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>> Heather Mitchell: Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Heather Mitchell, and I
am here to introduce and welcome Antonio Damsio, who is visiting us as part of the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speakers Series.
Dr. Damasio is here to discuss his latest book, "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the
Conscious brain." It is time to debunk the long-standing idea that consciousness is
separate from the body. What we think of as self is actually a biological process created
by the brain. Consciousness is a dynamic, unpredictable faculty that is instrumental in
defining and explaining who we understand ourselves to be.
Dr. Damasio is a professor of neuroscience and the director of the USC Brain and
Creativity Institute. His earlier books include "Decarts Air: Emotion, reason and the
Human Brain." "The feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion, in the Making of
Consciousness," and "Looking for Spinoza, Joy Sorrow and the Feeling Brain." Please
join me in welcoming Dr. Damasio to Microsoft.
[applause]
>> Antonio Damasio: Thank you. Let me start by apologizing for my voice. I have a
horrible laryngitis. It's very powerful. It doesn't taste good, although it was acquired in
Japan last week. And it doesn't taste sushi at all. So I'm delighted to be here in spite of
laryngitis and I will talk to you about research on consciousness and on the self. It's
always a pleasure to talk here. I missed the room where I've spoken before that had all
the people logging in and appearing on the wall. It's a much bigger room. But I miss the
little icons.
At any rate, always a pleasure to come here. And I don't think I need to disguise myself
and make things easier than they are. I'll just make them very difficult because you guys
can perfectly well cope with it.
So here we go. I thought I would give you a very brief summary of main ideas in this
book. And the talk's name is neuro self and I'm trying to make here the immediate
bridge between the self that we conceive of psychologically, which we all have a sense
of, although very often not a perfect sense.
And the fact that it is neurally based, that it is something that is being generated by a
living organism in the brain of a living organism, provided that brain is totally hooked and
interactive with the body without which none of this makes any sense.
Now, it is because we have a self that we can make sense of consciousness. And
consciousness, I have to tell you -- and I say that in the book -- is an incredibly
treacherous term.
I used to think that the best thing is not even to talk about consciousness, because
you're bound to get into a minefield, and people start coming with their definitions of
consciousness and their either lay view or scientific view but highly concerned with their
field of study. And it's very difficult to make a conversation work once you use those
terms.
And yet there's no other way of doing it but confronting the issue. What I'm going to do
is define the same way I do in the book, define the term. And when I talk about
consciousness, I don't mean self-consciousness in a very broad sense of high level
human consciousness only.
And I don't mean consciousness in the very lay term sense of that you will use if you talk
about, say, climate warming or climate changes as finally got into the consciousness of
western societies, which is a metaphorical use of the sense, and I'm not talking about,
for example, self-consciousness when I say that John got very embarrassed because
Mary was staring at him.
And therefore he got self-conscious, which again is a semi metaphorical use.
What I'm talking about is a process, state of mind, in fact, which is highlighted by three
fundamental neural processes. One which is wakefulness, another which is mind, and
another which is self. And of course I better define for you what I mean by these three
things.
Wakefulness is very easy for you to follow because it's exactly the kind of thing you
acquire when you wake up in the morning and the kind of thing you give up for certain
when you go to sleep.
Mind, we need to spend a little more time in defining, but I can give you a rapid definition
from my perspective, which is the representation of objects and events present inside
and outside the organism, in both perception and in recall.
And it's a very direct simple but I think actually rather complete definition, because it
means that minds are about representing objects and about representing actions and
events.
And those actions don't need, and objects don't need to be exclusively on the outside,
which is the way they're generally taken to mean but they can be inside your own body.
This is very key. And they can be in direct perception. Right now you're obviously
looking at me so you have in your mind representations of me visually and of me in
terms of my voice. But this could all be in recall. You could later on tonight be thinking
about this and suddenly picture in your mind the sight of me here at the podium or my
horrible voice or both.
All of that is in fact constituting the mind, which is flowing in time as a set of
representations, of many different sensory stripes. And the currency of our minds is
images. I will -- I cannot talk about it right now -- but our brains, the brains certainly of
humans and the brains of many species in fact going all the way down to relatively
modest species, our brains have the capacity of making neural maps, which means that
they can represent the constitution of objects, topographically. And I'm not just talking
about the visual constitution, but the constitution when you touch something and
appreciate its texture or its shape or the representation, for example, of the sound
properties in a voice or in the kind of noises that an object makes.
And neural maps are that currency of our minds and once neural maps are appreciated
in consciousness, they can be properly called images.
So you can say that minds are a flowing process of images, which are at heart neural
maps generated by the brain of an organism that is interacting and moving about in the
environment.
Now, there was something missing at the bottom of that slide that says that feelings of
the body are a particular class of images. And in keeping with the fact that I said that the
representations that are in the mind correspond to objects and events, both outside and
inside the organism, I'm now adding this little wrinkle that when you have images of your
own body, some of those images can become feelings. But they are in fact
representations of body state; representations, for example, of pain or pleasure or many
of those fundamentals that are literally on the border of mind and the appearance of
sentis, the appearance of consciousness, it's really the bottom rung of consciousness.
Now what about self, which was the second constitutive component of the process of
consciousness. In a very basic way, I can define it as the organization of images as a
function of homeostatic needs of the organism.
Now you will see that this definition is something that doesn't, is not traditional at all.
And what I'm taking into account here is an evolutionary perspective. I'm looking at the
function of self as a particular organization of images, and I'm saying that the
organization of those images is a function of something that is absolutely critical for the
organism, which is organizing life, organizing the management of life according to
homeostatic needs. And this is something that I'm going to introduce right now. It's
something that some of you may ask later on and we can go into greater depth. And it's
the question is as follows: Why is it that we have minds to begin with? And why is it that
we have consciousness? Why is it that that prevailed in evolution? What's the
advantage?
To make a long story short, the advantage is to generate the better regulation of life.
This is very important, because very often people think of mind or self or consciousness
as something that appears from the top down and is generated without any kind of
connection to the fundamental problems of a living organism.
And I think this is nonsense. I think that the only reason why something as strange and
complex as mind and consciousness would have prevailed in evolution is if it would have
a tremendously important role to play in inducing part of our survival or optimizing our
survival, and in great part as well aiming at something that we certainly at the human
level all seek very actively, which is well-being.
In other words, we don't just seek to survive, we seek to survive with well-being. That's
part of the organization of life that each individual and societies create for themselves.
So the self, in strict biological terms for me, is this ability of organizing the images that
are flowing in the mind according to this principle of biological need. According to the
fact that the main problem that we face as individuals is the management of the needs of
life management inside a living organism.
We deal with that the same way that amoebas or bacterial cells or unicell creatures deal
with. They have to manage life. They have to manage this life process in a way that is
compatible with procuring sources of energy, incorporating sources of energy,
transforming them, excreting waste products, and guiding behavior so that it can be
conducive to survival and eventually to well-being.
And the big difference between those simple cells and our very complex organisms,
including the human organisms, is that in the simple cells all the management has been
prescribed by your genome, and your genome is telling you exactly what to do in certain
circumstances.
So if something happens, if X happens, you're supposed to do this. But that is not
conscious. It's something that the genome is setting for you and it was set by natural
selection. And the situation that we have is quite different in the sense that we now have
a way of being aware of the fact that such regulation processes are occurring and we
have a way of optimizing those regulation processes.
And in relation to images, as I told you about, neural maps and images and the
constitution of mind, you may say, well, why do we even have minds in the first place?
And the answer is that when you have neural maps, you have a possibility of optimizing
responses in relation to both the inside and the outside.
So, for example, if you have the possibility of representing a predator in great detail, you
have the possibility also of responding to the presence of the predator with a better
response. Likewise, if you have an opportunity in the environment, if that opportunity is
better represented visually or auditorily, or in terms of touch or smell, you have a
possibility of generating a better response.
So all of this hierarchy of incredibly complex processes in our brain have very good
reason to stay on. They have prevailed, because once there were organisms that
presented that variety, those organisms would have been more successful, would have
been selected and therefore the brains that were so organized would have a possibility
of continuing on in further generations.
Now, let me go back to say so you have that self as organization of the mind. And then
in later stages, because you can say that first self is sort of a minimal self, something we
definitely share with lots of animals, but what we normally talk about as self is more
complex. And there I define it as an assembly of a neural surrogate of the organism
toward which images are oriented, thus operating as a protagonist and perceiver,
because we all know when we talk about, say, myself or yourself, we're thinking about
something more than just the organization of the mind to satisfy our needs of life
regulation.
We have something that indicates of humans at least that also includes the history of our
past, includes the anticipation of our future. And is something much more complex that
eventually culminates in personhood and in identity. And that's the process that's much
more complex. We'll get into that in a minute.
So this is to launch me in this division of the self into three stages. The protoself, the
core self and the autobiographical self. The protoself and the core self is something we
share with numerous species. For example, if you asked me if a fish or lizards or birds,
for that matter, have protoselves and core selves, I would say it's quite likely that they
do. I cannot guarantee you because they will not tell us, but for a variety of reasons we
can go into they have as a very likely possibility not only minds, which is fairly patent that
they do, but they have protoself and core self levels; that is, minimal selves.
What they tend not to have, except in species that are very, very close to us, like, for
example, higher primates, or cetaceans or wolves is an autobiographical self. What I
mean by a autobiographical self is a level that is more complex and that's built gradually
in the biological system on the core self and on the protoself, which takes into account
not just the here and now, the moment that it's being lived, but also what has come on
before as a narrative in your history and what we anticipate for the future.
And on the anticipation of the future, I have to say that humans are quite particular and
quite unique. We do -- we live constantly in a permanent present that on the one hand
looks at the past and on the other looks at the future that we have planned and that we
have aspired to but we have committed to memory.
So therefore we are caught in between past and present, except that that past and
present change all the time because right now we all have 15 minutes more than we had
when this whole lecture started, and there's already a past that was present 15 minutes
ago.
And there's more that is being incorporated moment by moment as we move into the
future.
Let me just say that it is out of the auto biographical self that we generate most of the
things that we hold true and dear in terms of our humanity.
So I think the ability to generate an expansion of memory of expansion of reasoning, the
force to generate language, and eventually the forces that led to creativity, they all came
out of the presence of the autobiographical self, and when we talk today about the
instruments of culture with which we navigate our social life, those would not have been
possible had we not developed an autobiographical self, and it's fairly obvious that the
species that don't have an autobiographical self or don't have much of it, have not had
the possibility of generating a culture whereas we have precisely because we expanded
all these other functionalities in a very rich way.
So let me just say that this first stage of the protoself actually is contrary to what even
myself used to think about ten years ago, brought out from the operations the brainstem
as far as I can see now and it is -- of course when you think of the brain, you very often
think of consciousness, and you consider the cerebral cortex, which is easily the most
distinctive aspect of the human brain. And many people, including myself a very long
time, thought, well, it's out of this cerebral cortical mantel that we're going to generate
this amazingly complex process which is consciousness. And the self that really gives
the mind the conscious level.
Well, my view right now is that that is only true for the very high levels of self, the one
that I call autobiographical self, and that the protoself is actually being generated out of
the brainstem here.
Now, this may sound quite controversial, and some people may be a little bit annoyed at
this, because this part of the brain, the brainstem, actually is extremely similar in design
to the one that you can find in reptiles.
So a lizard or a frog will have a brainstem that is of the same model. So you say, well,
so are they likely to have anything like our consciousness. And the answer is, of course,
not. They are conscious in kind. They have mind processes. They have conscious
processes as far as one can ascertain, but it doesn't make any difference because what
we are talking about in the human consciousness is a combination of what goes on here
in rich dialogue with what goes on in the cerebral cortex. What I'm saying is not that
human consciousness comes straight out of the same brainstem that exists in reptiles,
I'm saying that it comes out of a particular way of wiring the brainstem of human, which
is in the reptile model, with a cerebral cortex that is hugely different from that of any
other species, and of course much larger in capacity as well.
And what I'm talking about -- so the location, of course, is here, as you can see. And
what I'm talking about is this region over here, there is particularly important, and that is
the tegmentum of the brainstem, particularly at the level of the midbrain. And it is very
important to know that we have quite a lot of information about what this part of the brain
is doing. I'm not just dreaming about this and looking at these brains and sort of bringing
ideas to you.
We know that when you damage this part of the brainstem in front of the red section, you
actually do not alter consciousness at all, but when you damage this part of the
brainstem, behind it, the one that is in red, you do alter consciousness quite severely.
In humans you end up in states, vegetative state or coma, whereas here you end up with
something called locked in. And when you do the damage lower than this, you actually
do not alter consciousness. So there is quite a lot of cell activity in terms of the parts of
the brain that are related to consciousness or not, and this operates at the level of the
brainstem and operates at the level of the cerebral cortex as well.
Now, what is really fascinating -- and I think for people like you who are at least on
occasion interested in circuitries, is that we're now learning more and more about the
circuitries that are contained in this small part of the brainstem.
And it's quite a world. And I've just marked some of the key players here. One which is
the area post dream, another, the nucleus tractus solitarius, another the parabrachial
nucleus, another the periacqueductal gray, superior colliculus, the hypothalamus. And
you see the levels at which they are mid brain, pons, medulla. Now the critical issue,
functionally speaking in this region, it's located totally between the body proper and the
cerebral cortex.
And the main function of this region traditionally in terms of the accounts that people
have offered is that this is the conduit for signals from the body proper to the cerebral
cortex.
So signals from everywhere in the body, whether we're talking about, say, the viscera or
about the chemistries in the bloodstream, or about the muscular system, go through this
region in order to get to the cerebral cortex and constitute representations in the cerebral
cortex.
Now, this is sort of the traditional view. The view that is becoming more and more
entrenched now is that not only is there a connection upward to the cerebral cortex, but
there are multiple connections downward to the multiple regions that offered input to the
brain.
So rather than having something which connects unidirectionally, you have something
that connects redirectionally where signals go up and signals return.
But then there's something even more important, and that is that each of these regions
not only receive signals but also transform signals so that it can offer something
additional to what has been conveyed.
And each of these regions have the possibility of responding to the body and have the
possibility of interacting among themselves.
So what you have is a connectivity where you have massive recursiveness in the
components and you have massive recursiveness in relation to each component in the
body.
So one of the things that you will find in self comes to mind is an idea that this puts the
traditional view of the relations between body and brain into somewhat different footing.
And my footing is that I think that the traditional separations between body and brain
become extremely problematic when you look at this organization.
It's almost as if there's no possibility of drawing a sharp border between body and brain,
because body constantly gets represented at all of these levels and these levels have
the possibility of responding to the body.
And I want you to think that this is a very unusual situation. For example, when I send
now, for example, with my being here, give you the possibility of representing me
visually in your visual cortices, there's no way that your visual cortices are going to have
a way of responding to the origin of this neural map which is me standing here.
However, when my body or any of our bodies sends a representation to the brain, the
brain has a possibility of modifying the very representation that was sent in.
This is completely different, completely asymmetric, in relation to all the other processes.
And I think that is one of the -- if this alone would get people to think about a different
way of relating body and brain, I'd be very happy and I would consider the book
successful because that's one of the points.
And just to say that my current thinking is that this is the level not only at which you
generate the protoself, but at which you generate some of the most fundamental feelings
of our entire organism, which I call now primordial feelings and what do those feelings
give you? Those feelings give you a direct online representation of what is going on in
the body and give you the direct information that there's a living body in your organism
that there's existence and it gives you the flavor of that existence along a range that at
one extreme has pleasure and at the other has pain.
And that is what I call primordial feelings. Now, I have to tell you that in the past I have
thought -- and I was partially correct -- that feelings -- for example, feelings of emotions,
would be generated in a structure called the insular cortex which exists, of course, at the
cortical level and which is represented here. This is an MRI and through a transparency
we're getting from the outside to a deeper level at which we see the insular in all its glory
and this is a structure that you see here.
And sure enough we have very good evidence that this idea, which I presented some 15
years ago, is correct, that the insular is involved in generating feelings of emotion.
So if you are happy or sad or angry or compassionate, if you're watching pornographic
movies or drinking wine, or you're undergoing the action of drugs of abuse or of
withdrawals of the drugs, the insular is responding very actively, and there's no doubt
that the insular is a very strong platform for feelings at the cortical level.
But the point that I want to hammer in is that this smaller structure within the brainstem is
actually the first platform for such feelings and everything that is happening in the world
of the brainstem, which is small but incredibly complex, is then being rerepresented at
the level of the insular cortex. The second stage, and I want to come to as close as
possible to the end of the story, the second stage of that self that's so critical to generate
our minds is the core self.
And for me the core self is generated as a pulse. Sort of moment by moment. So, for
example, when you as an organism have an interaction with an object, suppose each of
you right now and the object which happens to be me, object and event, because I'm
talking at the same time, that interaction is going to modify the fundamental primordial
feeling state that is being generated in your organism.
And that modification is going to be made because, for example, right now I am talking, I
am moving, and all of these different movements are generating changes to your
organism, because your brain is picking up on movement, on sound, on visual
impressions and so forth.
Not only that, there is a constant reaction at emotive level to whatever is going on
outside the world. You may not be terribly aware of that emotive reaction, and that's a
good thing. But it's there. And the constant reactions, because in anything that is said
or heard, anything that you see, any idea that you process, is going to have an emotive
component. It's going to modify the state of your emotional reactivity.
So your organism, in relation to any object or event, is changing constantly. And it is in
the relationship that you establish between your organism at state zero and your
organism at state one, after that change has been accomplished, that you generate this
very special relationship which is going to be the source of the core self.
And you have an object that acts on the protoself, at a variety of levels. And that
modifies primordial feelings that change in turn generate a variety of processes that are
too long to explain now, that include perspective, feelings of knowing. A sense of
ownership and agency, and that eventually create saliency for the object is that that is
how you create the core self.
Now, the last stage which I refer to is the autobiographical self, and that occurs when all
the objects and events that are in our autobiography generate pulses of core self which
are subsequently linked into a larger [inaudible] pattern.
And what I'm talking about here is the following: If I'm now -- you know I could be asking
you to look at a variety of pictures that will have nothing to do with your history and you
would simply process them at a minimal self level or at a core self level.
But if I would turn to you or to one of you individually and would start asking you about
who you are and what you have been living through before and where you were born
and what -- how do you decide to have your career, you would very rapidly switch into a
mode that is the mode of autobiographical self.
I'm sorry. Let me try to stop this. And what you would be doing then is generating very
rapidly an avocation in memory of components of your past narrative, of your past
biography, in giving each of them a pulse of core self, and integrating them into a vaster
canvas which is the one that has to do with your narrative, your biography, and it is no
longer about the here and now but about how each here and now is put in the
perspective of past and future.
I'm going to skip that. And I'm going to, in order to see if I can get to the end without
breaking out completely, I'm going to just tell you about two different spaces in which we
organize this autobiographical self. And obviously when we think about, for example,
our past, when we think about our history, we are creating representations, generating
representations in our minds, and those representations can appear in any sensory
system, and they will appear in terms of brain structure, and, for example, auditory
cortices, for example, here, or individual cortices like here and somatosensory cortices
like here. But for those to appear at that level it is necessary that they are guided by a
system of memories that will allow those representations to be formed.
So if I ask you: Where were you born? Or when did you make your career choice,
which is your current career choice, you will need to bring back memories that are from
way back. Where are those memories held?
And the answer is that it is in a very different space. It's a space that includes, for
example, the parietal cortex, temporal cortex, the frontal cortices, and it is there that you
have the entire machinery with which you have coded and recorded those memories.
I'm sorry. I cannot continue, but if you give me a minute, you can ask me questions and
I'm going try to answer. For those who came late. I apologize. I have a very bad
laryngitis, and there's nothing else I can do, other than drinking tea.
So, yes, ma'am.
>>: Can you give the perspective on -- I haven't read your book.
>> Antonio Damasio: I cannot hear you.
>>: I haven't read your book, so I'm not sure if you have a perspective on Lipman's view
on ->> Antonio Damasio: I'm sorry?
>>: Chris Lipman?
>> Antonio Damasio: No.
>>: What I'm curious to know is when you say that basically our genes are what they are
and that we can't change them.
>> Antonio Damasio: That we cannot change our genes.
>>: Right.
>> Antonio Damasio: It's true that we cannot change our genes immediately sort of as
you go. But it's not true that, for example, the cultural effects that we create will not
change our genes. For example, I discuss in the book something quite interesting, is
that human beings created the dairy industry. It didn't exist. It was not created by our
genes, it was created by our -- by the fact that there was agriculture and there was
farming and it was discovered that you could harness certain products and create dairy
products.
Well, at the beginning people reacted very badly to dairy products, because our genome
did not have the provision to metabolize dairy products. It so happens that today lots of
people are born with mutations that allow you to metabolize dairy products.
That is something that has happened very rapidly over periods of thousands of years,
which means that very limited number of generations, not a period of millions, let alone
billions.
So it is not 100 percent true that we cannot change our genome, except that you don't
change it from one generation to the next.
Yes, sir.
>>: If I heard you right, at one point you were discussing a single celled organism. You
said it doesn't have consciousness, because it's behavior is deterministic. And is there a
connection between the determinism of an organism's behavior and whether or not it's
conscious, and how does this touch on personal free will, and is that something that
neuroscience can give us some answers to?
>> Antonio Damasio: Well, here's how I would put it: It's perfectly clear that if you're
dealing with bacterial cell or an ameba, what you have is an organism whose life
regulation is entirely controlled by the genome.
It's in an environment. It's been well adapted and it works perfectly fine. It's very
successful organisms, extremely numerous. By the way, we have more bacteria in our
bodies at any moment than we have cells that are actually components of our bodies.
That's because they're so successful. They're doing a lot of very nice interesting jobs for
us, too.
So they're sort of an extension of our bodies. But there's very little freedom there. In
fact, you can say there's none. The bacteria will do by and large or the other cells
singularly will do by and large what the genomes tell them to do in a certain
circumstance.
What we have that is very new and remarkable is that because we are so complex, we
have invented these tools of culture. For example, moral systems, justice systems.
Social and political organization. The arts. Religions. Science, technology.
All of this play a homeostatic role. But what is interesting is there's an element of
freedom in that they are -- they don't have to be in a certain way yet. There's a degree
of freedom that is caused by the fact that they were decided upon when a number of
individuals with their own selves, their own cultures their own perspective on the world
got together to operate at a certain new level. And this is, of course, the creation of
culture and civilization, and there is a remarkable degree of freedom. Now, of course do
we have all the freedom? No, because we're still being controlled in good part by the
genomes that make our organisms function in a certain way, and we cannot abandon
that. So you cannot touch that part of the -- that's a closed system. And it opens only
very gradually over generations. But we can operate at this other level within a certain
measure of freedom.
So I think that consciousness at the highest level by bringing on the emergence of
culture has been responsible by giving us not only knowledge without which we would
have no clue as to our existence or the existence of the world or of others, but it has
given us a measure of intervention in the entire system of nature, which can be either for
the good or for the worse, of course. It depends on how we with some freedom will
guide it well or not.
Thank you. That's a very good question. Okay. One here and then one there.
>>: I'm interested in your perspective on complex machines like robots, which certainly
map their surroundings and which arguably have a representation of their own selves, in
those maps.
So when we map for them a certain measure of either -- any of your three layers of self
and consciousness.
>> Antonio Damasio: Excellent question. Did you hear the question in the back? So
that's a wonderful question. I deal a little bit with it in this book, and the answer is that
sooner or later there will be machines that will have actually something like self and
consciousness in all the senses that I outlined here. If your question is, however, will
they, those machines experience consciousness the way we do, my bet would be that
they will not, unless you make their bodies exactly like ours, which would be, of course,
an absurdity, why would you. Besides, you couldn't. Because it would be so much more
complex than you could in a much more direct machine.
However, those machines will have certainly a level of protoself and a level of protoself
that is not generating primordial feelings or at least not our primordial feelings. It's
generating the primordial feelings of that machine, which don't have to be like ours,
because our feelings are related to the set of our flesh and those machines don't have
flesh. They have whatever hardware you create for the machines.
In those machines what counts in fact is all the software in which you animate whatever
hardware it is. And in humans, in living creatures, in general it's both. The software is
written in the hardware. And the two count very, very strongly.
The other thing that's very important -- and this I talk about in the book -- is the following:
When you create one of those robots, you have a body where once you build it as an
engineering object, you have a very small risk of disease and death. You have a risk of
malfunction, which you don't have a risk of disease and death in any way like that of,
say, a human body. Why? Because our body is made up of trillions of single organisms
called cells, each of which has its own genome, has its own lifecycle, has its own risk of
disease and death. There's no such thing in the body of the robot. That changes the
game completely.
And it's something that is not normally appreciated. The one at the back.
>>: In your world, in your perspective, what is the biggest unknown or the biggest
mystery?
>> Antonio Damasio: It's not just one, and I wouldn't even talk about the biggest,
because I don't know what the biggest is. I think there's so many. For example, I tell
you what I don't know for sure and I would like to know. At what level does feeling
begin? We know, for example, that in order to construct a map that can represent me in
your brain, you need to have certain small circuits that are hooked up in larger circuits
and then hook up in a map, say, in the visual cortex.
We know pretty much how that functions. In a way you can talk about sort of proto
cognition that begins at very low level in the operation of single neurons. Is there an
equivalent in terms of proto feeling? Is each neuron already endowed with an ability to
feel? In which case the feelings we have of, say, pleasure or pain are sort of scaling up
through the structure of those proto feelings then emerging into a big-time large-scale
operation or not. Or does it come, for example, at the level of the brainstem? That's a
very important question. And we're nowhere at the point of giving the answer.
In fact, something that I present as a question, and I have to tell you that when I
articulate this problem, people look at me they think I'm coming from the moon, that I'm
crazy, but I don't think this is crazy. This is absolutely essential if we're going to
understand how this works.
Okay. Let's organize this. I think there was one other in the back then we move to the
front. Switch to you.
>>: Have [inaudible].
>> Antonio Damasio: Yes.
>>: [inaudible] he defines self more as a social phenomenon in his view self does not
pervade the formation of society. How would you contrast your view?
>> Antonio Damasio: By saying that for me it does involve -- it does start much earlier.
There's a tradition. Of course, if you start from psychology or from sociology, there's a
tendency to start the very high level and work from outside in. But if you start at the level
of self, let's say you do something like an immune system phenomenon, immune system
is recognizing self from non-self in the sense it recognizes an object from another object
and responds accordingly.
So I think that I would start very early, as I do, and then work my way up to the social
level. The social level is generated out of many autobiographical selves. But in fact it
can even start earlier. For example, there's plenty of evidence that groups of bacteria
can behave socially. Groups of bacteria can fight for territory. Or they can cooperate,
depending on the state of resources and how things are in the environment.
So these notions, I think it's very foolhardy to keep them only at one level. I think in all
likelihood you can find precursors all the way down into cells if not molecules
sometimes.
>>: I think maybe just one more question.
>> Antonio Damasio: Who wants to be the last?
>>: I have two questions. One is when does consciousness start? Not at the proto
consciousness level but before consciousness, when in development does it start? And
the second question is a bit different, but is there a neural basis for religion, because
regardless of which culture or society you are in, there's always the tendency for humans
to create religion. And so how does that place -- [inaudible].
>> Antonio Damasio: You want to know when consciousness starts at the level of a
human being?
>>: Yes.
>> Antonio Damasio: Very good question but nobody knows the answer. Chances are
that a newborn has a protoself and is on the way to developing very rapidly a core self.
And by age two there's already the beginnings of an autobiographical self being
generated.
Your question on religion is very interesting. I think there is definitely a neural basis for
religious feeling.
>>: Or spirituality.
>> Antonio Damasio: And for spirituality. And it has to do with the fact that of course it
can only occur in humans and can only occur in humans because you need to have a
very robust set of self. You need to have had a sense of loss and a sense of question
regarding the universe in order to try to generate answers for those questions.
And a lot of those questions appear in the form of religious thinking that precede and
predate a lot of the extensive developments, of course, of science that have given other
accounts of the universe. Okay?
Sorry about this, folks. There's nothing I can do.
[applause]