Antonio Damasio
Encyclopedia
Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, where he heads USC's Brain and Creativity Institute
Brain and Creativity Institute
Headed by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, the Brain and Creativity Institute is a research unit of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California, which aims to "gather new knowledge about the human emotions, decision-making, memory, and communication, from a...
and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. Prior to taking up his posts at USC
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, in 2005, Damasio was M.W. Van Allen Professor and Head of Neurology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics
The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is a 762-bed public teaching hospital and level 1 trauma center affiliated with the University of Iowa. UIHC is part of University of Iowa Health Care, a partnership that includes the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A...
. His career at Iowa lasted from 1976 to 2005.
Besides being a well-known researcher in several areas of neurology and neuroscience
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
, Damasio is the author of several best-selling books which describe his scientific thinking. "As a leading neuroscientist, Damasio has dared to speculate on neurobiological data, and has offered a theory about the relationship between human emotions, human rationality, and the underlying biology."
Life and work
Damasio was born in LisbonLisbon
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...
and studied medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School in Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
, where he also did his neurological residency and completed his doctorate. He worked as a research fellow at the Aphasia Research Center in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
in 1967, prior to receiving his MD in Lisbon. His work there on behavioral neurology
Behavioral neurology
Behavioral neurology is a subspecialty of neurology that studies the neurological basis of behavior, memory, and cognition, the impact of neurological damage and disease upon these functions, and the treatment thereof. Two fields associated with behavioral neurology are neuropsychiatry and...
was done under the supervision of the late Norman Geschwind
Norman Geschwind
Norman Geschwind pioneered behavioral neurology in America. He is best known for his exploration of behavioral neurology through disconnection models based on lesion analysis.- Early life :...
, the Harvard neurologist who created the field.
As a researcher, Damasio's main interest is the neurobiology of the mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
, especially neural systems which subserve memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
, language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
, emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
, decision-making and consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
. Damasio's most influential contribution to date is the demonstration that emotions play a critical role in high level cognition, an idea that ran counter to dominant 20th c. views in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. He showed that emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously); provide the scaffolding for the construction of social cognition
Social cognition
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...
; and are required for the self processes which undergird consciousness. "Damasio provides a contemporary scientific validation of the linkage between feelings and the body by highlighting the connection between mind and nerve cells...this personalized embodiment of mind."
This idea has inspired many systems-neuroscience experiments carried out in laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, and has had a major impact in contemporary science and philosophy. It is often discussed in peer-review experimental and theoretical work (an index of its relevance can be gleaned from the fact that Damasio has been named by the Institute of Scientific Information as one of the most highly cited researchers in the past decade). Damasio has formulated the somatic markers hypothesis
Somatic markers hypothesis
The somatic-marker hypothesis proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide behavior, particularly decision-making. This hypothesis has been formulated by Antonio Damasio.-Hypothesis:...
, which captures the essence of these ideas. Current work on the biology of moral decisions, neuro-economics, social communication
Social communication
The term social communication refers to using the so-called social media. However there is no standardised definition yet recognised. Generally communication requires a social nexus of at least two entities in a technical or just social relation...
, and drug-addiction, has been strongly influenced by Damasio's hypothesis.
Damasio also proposed that emotions are part of homeostatic regulation
Homeostasis
Homeostasis is the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties like temperature or pH...
and are rooted in reward/punishment mechanisms. He recovered James'
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
perspective on feelings as a read-out of body states, but expanded it with an "as-if-body-loop" device which allows for the substrate of feelings to be simulated rather than actual (foreshadowing the simulation process later uncovered by mirror neurons). He demonstrated experimentally that the insular cortex
Insular cortex
In each hemisphere of the mammalian brain the insular cortex is a portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus between the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe. The cortical area overlying it towards the lateral surface of the brain is the operculum...
is a critical platform for feelings, a finding that has been widely replicated, and he uncovered cortical and subcortical induction sites for human emotions, e.g. in ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Ventromedial prefrontal cortex
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a part of the prefrontal cortex in the mammalian brain. The ventral medial prefrontal is located in the frontal lobe and is implicated in the processing of risk, fear, and in decision making.- Anatomy :...
and amygdala
Amygdala
The ' are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system.-...
.
In another development, Damasio proposed that the cortical architecture on which learning and recall depend involves multiple, hierarchically organized loops of axonal projections that converge on certain nodes out of which projections diverge to the points of origin of convergence (the convergence-divergence framework). This architecture is applicable to the understanding of memory processes and of aspects of consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
related to the access of mental contents.
In “The Feeling of What Happens”, Damasio lays the foundations of the “enchainment of precedences”: “the nonconscious neural signaling of an individual organism begets the protoself
Protoself
In António Damásio's theory of consciousness, the protoself or proto-self describes a basic level of awareness biologically available to the nervous system of animals. In Damásio's theory, the protoself is the first of the three processes leading to human consciousness...
which permits core self and core consciousness
Core consciousness
In António Damásio's theory of consciousness, core consciousness describes a hypothesized level of awareness facilitated by neural structures of most animals that allows them to be aware of and react to their environment...
, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness
Extended consciousness
In biological psychology, extended consciousness is an animal's autobiographical self-perception.Extended consciousness is said to arise in the brain of animals with substantial capacity for memory and reason. It does not necessarily require language...
. At the end of the chain, extended consciousness
Extended consciousness
In biological psychology, extended consciousness is an animal's autobiographical self-perception.Extended consciousness is said to arise in the brain of animals with substantial capacity for memory and reason. It does not necessarily require language...
permits conscience
Conscience
Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong. Moral judgement may derive from values or norms...
.
Damasio's research depended significantly on establishing the modern human lesion method, an enterprise made possible by Hanna Damasio
Hanna Damásio
Hanna Damasio is Dana Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and Neurology at the University of Southern California where she directs the Dornsife Neuroimaging Center. She is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California...
's structural neuroimaging
Neuroimaging
Neuroimaging includes the use of various techniques to either directly or indirectly image the structure, function/pharmacology of the brain...
/neuroanatomy
Neuroanatomy
Neuroanatomy is the study of the anatomy and organization of the nervous system. In contrast to animals with radial symmetry, whose nervous system consists of a distributed network of cells, animals with bilateral symmetry have segregated, defined nervous systems, and thus we can begin to speak of...
work complemented by experimental neuroanatomy (with Gary Van Hoesen and Josef Parvizi), experimental neuropsychology (with Antoine Bechara, Ralph Adolphs, and Dan Tranel) and functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions...
(with Kaspar Meyer, Jonas Kaplan, and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang).
As a clinician, he and his collaborators have studied and treated disorders of behavior
Behavior
Behavior or behaviour refers to the actions and mannerisms made by organisms, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with its environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as the physical environment...
and cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
, and movement disorder
Movement disorder
Movement disorders include:* Akathisia * Akinesia * Associated Movements * Athetosis...
s.
Damasio's books deal with the relationship between emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
s and feeling
Feeling
Feeling is the nominalization of the verb to feel. The word was first used in the English language to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe experiences, other than the physical sensation of touch, such as "a feeling of...
s, and what their bases may be within the brain
Human brain
The human brain has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times larger than the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size. Estimates for the number of neurons in the human brain range from 80 to 120 billion...
. His 1994 book, Descartes' Error
Descartes' Error
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a book by neurologist Antonio R. Damasio presenting the author's "somatic marker hypothesis", a proposed mechanism by which emotions guide behavior and decision-making, and positing that rationality requires emotional input...
: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, won the Science et Vie prize, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
Book Award, and is translated in over 30 languages. It is regarded as one of the most influential books of the past two decades. His second book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, was named as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the New York Times Book Review, a Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal
Library Journal
Library Journal is a trade publication for librarians. It was founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey . It reports news about the library world, emphasizing public libraries, and offers feature articles about aspects of professional practice...
Best Book of the Year, and has over 30 foreign editions. Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, was published in 2003. In it, Damasio suggested that Spinoza's thinking foreshadowed discoveries in biology and neuroscience views on the mind-body problem. Spinoza was a protobiologist. His latest book is Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. In it Damasio suggests that the self is the key to conscious minds and that feelings, from the kind he designates as primordial to the well-known feelings of emotion, are the basic elements in the construction of the protoself and core self.
Damasio is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
, the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
' Institute of Medicine, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
The European Academy of Sciences and Arts was created in 1990 in Salzburg, Austria by heart surgeon Felix Unger of Salzburg; the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, Franz König; and the political scientist and philosopher Nikolaus Lobkowicz....
. Damasio has received many awards including the Prince of Asturias Award in Science and Technology, the Kappers Neuroscience Medal, the Beaumont Medal from the American Medical Association
American Medical Association
The American Medical Association , founded in 1847 and incorporated in 1897, is the largest association of medical doctors and medical students in the United States.-Scope and operations:...
, the Nonino Prize, the Reenpaa Prize in Neuroscience, and, most recently, the Honda Prize. He has received honorary doctoral degrees (Doctor honoris causa) from the University of Aachen (2002), University of Aveiro (2003), University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen Business School; 2009), University of Leiden (2010), University Ramon Llull, Barcelona (2010), University of Coimbra (2011) and from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (2011).
His current work involves the social emotions, consciousness and the creative interface between neuroscience and the arts, especially music and film.
Damasio is married to Dr. Hanna Damasio
Hanna Damásio
Hanna Damasio is Dana Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology and Neurology at the University of Southern California where she directs the Dornsife Neuroimaging Center. She is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California...
, his colleague and frequent co-author.
Scientific philosophy
'Damasio himself notes, in fallibilistFallibilism
Fallibilism is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world...
fashion, "I have a difficult time seeing scientific results, especially in neurobiology, as anything but provisional approximations"'. Whether despite or because of that fallibilism, Damasio writes in the belief that 'scientific knowledge can be a pillar to help humans endure and prevail'.
Selected books and articles
- Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Putnam, 1994; revised Penguin edition, 2005
- The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt, 1999
- Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, 2003
- Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Pantheon, 2010
- Meyer K, Kaplan JT, Essex R, Damasio H, Damasio A. Seeing touch is correlated with content-specific activity in primary somatosensory cortex. Cerebral Cortex, vol 21, 2113-2121, 2011.
- Meyer K, Kaplan JT, Essex R, Webber C, Damasio H, Damasio A. Predicting visual stimuli based on activity in auditory cortices. Nature Neuroscience, vol 13, 6, 667–668, 2010.
- Meyer K, Damasio A.Convergence and divergence in a neural architecture for recognition and memory. Trends in Neurosciences, vol. 32, no. 7, 376–382, 2009.
- Immordino-Yang MH, McColl A, Damasio H, Damasio A. Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106 no. 19, 8021–8026, 2009.
- Damasio A, Meyer K. Behind the looking glass. Nature, vol. 454: 167–168, 2008.
- Parvizi J, Van Hoesen G, Buckwalter J, Damasio A. Neural connections of the posteromedial cortex in the macaque: Implications for the understanding of the neural basis of consciousness. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, 103: 5, 1563–1568, 2006.
- Shiv B, Lowenstein G, Bechara A, Damasio H, Damasio A. Investment behavior and the negative side of emotion. Psychological Sciences, 16: 435–439, 2005.
- Parvizi J, Damasio AR. Neuroanatomical correlates of brainstem coma, Brain, 126: 1524–1536, 2003.
- Parvizi J, Damasio AR. Consciousness and the brainstem, Cognition, 79: 135–160, 2001.
- Damasio AR, Grabowski TJ, Bechara A, Damasio H, Ponto LLB, Parvizi J, Hichwa RD. Subcortical and cortical brain activity during the feeling of self-generated emotions. Nature Neuroscience, 3: 1049–1056, 2000.
- Damasio AR. How the brain creates the mind. Scientific American, 281: 74–79, 1999.
- Damasio AR. Investigating the biology of consciousness. Transactions of the Royal Society (London), 353: 1879–1882, 1998.
- Bechara A, Damasio H, Tranel D, Damasio AR. Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science, 275: 1293–1294, 1997.
- Damasio AR. The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Transactions of the Royal Society (London), 351: 1413–1420, 1996.
- Adolphs R, Tranel D, Damasio AR. Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala. Nature, 372: 669–672, 1994.
- Damasio AR, Tranel D. Nouns and verbs are retrieved with differently distributed neural systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 90: 4957–4960, 1993.
- Damasio A, Tranel D, Damasio H. Face agnosia and the neural substrates of memory. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13: 89–109, 1990.
- Damásio AR. Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition. Cognition, 33: 25–62, 1989.
- Tranel D and Damasio A. Knowledge without awareness: An autonomic index of facial recognition by prosopagnosics. Science, 228(21): 1453–1454, 1985.
- Hyman B, Van Hoesen GW, Damasio A, Barnes C. Alzheimer's disease: Cell-specific pathology isolates the hippocampal formation. Science, 225: 1168–1170, 1984.
- Damasio A and Geschwind N: The neural basis of language. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 7:127–147, 1984.