Item: 1 copy of The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio
As you might guess from the highly vague title, it's somewhat hard to describe what this book is about. It's about consciousness, and the scientific study thereof. The author is a neurologist at the University of Iowa, and makes the argument that human consciousness is very closely linked in the brain to both emotion and to the bodily mechanisms of survival. I don't dare say any more than that because I'm not sure that even what I just said was completely accurate. Mine is not a scientific mind.
This book, at least as it sets out the problems in the beginning, is at least as much philosophy as it is data. Reading this caused me to generate a whole set of questions in relation to how the brain directs my entire life. I can be typing this right now and also remember, in another place of my mind, that I need to leave in half an hour. How does that work?
Let's see if I can define the main question of the book, though. Okay, say I experience the emotion of anger. How do I know that it is I, Karen, feeling it? How do I know that I'm the same person who once fell down a set of basement stairs and how do I know that where it is I'm supposed to go to work tomorrow? How do I maintain that sense of self through time? Where does that come from?
One way that researchers have conducted inquiry into human consciousness is to study patients who have had damage to different areas of the brain, and correlate that with which functions are lost and which are unaffected. I noticed that although Damasio seemed intellectually excited by cases which revealed something new, he always referred to these patients' circumstances as "tragedy." As in yes, this person's ailment may contribute a great deal to knowledge on the subject, but what's the gain in that for that person who has lost her memory?
The upshot of all of this is that The Feeling of What Happens is a good book, even though I'm being particularly inept tonight at describing what it talks about and why it's good, or why I think it is, anyway. The problem isn't that I don't appreciate science, but that I don't have the background knowledge to do any critical thinking about it. Thus my review boils down to: I thought it was good, but what do I know?
This book, at least as it sets out the problems in the beginning, is at least as much philosophy as it is data. Reading this caused me to generate a whole set of questions in relation to how the brain directs my entire life. I can be typing this right now and also remember, in another place of my mind, that I need to leave in half an hour. How does that work?
Let's see if I can define the main question of the book, though. Okay, say I experience the emotion of anger. How do I know that it is I, Karen, feeling it? How do I know that I'm the same person who once fell down a set of basement stairs and how do I know that where it is I'm supposed to go to work tomorrow? How do I maintain that sense of self through time? Where does that come from?
One way that researchers have conducted inquiry into human consciousness is to study patients who have had damage to different areas of the brain, and correlate that with which functions are lost and which are unaffected. I noticed that although Damasio seemed intellectually excited by cases which revealed something new, he always referred to these patients' circumstances as "tragedy." As in yes, this person's ailment may contribute a great deal to knowledge on the subject, but what's the gain in that for that person who has lost her memory?
The upshot of all of this is that The Feeling of What Happens is a good book, even though I'm being particularly inept tonight at describing what it talks about and why it's good, or why I think it is, anyway. The problem isn't that I don't appreciate science, but that I don't have the background knowledge to do any critical thinking about it. Thus my review boils down to: I thought it was good, but what do I know?
posted by Karen at 5:56 PM
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