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Summary: Dr. Damasio explains the brain...
Review: These descriptions of the neurology of thought and sensation helped me to understand that seemingly simple behaviors and mental processes are both staggeringly complex, and surprisingly mechanistic (or electro-mechanistic).What seems to be the straightforward, almost effortless sensation of awareness turns out to be a deceptively complex process, malfunctions of which reveal its complexity. I have found that, for those who find it difficult to follow the thread of this sort of material, the book-on-tape version is both easily reviewable (rewind) and extremely well read.
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Summary: how a neurobiologiszt sees conciousness & emotion
Review: This work has a high value to understand how our brain works and I do recommend it from that point of view. Indeed, the book is probably a first full description of the neurobiological foundations of the self (as we understand this today). Yet, Damasio's approach in this book is somewhat reductionistic. It reduces our emotions and our thinking to the facts that a neuroscientist will be able to observe. From that perspective, it's a real masterpiece. On the other hand, it won't be very useful in achieving a higher level of emotional intelligence, since that requires answering a different question: "How do people use the brain?" To compare: it's not because you understand how a PC functions from a technical point of view that you'll understand how to use a program such as an E-mail editor (to give a simple example). From this second perspective, its really difficult for me to accept some of his conclusions on how consciousness causes emotions, especially since for him a mental image is the same as a mental pattern and his definitions for the word "feeling" and "emotion" differ from the convention definitions. Where his neuroscience vocabulary is more detailed than that of an average cognitive scientist, his vocabulary for the cognitive psychological processes is smaller, and as Wittgenstein has stated: "The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world." Near the end of the book Damasio states: "in all likelihood, I will never know your thoughts unless you tell me, and you will never know mine until I tell you". I agree with him in that his approach won't help him to understand someone's behavior, but I know that many other theories will help me in that area. Patrick E.C. Merlevede, MSc. -- co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"
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