Sublime

One of Damasio’s most curious discoveries is how the feelings of the body influence rational thought without our even being aware of the process.

Damasio

The frontal cortices appear to be instrumental in assembling the vast mental panoramas that the process of consciousness literally illuminates and identifies as ours.

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has found that the absence of emotion—the actual clinical inability to experience emotion caused by lesions to an area of the brain called the VMPFC, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex—can cause people to go broke on a gambling task.

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