness is an idea of ​​oneself, the feeling of oneself as an individual being, preoccupied with realizing one's own existence and the existence of others. The core consciousness is pulsing again and again for each content that we become aware of. It is the knowledge that materializes when we encounter an object, generate a neural pattern for it and (automatically) discover that the now concise idea of ​​the object has been formed in our perspective, belongs to us and we can even influence it. There is no inferential process that we lead there, no linguistic process - there is just the idea of ​​this object and immediately afterwards the feeling that we own it. The core consciousness is the direct sensation of our individual organism in the act of knowing, whereby the time is of essential importance that the causal connection between the idea of ​​an object and our "taking possession" is established.

Feelings and emotions

Damásio separates between emotions , which he describes as the body states caused by somatic markers, and sensations ("feelings"), which represent the conscious perception of the emotional body states. In the course of their development, for example, humans learn to perceive the physical state associated with the reflexive flight from danger as fear, i.e. as a conscious feeling. While the emotions are innate and produce physical behavior that can be observed from the outside, the sensations are based on experience and thus enable further protective strategies against external threats.

The German translations of the English terms emotions and feelings , which Damásio borrowed from the psychologist and philosopher William James , are unfortunately not uniformly differentiated in all texts. In the work I feel, I am in a preliminary remark by the translator and the specialist editor that in this work - unlike Descartes' error - "emotion and feeling" is translated as "emotion and feeling". In the text The Shining of the Neurons , translated by Claudia Kotte, the author Damásio initially shows his distinction in detail, only to jump from the term “emotion” to the term “feeling” without any distinction at the end of the presentation.

Re-citation

Childhood researcher Alice Miller added a quote from António R. Damásio to her book The Revolt of the Body : Emotions are not a luxury but a complex aid in the struggle for existence .

Awards

Publications

As an author:

  • Descartes' error. Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Picador, London 1994.
    • Descartes' error. Feeling, Thinking and the human brain. List, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-471-77342-8 .
  • The feeling of what happens. Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt Brace, New York 1999.
    • I feel therefore I am The decryption of consciousness. List, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-548-60164-2 .
  • Looking for Spinoza. Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. Heinemann, London 2003.
    • The Spinoza Effect. How feelings determine our life. List, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-471-77352-5 .
  • Self comes to mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon Books, New York 2010.
    • Man is himself. Body, mind and the emergence of human consciousness. Siedler, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-88680-924-0 .
  • The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Pantheon Books, New York 2018.
    • In the beginning there was the feeling. The biological origin of human culture. Siedler, Munich 2017, ISBN 3-8275-0045-1 .

As editor:

Web links

Commons : António Damásio  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A. Damasio at the University of Southern California ( Memento April 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. Contents, participants and program of Mind and Life II: Dialogues Between Buddhism & the Neurosciences ( Memento of October 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  3. Antonio Damasio : Man is himself: body, mind and the emergence of human consciousness . Pantheon Verlag 2013, ISBN 978-3570551790 , p. 169 ("Consciousness: a definition")
  4. ibid. P. 196
  5. ibid. P. 193
  6. ibid. P. 328
  7. cf. Damasio, A. (2000): I feel, therefore I am. The decryption of consciousness. Munich: List. Pp. 155-156.
  8. Douglas F. Watt: Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , review and explanation of the term core consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).
  9. See his essay in: Culture Exchange III / 13, p. 22.
  10. The strictly materialistic or naturalistic view of the mind-body problem meets with criticism. So there are z. B. a negative criticism in the FAZ . The review in DR Kultur is just as critical .