Promotional Information

'Crucial reading' - New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Antonio Damasio is a University Professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Neurology, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Damasio's other books include Self Comes to Mind, Looking for Spinoza and The Feeling of What Happens. He has received the Honda Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, and, shared with his wife Hanna, the Pessoa, Signoret, and Cozzarelli prizes. Damasio is a fellow of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

A thought-provoking account
*New Scientist*

Rich in provocative concepts about intelligence, memory, creativity and passion
*Los Angeles Times*

idiosyncratic and engaging
*The Times*

Damasio is a profound thinker and an elegant writer...Descartes' Error is a fascinating exploration of the biology of reason and its inseparable dependence on emotion
*Oliver Sacks*

Crucial reading
*New York Times Book Review*

In an important, gracefully written exploration of the neurochemical basis of mind, neurologist Damasio rejects the Cartesian notion of the human mind as a thinking organ more or less separate from bodily processes. Emotions and feelings, he argues, are essential to reasoning and decision-making. The human brain, he further contends, has a specialized region in the frontal lobes for making personal and social decisions, and this region works in concert with deeper brain centers that store emotional memories. To support this controversial claim, Damasio draws on his work with brain-injured patients at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, and also cites the case of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railway foreman who lost his ethical faculties after an explosion in 1848 drove a metal rod through his skull. Damasio's exciting investigation challenges the fashionable metaphor of the mind as a software program. Interested readers are also referred to Richard Restak's The Modular Brain (Nonfiction Forecasts, June 13). Illustrations. 50,000 first printing; QPB alternate; Library of Science selection. (Sept.)

A thought-provoking account * New Scientist *
Rich in provocative concepts about intelligence, memory, creativity and passion * Los Angeles Times *
idiosyncratic and engaging * The Times *
Damasio is a profound thinker and an elegant writer...Descartes' Error is a fascinating exploration of the biology of reason and its inseparable dependence on emotion -- Oliver Sacks
Crucial reading * New York Times Book Review *