The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. This item is unavailable.The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

The publication of this book is an event in the making. All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the po

Antonio R. Damasio is the Van Allen Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center (the largest university hospital in the world) and is an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego. The recipient of scores of scientific honors, he is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Descartes' Error was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, has been translated into seventeen languages, and has sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide.