I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Consciousness and How the Feeling-Tone of the Body Underscores the Symphony of the Mind

According to Damasio, the mind, at its base, is nothing other than the body’s ongoing experience of perturbations unfolding at the contact surface between itself and the world.Ω

To the definition of consciousness as a state of mind, Damasio adds that states of mind are always accompanied by feelings.17 We are conscious and very much alive to the feeling of our own existence, or perhaps the feeling is dull, but if we are awake and conscious, we feel something (consciousness is consciousness of something).

Antonio Damasio reminds us, “We are not necessarily thinking machines.10 We are feeling machines that think.”

Clinicians and educators who work with embodied self-awareness often talk about “mind” and “body.” This is an oversimplification that leads to misconceptions: the “mind” is in the head and the “body” is below the neck. The problem is that the mind is part of the body and the body has a mind of its own in its peripheral nerve cells and receptors and

Consciousness, which is the “reflective” element of Norman’s conceptual brain, handles the “higher” functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business o