Antonio Damasio

António Damasio, GOSE, pron. IPA: [ɐ̃'tɔniu dɐ'maziu], (IPA: [ɐ̃'tɔniu dɐ'maziu]) (b. 1944, Lisbon, Portugal) is a behavioral neurologist and neuroscientist. He is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC's Brain and Creativity Institute. Prior to taking up his posts at USC, in 2005, Damasio was M.W. Van Allen Professor and Head of Neurology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City, Iowa, United States. His career at Iowa lasted from 1976-2005. Besides being a well-known researcher in several areas of the neurology, he is a best-selling author of books which describe his scientific thinking.



Life and work
Damasio studied medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School in Portugal, where he also did his medical residency rotation and completed his doctorate. Later, he moved to the United States as a research fellow at the Aphasia Research Center in Boston. His work there on behavioral neurology was done under the supervision of Norman Geschwind.
As a researcher, Dr. Damasio's main interest is the neurobiology of the mind, especially neural systems which subserve memory, language, emotion, and decision-making. His research has helped to elucidate the neural basis for the emotions and has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.
As a clinician, he and his collaborators study and treat the disorders of behavior and cognition, and movement disorders.
Damasio's books deal with the relationship between emotions and feelings, and what are their bases in the brain. His 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and is translated in over 30 languages. 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 New York Times Book Review, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and has thirty foreign editions. Damasio's most recent book, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, was published in 2003. In it, Damasio explores philosophy and its relations to neurobiology, suggesting that it might provide guidelines for human ethics.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine, and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. Damasio has received many awards including the Prince of Asturias Award in Science and Technology, Kappers Neuroscience Medal, the Beaumont Medal from the American Medical Association and the Reenpaa Prize in Neuroscience. He is also in the editorial board of many important journals in the field.
His current work involves the social emotions, decision neuroscience and creativity.
Prof. Damasio is married to Dr. Hanna Damasio, his colleague and co-author of several works.

Antonio Damasio Quotes
Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.
Even in the small world of brain science [in the 1860s], two camps were beginning to form. One held that psychological functions such as language or memory could never be traced to a particular region of the brain. If one had to accept, reluctantly, that the brain did produce the mind, it did so as a whole and not as a collection of parts with special functions. The other camp held that, on the contrary, the brain did have specialized parts and those parts generated separate mind functions. The rift between the two camps was not merely indicative of the infancy of brain research; the argument endured for another century and, to a certain extent, is still with us today.

Bibliography
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Penguin Books, 1994 - 2005, ISBN 0-380-72647-5
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt, 1999, ISBN 0-15-100569-6/ Harvest Books, 2000 ISBN 0-15-601075-5
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, 2003, ISBN 0-15-100557-5

See also
Brain and Creativity Institute
Cognitive neuropsychology
Embodied philosophy
Embodiment
Emotion
Neuropsychoanalysis
Joseph E. LeDoux
Insular cortex


Related Links
Damasio's USC Faculty page
Antonio Damasio's Wikipedia page
An interview with Antonio Damasio
Review of Damasio's book: The Feeling of What Happens
Review of Damasio's book: Descartes' Error
Harcourt interview with Antonio Damasio
Discover magazine article about Antonio Damasio
Audio of António Damasio's 2003 lecture, "Emotion, Feeling, and Social Behavior: The Brain Perspective"
Ideas of António Damasio - JRSM book review

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