Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

DAMASIO, Antonio R

ISBN 10: 0333656563 / ISBN 13: 9780333656563

Published by Papermac, London, 1996

About this Item

Pictorial card wraps. xxi, 312. Minor signs of handling, use, but a very sound, clean copy.

Seller Inventory # 00006676

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
• Publisher: Papermac, London
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0333656563
• ISBN 13: 9780333656563
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Edition: Reprint.
• Condition: Very good +
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mathematics, logic and philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

Since Descartes famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am," science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" ( The New York Times )—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.

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.