When1: 1992
When2: 2003
Who: Antonio Damasio [Damasio, Antonio]
What: psychologist
Where: USA
works\ Brain and Language [1992: with Hanna Damasio]; Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain [1994]; Feeling of What Happens [1999]; Looking for Spinoza [2003]
Detail: He studied extended consciousness, autobiographical self, core-self, proto-self, somatic marker, akinetic mutism, and epileptic automatism.
Consciousness involves special brain regions, which attend to brain regions that regulate body. Wakefulness, attention, and consciousness are separate. Consciousness involves perceptions and emotion mental parts, because emotions precede consciousness. Consciousness is response but is not overt.
Emotion is an innate pattern of chemical and neural responses to stimulus patterns. Emotions involve brainstem, hypothalamus, and basal forebrain, which regulate body. Reticular formation, cranial nerve nuclei, amygdala, anterior cingulate, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex send axons to periaqueductal gray (PAG), which coordinates emotions. Damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduces social behaviors and emotions {prefrontal lobe syndrome}. Different emotions involve different brain regions. Emotions are automatic but learning and consciousness can affect them. Emotions lead to feelings, which involve cortex.
Images become explicit, consciously or unconsciously, in mental space {image space}. Memory, recall, movement, attention, and image processing are in implicit unconscious mental space {dispositional space}.
Symbols are mental image: spatial and temporal, concrete or abstract, conscious or unconscious, or mental patterns representing objects and concepts. Images depend on neural patterns of chemical and electrical activity. Mental uses symbols directly.
Cerebral association cortex recognizes stimulus, which sends signals to amygdala to trigger emotional reaction, which sends to basal forebrain, hypothalamus, and brainstem to perform reaction. Brain senses body changes and conveys information to trigeminal nucleus, parabrachial nucleus, nucleus tractus solitarius, ventral medial thalamus, insula, anterior cingulate, and ventromedial frontal lobes to make emotional state. Mental states arising from brain sensory events are feelings, which are ideas about body state, having both thoughts and processing methods [Damasio, 1999].
Social Sciences>Psychology>History>Consciousness
6-Psychology-History-Consciousness
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Date Modified: 2022.0224