Antonio Damasio Quotes

A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

Our thoughts are certainly part of us; they come from us, but we are not our thoughts. Have you ever woken up in the morning and said to yourself, 'I am not going to think today; I am too tired'? No, of course not. Just as breathing happens and is constant, thoughts happen, and they are also constant.

Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there.

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

How do you know, right now, that you are aware of being aware, or conscious?

I have no inner monologue.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber.

I am determined and resigned to being self-conscious.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

Consciousness is the perception of what passes in man's own mind.

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

Our intellect, our awareness, and our consciousness is the most powerful form of life on this planet.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.

For some people, it's the beginning of an awakening when they hear or read, "You have a voice in your head that never stops talking. Have you noticed that?" And suddenly they become aware that the thoughts go through their heads, whereas before they were so identified with them that they were those thoughts.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

I really hate being self-conscious—and being conscious of being self-conscious

Life is consciousness.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.