In the centuries 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. Antonio Damasio challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wonderfully 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 suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behaviour.
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Length: 225 pages Word Wise: Enabled Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Review
Crucial reading ― New York Times Book Review
A thought-provoking account ― New Scientist
idiosyncratic and engaging ― The Times
Rich in provocative concepts about intelligence, memory, creativity and passion ― Los Angeles Times
Damasio is a profound thinker and an elegant writer...Descartes' Error is a fascinating exploration of the biology of reason and its inseparable dependence on emotion -- Oliver Sacks --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
--This text refers to the paperback edition.
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. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
About the Author
Antonio Damasio, a neurologist and neuroscientist, is at the University of Southern California, where he directs a new brain research institute dedicated to the study of emotion and creativity. He is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. The recipient of numerous awards (several shared with his wife Hanna Damasio, also a neurologist and neuroscientist), he is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of two other widely acclaimed books, The Feeling of What Happens and Looking for Spinoza. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Book Description
'Crucial reading' - New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
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Product details
ASIN : B0031RS9I4
Publisher : Vintage Digital (4 September 2008)
Language : English
File size : 859 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 225 pages
Best Sellers Rank: 200,224 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
109 in Neuropsychology (Kindle Store)
127 in Neuroscience (Kindle Store)
202 in Humanism Philosophy
Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 290 ratings
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Adam Johnson
5.0 out of 5 stars An important foundational book for so much of contemporary thinking
Reviewed in Australia on 7 March 2019
Descartes Error opens with a story that has surely gained a life of its own by now. The story of the most unfortunate Phineas Gage who sustained a horrific injury from a steel tamping rod passing through his brain. The story is compelling because, not only did Gage survive, but he seemed to survive without harm. He could walk, talk, think and all of the things you’d expect.
Except he wasn’t without harm. To steal the punchline, he sustained an injury that left him unable to function properly in society. Damasio hypothesizes, based on similar cases with similar injuries, that Gage lost his ability to connect emotion into reasoning, and ultimately lost his ability to make judgements about preferred future states.
This book is now over 20 years old, and it remains a classic in neuroscience. Its central hypothesis is the “somatic marker” hypothesis, which essentially states that reason is connected to embodied emotion. That decision making isn’t just rational and disembodied, but it is also connected deeply into feelings across the body.
These feelings, or somatic markers, enable certain options to be prioritised over others. Somatic markers are informed by the continual, day to day senses, decisions and consequences. The are, in this sense, emergent. They can be conscious or unconscious, but what they do is facilitate “rational” decision making in the complex world that makes up human society. So much so that, without them (as demonstrated by Damasio’s case studies), people are paralysed in their decision making.
Emotions are vital for rational thought. And that fact that this statement is relatively uncontroversial is sign of how significant this book has become. Its subject matter has led to a vast array of writing around the neuroscience of decision making, the self, and how to potentially overcome these embodied emotions. It has led to the recognition that the body and how it processes emotion is critical for how to enhance the performance of the mind, and similarly how the mind is vitally important for how the body functions.
A fascinating book that provides the baseline for so much of what is out in the marketplace of ideas around decision making and emotion. A book that is at times heavy reading, but is for the most part a ripping yarn that rearranges a number of pieces of the human puzzle to derive a compelling hypothesis for how we think.
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nicholas hargreaves
4.0 out of 5 stars Organismic Feedback Loop Theory
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 March 2012
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After having read "The Feeling of What Happens" I thought I'd give this earlier work by the same author a read,as I have recently come across numerous references to it that elevate it to somewhat of a classic in its field.
The first one hundred pages read like a dream and I mistakenly thought that the author had saved his verbose and prolix style for his later works,but then I found I had been lulled into a false sense of security,by which time I was in too deep.The rest of the book took a considerable effort to finish,as to understand a great deal of it requires one to read then re-read a sentence,then deliberate on it until its meaning becomes apparent in your own linguistic terms.This method is taxing to say the least and a vast amount of concentration was required for reading anymore than 10 pages at a time,but due to the interesting nature of the material one remains motivated to proceed further,and by the end of the book you are in no doubt as to the information that has been imparted.
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Marius Francu
5.0 out of 5 stars Glad that I read it
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 January 2019
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I am working in IT business. Is time to cross the corridors of the other disciplines and see how these handled/discovered/managed stuff we are struggling with. Is a neuroscience book, don't expect to be an easy read. I decided to read all books written by Antonio Damasio because of risk related work. But soon I discovered that his books and the other of his books are a good trigger, at least for me, for other useful ideas regarding programming, testing, management.
2 people found this helpful
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Jordan
5.0 out of 5 stars a classic!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 July 2017
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a great book, very interesting read.
2 people found this helpful
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JL
5.0 out of 5 stars Good quality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 May 2020
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This is a good read very informative
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christina s
5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 July 2020
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Very interesting and well written
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