When written in 1999 Antonio Damasio was a Van Allen Distinguished Professor and Head of the Neurology Department at Univ. of Iowa's College of Medicine and an Adjunct Professor of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. (For his other books I’ve read, click on his name.) This was a gift book.

The back cover has a good summary: “Widely praised for his innovative scientific thinking and elegant writing, Antonio Damasio achieves a new understanding of consciousness by asking – and answering – profound questions: How is it that we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? In this groundbreaking follow-up to his landmark Descartes’ Error, Damasio, a gifted medical clinician with decades of caring for patients with brain damage, explores the biological roots of consciousness and its role in survival. Linking body and emotion is an arresting and original study of what it is to be human. The Feeling of What Happens, as the New York Times wrote, ‘will change your experience of yourself’.” This book was a NYT Book Review Editor’s Choice in 1999. Before elaborating on the above summary, with which I fully agree, there are some points which, as a thorough reader of elegantly written groundbreaking books with new ideas, I wish to praise: a detailed 4-pp Table of Contents (listing Parts, Chapters, and often several chapter subtitles) and the great detail in some of his many endnotes, whose length adds significant meaning to the concepts noted. Descartes’ Error (book 332) also had these qualities.

His logical order of presentation of the significant concepts is apparent from the Contents. Part I – Introduction – has Ch 1: Stepping into the Light; Part II – Feeling and Knowing – has Ch 2: Emotion and Feeling, Ch 3: Core Consciousness and Ch 4: The Hint Half Hinted. Part III – A Biology for Knowing – has Ch 5: The Organism and the Object, Ch 6: The Making of Core Consciousness, Ch 7: Extended Consciousness, and Ch 8: The Neurology of Consciousness. Part IV – Bound to Know – has Ch 9: Feeling Feelings, Ch 10: Using Consciousness and Ch 11: Under the Light. He uses the 19-pp Appendix – Notes on Mind and Brain – for a technical discussion of the brain and its structure as they relate to the philosophical concepts of human emotions, feelings, self, and consciousness. This allows him to be brief in a chapter when the discussion of relevant brain structures and functions are necessary to understand a concept under discussion. I focus my comments here on the philosophical ideas rather than on the neurological or body chemical aspects that he explains in enough detail for someone like me who is a novice with regard to neuroscience.

Using excerpts from his Introduction prepares the reader for the aims of this book: “How we step into the light of consciousness is precisely the topic of this book. I write about the sense of self and about the transition from innocence and ignorance to knowingness and selfness. My specific goal is to consider the biological circumstances that permit that critical transition.” …”If elucidating mind is the last frontier of the life sciences, consciousness often seems like the last mystery in the elucidation of the mind. Some regard it as insoluble.” Antonio Damasio doesn’t, as this book spells out in detail how he sees the self and consciousness built up from the brain/body as a unity the resulted from evolution. “At its simplest and most basic level, consciousness lets us recognize an irresistible urge to stay alive and develop a concern for the self. At its most complex and elaborate level, consciousness helps us develop a concern for other selves and improve the art of life.” …”I could see that overcoming the obstacle of self, which meant, from my standpoint, understanding the neural underpinnings, might help us understand the very different biological impact of three distinct although closely related phenomena: an emotion, the feeling of that emotion, and knowing that we have a feeling of that emotion. No less important, overcoming the obstacle of self might also help elucidate the neural underpinnings of consciousness in general.” …”In the simplest of summaries, I regard the problem of consciousness as a combination of two intimately related problems. The first is the problem of understanding how the brain inside the human organism engenders the mental patterns we call, for the lack of a better term, the images of an object.” …”Quite candidly, this first problem of consciousness is the problem of how we get a ‘movie-In-the-brain’…” …The second problem “is the problem of how, in parallel with engendering mental patterns for an object, the brain also engenders a sense of self in the act of knowing.”

While the preceding excerpts set up part of the problem, I skip to his solution (Figure 10.1 – from wakefulness to conscious – on page 310), then I describe the terms used in his solution. To remake Figure 10.1 into a linear format, I use numbers to group things that are parts of one step in the linear description. (1) wakefulness, minimal attention, image-making ability, detection of significant object; (2) proto-self; (3) OBJECT; (4) images of object; (5) changes in proto-self; (6) second-order map of organism-object relationship; (7) core consciousness (includes core self); (8) enhanced attention and working memory; (9) conventional memory; (10) autobiographical memory; (11) autobiographical self and extended consciousness; (12) language; (13) creativity; (14) conscience; (15) other creations. As briefly as I can explain these, the abilities in (1) are necessary to form (2) a proto-self. The appearance of an (3) OBJECT leads the organism to form images of it which may well induce (5) changes in the proto-self (for examples, imagine the object to be a snake or a butterfly, which would likely cause different values of (6). A second-order map (simple images are first order) is needed to form a core consciousness and a core self, as (7) implies. With core consciousness and self, an (8) enhanced attention and working memory can use the preceding organism-object relation as an alert – into (9) conventional memory, which may cause the organism to use its autobiographical (10) memory and (11) self to react. If the object were a snake or a butterfly, the organism may use its (12) language ability in its reaction. With the preceding steps, the organism may decide to do something (13) creative, subject to the (14) conscious of the organism as regards concepts like good/bad or right/wrong, perhaps then leading to (15) other creations. Damasio says that the object need not be an external one but could be internal, such as a sudden recall of an appointment missed, a name you couldn’t recall, or as lofty as an epiphany or an inspiration.

The reader should be aware that Antonio Damasio invoked a reductionism scheme for self, memory and consciousness in the sequence shown in Figure 10.1. That is, he subdivided these concepts in order to present their interdependence and interactions in a simple progression, such as from proto-self to core self to autobiographical self or working memory to conventional memory to autobiographical memory. But he sees consciousness, a higher-order entity, only in two forms – core and extended. In his summary, Ch 11, he says, “Presenting the roots of consciousness as feelings allows one to glean an explanation for the sense of self, the second of the two problems of consciousness I outlined in the introductory chapter – that is, how the owner of the movie-in-the-brain emerges within the movie. The proposal, however, does not fully address the first of the two problems I outlined then – how the movie-in-the-brain is generated.”

Although it is clear that much more study remains to be done, I found this book to be a superb analysis of consciousness and the sense of self as related to consciousness. It is indeed a step beyond the main accomplishment of his Descartes’ Error (book 332) – the very convincing argument that our understanding has moved past the philosophically unsound error of mind/body duality to a realization, by means of neuroscience coupled closely with philosophy, that we instead need to think holistically in terms of a body/brain/mind unity. I give this book my highest recommendation.