In the phrases of Antinio Damsio, he always emphasizes the importance of affections and emotions for the development of people. Few neurologists have contributed as much to understanding this fascinating world of human feelings and motivations as this professor, considered the “brain wizard. “.
Vilayanur Ramachandran, another well-known neurologist at the University of California, once said that homo sapiens is a fascinating creature who, at one point, was able to look into his mind and see the cosmos reflected in it. This poetic and revealing resemblance contains an obvious reality: when we began to reflect on ourselves, we made a big step as a species.
- “The conscious mind is the result of the very well-articulated functioning of various regions of the brain.
- “Antinio Damsio?.
On the other hand, we cannot deny that the human brain encloses almost the same mysteries as the universe itself, contemplating this immensity unsinkable inhabited by celestial bodies that surround us every night produces almost the same vertigo as looking within ourselves, yet, according to Antnio Damsio, we now know much more about the brain than about the universe.
Scientist, passionate inquisitor and exceptional promoter, Damsio is a neurophile capable of giving us the simplest answers to these questions that we have always asked ourselves, in the end everything we are, everything we feel and believe as a society and civilization lies in this wonderful organ: the human brain.
Human beings are characterized essentially by one thing: their sophisticated intelligence, we have a great memory and, at the same time, something that defines us and differentiates us from the other species of this planet, which is our language. that in addition to all this, there is one aspect that we cannot overlook.
Everything we are and have achieved so far flows from our feelings. They are the ones who motivated us to find the solution to the problems, the alternatives to our doubts and the new paths when we find barriers to our difficulties. Well, another crucial aspect of this University of California professor’s theories is the clear distinction he makes between emotions and feelings.
These two terms are not the same, and this is something that we can often see in Antônio Damsio’s phrases.
“Feelings open the door to a certain measure of premeditated control of automated emotions. “
When we see danger, when we meet a person who causes us anxiety or dissatisfaction, our body reacts with emotion, the heart accelerates, you feel a chill, the stomach becomes knotted, etc.
Well, the mental representation we have of that fear and the thoughts associated with it are the feeling, the emotions precede the feelings, it is chemical and organic changes, yet it is the feelings that guide us that will eventually allow us to make the decision. for example, to run away from someone who scares us.
What good is consciousness? The answer is simple: does consciousness serve to extend the reach of the mind of the body and thus improve the life of this organism, whose mind has more reach ?.
As is clearly the case: consciousness is present in most living beings. The moment a brain, whether it’s a primate, a dolphin, a dog, or even a reptile, creates a sense of self, it creates awareness. this entity is not found anywhere in our brain, it is simply a process.
What sets us apart from other species is the fact that evolution has greatly expanded our consciousness, harbors creativity, memory, logical reasoning, etc.
“The beginning of it all was emotion, isn’t feeling a passive process?
This is another of the most important phrases of Antinio Damsio to understand his work, his hypothesis assumes that an emotion is a set of chemical and neural responses that form a distinctive pattern, when we find a specific stimulus a type of reaction is generated. our brain is the result of an evolution of the repertoires of learned behaviors.
For after this emotional response comes the mental process, the feeling arrives, with it we regulate emotion and orient it towards a specific behavior, towards motivation and towards a kind of response more or less effective, so we can say that emotions are basically like the spark of life, which inspires us to action.
“We must learn to nurture the good emotions that allow humans to thrive. “
It is still very sensitive to the social crisis that humanity is going through, it is common to hear in its conferences how it immerses itself in the idea of violence, inequality, conflicts between countries, for this neurophilic brain, we lose the capacity for compassion. and often we only get carried away by negative emotions like anger, anger or resentment.
We need to be able to create closer environments where more positive emotions can be generated, only then can we thrive, understand each other better.
“I am totally against the idea that artificial intelligence can recreate a human spirit, because it does not have the ability to have feelings. “
This is another of the best-known phrases of Antinio Damsio, it is common to hear his skepticism about artificial intelligence and its future among us, for him such entities can never be compared to human consciousness, we must remember, first of all, that our brain is the result of a sophisticated evolution.
These code-based computing processes lack all of our past experience, lack emotions, fears, vulnerability and, of course, awareness, so they will never have feelings. They can help us with a lot of problems, but they’ll never be emotionally intelligent.
In conclusion, as we have seen in the phrases of Antinio Damsio, the human being is undoubtedly the result of a brain development guided by the consciousness of the “I”, of language and, above all, of emotions.
Although this body may seem, at first glance, a mystery within another, with scientists of the caliber of Damsio, we manage every day to have more clarifications and knowledge about who we are.