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Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain Hardcover – Deckle Edge, November 9, 2010

by Antonio Damasio (Author)

77 customer reviews

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From one of the most significant neuroscientists at work today, a pathbreaking investigation of a question that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists for centuries: how is consciousness created?

Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as a mind with a self—is to begin with a biological process created by a living organism. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the introspective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told. He also advances a radical hypothesis regarding the origins and varieties of feelings, which is central to his framework for the biological construction of consciousness: feelings are grounded in a near fusion of body and brain networks, and first emerge from the historically old and humble brain stem rather than from the modern cerebral cortex.

Damasio suggests that the brain’s development of a human self becomes a challenge to nature’s indifference and opens the way for the appearance of culture, a radical break in the course of evolution and the source of a new level of life regulation—sociocultural homeostasis. He leaves no doubt that the blueprint for the work-in-progress he calls sociocultural homeostasis is the genetically well-established basic homeostasis, the curator of value that has been present in simple life-forms for billions of years. Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking journey into the neurobiological foundations of mind and self.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (November 9, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307378756
ISBN-13: 978-0307378750
Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #119,372 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #126 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diseases & Physical Ailments > Nervous System
- #185 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Neurology > Neuroscience
- #255 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Neuropsychology

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4.2 out of 5 stars

5 star		56%
4 star		27%
3 star		7%
2 star		5%
1 star		5%

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

Resolving the "Mind-body" Problem through Mental Cartography

By Herbert L Calhoun on December 20, 2010

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

Professor Damasio begins this incredible story using Darwin's Theory of Evolution as the driving force and centerpiece of a theoretical odyssey that is as intimate as it is cogent and thorough. For the author, the theory of how the mind becomes "self" is a labor of love, surely his professional life quest: the last remaining riddle of the universe, now finally solved by the life work of this author. It is told so carefully, so cogently, and with such clarity and depth that it amounts to a convincing love story that will simply take the breath away.

This book is sure to be one of the finalists in the National Science Book of the year Award. It certainly gets my vote!

At the center of this incredible story (and the author's theory) is the ever-evolving cell: that powerful "active" (but much underrated) building block of all living systems. With the evolution of the cell, which importantly, has, since its inception, always had the capacity to be a "stand-along," "purposefully surviving" functional living system and unit of life. That is to say as a "proto-animal," the cell brings intrinsically into being the functional aspects of an "intentional life." The mind is simply one of the latest evolutionary adaptations of this exquisite carefully balanced, living piece of architecture called (animal) life. One of the key remaining unanswered properties of a cell is that it comes with the "will to survive," built-in? How it does this?-- the author does not touch with a ten-foot pole; and this remains the only flaw in the design, as the research leaves unanswered, and thus begs this most important of questions. But more about that later.

As Professor Damasio demonstrates so elegantly, having a "proto-animal" as the functional building block of life is no small matter.Read more ›

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92 of 97 people found the following review helpful

Piecing It All Together.

By Amazon Customer on November 22, 2010

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

Dr. Damasio says that, "This book is dedicated to addressing two questions. First: how does the brain construct a mind? Second: how does the brain make that mind conscious?" Do I think he does an exceptional job of tackling these two questions? Yes, I do.

I believe the greatest strength of this book lies in Dr. Damasio's capacity to take account of vast amounts of information and viewpoints related to mind and consciousness. He has included large swaths of issues that are usually books in and of themselves (Body Maps - The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better, Extended/Embodied Cognition - The Extended Mind (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology), Efficient Computational Theory of Mind - Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions, Selfhood - The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, Free Will - ...Read more ›

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

A wonderful fresh look

By Joe on December 6, 2012

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

Antonio Damasio, commonly held as one of the leading neuroscientists, is currently a professor of neuroscience at The University of Southern California. He has written many books including Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain , The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. But the subject of this review is his latest book Self Comes To Mind. It is an incredibly interesting study on the workings and evolutionary past of consciousness and the mechanisms of the human brain. This book takes a step back from what is held as common knowledge and reexamines consciousness. The book is based around the idea of consciousness, what it entails, why it is important and where it came from.

The book starts by asking the reader to take a fresh look at consciousness, not asking them to throw away all knowledge, but to try and step back and observe it from a new angle. This was very important for me because it had been ages since I truly took a fresh look at neuroscience and psychology. I had become so complacent in learning the areas, functions, pathways etc. of the brain, that the request to take a fresh look was a wake up call for me. It drove me to re-ask the questions that originally lead me to study neuroscience and to ask how little things play into the big picture. From this comes the fundamental discussion of how to go about studying the objective mind in a subjective manner. Damasio uses the working hypothesis that mental states and brain states are essentially equivalent. This allows for him to tie philosophy, psychology and neuroscience together.

From here he discuses what goes in to making the mind conscious and the creation of perception.Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Three Stars

While misguided in his attempt to understand the mind, Antonio Damasio certainly does understand the brain.....

Published 1 month ago by Swede

Top-notch book on consciousness.

Further thoughts on the scientific research into the nature of human consciousness from one of the leading minds (!) in the scientific field. Heavy duty, but well worth the work. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Mac McCarthy

Self Comes to Mind

.
Interesting book but a bit of a stretch for the lay person.

There is a real need to filter out unnecessary and distracting information from the opening... Read more

Published 6 months ago by Kim Burdick

Five Stars

The writing is occasionally a little awkward, but this is a fabulously thought-provoking book.

Published 7 months ago by Greg Vitercik

the comments of other reviewers about the densely written prose ...

the comments of other reviewers about the densely written prose are true; it's not dense because of the
subject matter but rather because of the sentence structure, choice of... Read more

Published 7 months ago by Bob

Five Stars

Excellent book

Published 8 months ago by Alexander Kochkin

Wonderful

I think this book is the best way for a non-scientist to acquire the knowledge about complicated processes and the newest findings in the field of neurobiology.

Published 8 months ago by Marcin Pasikowski

Study the conscious mind you must follow the work of Antonio Damasio,...

Damasio shows how the conscious mind comes into being. The mystery is not completely explained and may never be just because it is difficult to imagine how the human mind can ever... Read more

Published 8 months ago by Philip Henderson

Four Stars

An excellent presentation of the complexity of how the mind constructs the Self, especially for an interested lay reader.

Published 10 months ago by James R. Cook III

A MUST READ FOR PEOPLE OF INTEREST!

As a Scientist myself, I am amazed by the intricate details of this book. This is The text book for the Neuroscience Dept. Read more

Published 10 months ago by Sonia Fiddler