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In The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio, a preeminent worker in the field of cognitive neuroscience, attempts to define consciousness in such a way as to expose its somatic roots and to return to a Darwinian view of the working of the brain. His is a passionate, as
well as reasoned, exposition of concepts which, not quite gettable in a linear way, require like Magic Cards the reader's constant staring and concentration until, with a snap, a card yields up its three-dimensional secret. Damasio's relentless message, here and in his previous book, Descartes' Error, is that emotion, consciousness, and brain coexist within, and are inseparable from, the same body.
Damasio is Allen Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine in Iowa City, and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. He is a prolific researcher, having written some 245 articles, including “A Neural Basis for Sociopathy” and “Fear and the Human Amygdala.” In his earlier book he elucidated the origin of feeling in the body and supported his view that the attempt to keep reason and emotion separate is fatally flawed. This was the view too of Gilbert Ryle (1949), who criticized the Cartesian dualistic view as a category error. Expressive of Damasio's amazingly wide erudition, which enables him to avoid dualism by seeing science in the service of humanism, his explanatory references extend across rock music, Beckett, Shakespeare, musical comedy, and Mozart. His apparent familiarity with ancient literature allows him to remind us that the Greek word for mind was psyche, which also denoted breath and blood.
In keeping with his romantic view, Damasio presents the story of consciousness as if it were a vast Wagnerian drama: organism contends with object, and the self, especially as it first appears in the guise of proto-self, emerges as hero. These struggles produce consciousness, which is our uniquely human condition of mind, characterized b