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165 of 175 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truly a "must read," albeit a first attempt, December 11, 1999
I'm a clinical neurologist myself, and familiar with Damasio's work...there's no doubt he's a first rate behavioral neurologist, who's made many original contributions on both theoretical and clinical levels to neuroscience and neurology. I believe his particular breakdown of consciousness into several levels..."proto" "core" "autobiographical" and "extended"...to be both novel and supported by clinical evidence and intuition. It is inaccurate to say that Damasio equates consciousness with the reticular activating system. In fact, he conceives "core consciousness", the unadorned feeling of self, to be a network function including not only the RAS, but the intralaminar thalamic nuclei and cingulate and primary somatosensory cortex. I also disagree strongly with the reviewer who felt the ideas were largely redundant with previous philosophical attempts at explanations of consciousness. Though I agree the book is at times wordy and could use more detailed scientific backup in places, it is clearly aimed at a popular audience. I look forward to seeing his paradigm used in further neuroscientific research on consciousness, and I'm convinced it will be. This book is definitely on the right track, and one shouldn't hesitate to read it. I'd also note that the book is strongly endorsed by leading scientists and philosophers, such as Eric Kandel, David Hubel, and the Churchlands.
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58 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An exceptional synthesis, with many original ideas, September 9, 1999
This is a landmark book, almost irrespective of how accurate all of Antonio Damasio's extensive theoretical formulations turn out to be. He is the first to admit (in the book itself) that things are changing so fast in this area of neuroscience that virtually nothing on the table at this point can be considered doctrinal, or not subject to potentially major modifications. That being said, I suspect that much of Damasio's more original terminology, terms such as "proto-self," "core-self," "autobiographical self," "core consciousness," and "extended consciousness" will quickly become part of the basic lexicon in consciousness neuroscience in many quarters, due to the shear force of his ideas and the volume of original thought in this work. At the heart of this enterprise is Antonio Damasio's supposition (generally not informing much theorizing about consciousness) that the brain can't be conscious unless it represents not just objects, but a primitive self, and also represents the basic manner in which the self is being altered by interaction with the object(s). In other words, consciousness requires that the brain must represent not just the object, not just a basic self structure, but the interaction of the two. This is still an atypical foundation for a theory of consciousness, given that until recently, it was implicitly assumed that the self could be safely left out of the equation. There has been a recent sea change on this crucial point, parallel with the cogent formulations in Damasio's book. The book will challenge and delight the most sophisticated readers, while rarely leaving the less sophisticated lost or overwhelmed. Damasio makes great use of the rich empirical database provided by the neurology of diseases of consciousness that some theorists of consciousness seem to know almost nothing about, and pay little attention to. The book also addresses in a most thoughtful and sophisticated fashion the problem(s) of self, and carefully unbundles the mostly conflated hierarchical nature of self and consciousness into separate but intimately related systems. It is tightly and carefully reasoned and empirically grounded. It integrates emotion and the body in the story of consciousness. Damasio deals skillfully with conceptual pitfalls in our commonplace terminology of "maps," "neural (neurodynamic) patterns," and "representations" (don't miss it stashed in the appendix!!) The book integrates classical RAS theory and neo-classical ERTAS (extended reticular thalamic activating system) theory into a broader theory about the ventral brain, that of "proto-self mappings and structures." Damasio admits readily this formulation is without the differential functional specificity for the proto-self structures (as perhaps the earliest functionally concerted, distributed system?) that he deeply hopes to see further developed. Further understanding of the functionally concerted and re-entrant operations of the various proto-self structures may be a great frontier in the neurology of consciousness. The core chapter of the book - The Neurology of Consciousness - in which he bridges concepts of proto-self, homeostatic and visceral regulation with traditional RAS and later ERTAS notions into a comprehensive theory of brainstem functions is brilliantly integrative and original, among the two or three finest pieces of neurological writing I have ever read. Added to this impressive menu are the delights of a literary, even at times poetic and moving, writing style. For an in depth treatment of this book, see my review article coming out in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, or email me for reprints.
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Attempt by Damasio to Explain Us to Ourselves, January 18, 2004
Damasio breaks down into minute, qualitative descriptive detail how the boby/brain functions in humans, and ergo, de facto, many mammals. This book's strength is that Damasio backs up his claims regarding neural anatomy, physiology, and function with specific examples from comparative neuropathology. The book's weakness is that he goes on at length with qualitative descriptions for non-intuitive notions like how the body and brain function as a singular unit, and how emotions and feelings are integral along with body/brain physiology. I say this is the book's weakness because Damasio often bogs down and even tries to describe phenomena that are possibly ineffable, but these attempts at qualitative description are also one of the strengths of this book. This may seem contradictory, but possibly the book would have read differently if the author had stuck to purely quantitative case studies. However he did not, so we get through Damasio's several qualitative, alternate descriptions of singular phenomena an attempt to flesh out and make organic the dry clinical data. On the one hand the book could have been more concise without the extended descriptive sections, on the other hand the book possibly becomes richer and more meaningful because of them; this is up to the reader to decide.Having said this, the book itself endeavors to demonstrate how consciousness emerges from gross neuroanatomy and physiology. In this Damasio is successful in using neuropathology to define terms such as: homeostasis, consciousness, language, mental images, neuronal maps, cathexis, and hedonic tone (although he does not use these two latter terms explicitly). In all honesty Damasio is very strict about defining his terms. Even though the author writes to a popular audience some knowledge of neuroanatomy and physiology is helpful in reading this book for maximum effect; although this book would be a good beginning for those interested in neurology. In General, the appendix, `Notes on Mind and Brain,' should probably be read prior to reading the main body of text, especially if the reader is weak in basic neurology. In any event, Damasio is big on forming neologisms although he spends adequate time defining and explaining them. As a neurologist, he always couches his arguments in materialist, Darwinistic terms. A good way to describe the structure of this often rambling, inchoate book, is to briefly compare it to Dr. Paul McLean's triune brain model. The triune brain posits the reptilian brain (brain stem) as primary, the mammal brain (thalamus, limbic, etc.) as secondary, and the primate brain (cortex) emerging evolutionarily later as tertiary. Damasio uses a similar foundation in positing the proto-self, the core self, and the autobiographical self (I told you there were a lot of neologisms), but he does so in a way that has them all hang together as a synchronous, functioning unit. The proto-self is rather the sense of homeostatic organism state, where the core self is the `transcient but conscious reference to the individual organism in which events are happening' (to get a taste of Damasio's descriptive effluence), and the autobiographical self is the more cortical, temporal sense of self derived from transcendental yet highly efficacious ideas about past and future. It can all get pretty incoherent, but a complete reading of the book supplies numerous neural correlates which shore up the author's assertions. In the end it is hard not to recommend this book because, in the reading of it, the author lights upon accurate though transitory descriptions of what it means to have a brain and be conscious. He places emotions and feelings (better see his definitions of these two terms) in their proper place in neural events. Indeed Damasio does well in defining a neural basis for epistemology [p. 130, 137, 138, 296, 305, 316] and idealism [p. 320, 322]. In closing Damasio admits that `we cannot characterize yet all the biological phenomena that take place between (a) our current description of a neural pattern, at varied neural levels, and (b) our experience of the image that originated in the activity within the neural maps.' Indeed we may never be able accomplish such a correlation absolutely, but in the reading of a book such as this one, and say, Edelman's "A Universe of Consciousness," we see we are not very far off either.
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