Antonio Damasio

David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy

University of Southern California, United States; Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, United States

Profile – Antonio Damasio (b. 1944)

Until confronted by patients with frontal lobe damage, Portuguese-born neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio accepted the traditional view that ‘sound decisions came from a cool head’; and that reason and emotion are separate. Since then much of his work has shown the opposite and has become a major influence in neuroeconomics and neuroethics. According to his ‘somatic marker’ hypothesis, emotions are intrinsic to rationality, and are closely bound up with dynamic representations of the body. In Descartes’ Error (1994), he explains that the mistake was to tear body and mind apart. In The Feeling of What Happens (1999), he distinguishes between core consciousness and extended consciousness, and between the proto-self, core self, and autobiographical self. In Self Comes to Mind (2010), he connects homeostasis in unicellular organisms to the conscious self that supports identity and culture. Born in Lisbon, Damasio led the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa for many years before becoming Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and head of its Brain and Creativity Institute.