Self Comes to Mind

Constructing the Conscious Brain

Winner of the CORINE International Book Award 2011 From one of the most important neuroscientists at work today, a path-breaking investigation of a question that has confounded neurologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists and psychologists for centuries: how is consciousness created? Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness - what we think of as a mind with a self - is in fact a biological process created by a living organism. The result is a groundbreaking investigative journey into the neurobiological foundations of mind and self.

The functional arrangement described in Chapter 3 makes my position on this
problem clear: the brain's map-making ability provides an essential element in its
solution. In brief, complex brains such as ours naturally make explicit maps of the
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