The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of UCLA's Brain and Creativity Institute, presents "the first truly compelling neurobiological account of the self...a remarkable work of intellectual daring" (Nature).

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Widley praised for his innovative scientific thinking and elegant writing, Antonio Damasio, the international bestselling author of Descartes' Error achieves an understanding of consciousness by asking and answering profound questions: How is it we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self?

In this groundbreaking book, Damasio — a renowned and revered scientist and clinician who 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 — explores the biological roots of sentient awareness and its role in survival.

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. Linking body and emotion in an arresting and original study of what it is to be human, The Feeling of What Happens "will change your experience of yourself" (The New York Times).

"Both Descartes Error and The Feeling of What Happens are essential reading. They are ground-breaking classics of psychology and neuroscience."—Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine

ANTONIO DAMASIO is the David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. He is a member of both the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Descartes’ Error was an international bestseller. The Feeling of What Happens has been translated into seventeen languages.