Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain - Softcover

Damasio, Antonio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0399138943 ISBN 13: 9780399138942

Publisher: Grosset/Putnam, 1994

Synopsis

Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Although I cannot tell for certain what sparked my interest in the neural underpinnings of reason, I do know when I became convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality could not be correct". Thus begins a book that takes the reader on a journey of discovery, from the story of Phineas Gage, the famous nineteenth-century case of behavioral change that followed brain damage, to the contemporary recreation of Gage's brain; and from the doubts of a young neurologist to a testable hypothesis concerning the emotions and their fundamental role in rational human behavior. Drawing on his experiences with neurological patients affected by brain damage (his laboratory is recognized worldwide as the foremost center for the study of such patients), Antonio Damasio shows how the absence of emotion and feeling can break down rationality. In the course of explaining how emotions and feelings contribute to reason and to adaptive social behavior, Damasio also offers a novel perspective on what emotions and feelings actually are: a direct sensing of our own body states, a link between the body and its survival-oriented regulations, on the one hand, and consciousness, on the other. Descartes' Error leads us to conclude that human organisms are endowed from the very beginning with a spirited passion for making choices, which the social mind can use to build rational behavior.

About the Author:

Antonio R. Damasio, M.D., Ph.D., is the M. W. Van Allen Professor of Neurology and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City. He is also adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grosset/Putnam
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0399138943
• ISBN 13: 9780399138942
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312