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ANTONIO DAMASIO Antonio Damasio (born February 25, 1944 in Lisbon, Portugal) is a University Professor (an award based on multi-disciplinary interests and significant accomplishments in several disciplines) and David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute. Prior to taking up his posts at USC, in 2005, Damasio was M.W. Van Allen Professor and Head of Neurology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics from 1976 to 2005. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. Damasio is the author of several best-selling books which describe his scientific thinking. “As a leading neuroscientist, Damasio has dared to speculate on neurobiological data, and has offered a theory about the relationship between human emotions, human rationality, and the underlying biology.” Damasio was born in Lisbon and studied medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School in Portugal, where he also did his neurological residency and completed his doctorate. He worked as a research fellow at the Aphasia Research Center in Boston in 1967, prior to receiving his MD in Lisbon. His work there on behavioural neurology was done under the supervision of the late Norman Geschwind, the Harvard neurologist who created the field. As aresearcher, Damasio’s main field is the neurobiology of the mind, especially neural systems which subserve emotion, decision-making, memory, language and consciousness. Damasio’s seeks to demonstrate that emotions play a critical role in high level cognition, an idea that ran counter to dominant 2oth century views in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. He showed that emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously); provide the scaffolding for the construction of social cognition; and are required for the self processes which undergird consciousness. “Damasio provides a contemporary scientific validation of the linkage between feelings and the body by highlighting the connection between mind and nerve cells... this personalized embodiment of mind.” He formulated the somatic markers hypothesis, which captures the essence of these ideas. This idea has inspired many systems-neuroscience experiments carried out in laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, and has had a major impact in contemporary science and philosophy. His articles on this topic include: Bechara A, Damasio AR, Damasio H, Anderson S. Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition. 50:7-15. 19943 Bechara A, Damasio H, Tranel D, Damasio AR. Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science. 275:1293-1294. 1997; Anderson SW, Bechara A, Damasio H, Tranel D, Damasio AR. Impairment of social and moral behaviour related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience. 2:1032-1037. Damasio has been named by the Institute of Scientific Information as one of the most highly cited researchers in the past decade). Current work on the biology of moral decisions, neuro- economics, social communication, and drug-addiction, has been strongly influenced by Damasio’s hypothesis. Damasio also proposed that emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and are rooted in reward/punishment mechanisms. He recovered James’ perspective on feelings as aread-out of body states, but expanded it with an “as-if-body- loop” device which allows for the substrate of feelings to be simulated rather than actual (foreshadowing the simulation process later uncovered by mirror neurons). He demonstrated experimentally that the insular cortex is a critical platform for feelings, a finding that has been widely replicated, and he uncovered cortical and subcortical induction sites for human emotions, e.g. in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala. He also demonstrated that while the insular cortex plays a major role in feelings, it is not necessary for feelings to occur, suggesting that brain stem structures play a basic role in the feeling process. He has continued to investigate the neural basis of feelings and demonstrated that although the insular cortex is a major substrate for this process it is not exclusive, suggesting that brain stem nuclei are critical platforms as well. He regards feelings as the necessary foundation of sentience. In another development, Damasio proposed that the cortical architecture on which learning and recall depend involves multiple, hierarchically organized loops of axonal projections that converge on certain nodes out of which projections diverge to the points of origin of convergence (the convergence-divergence framework). This architecture is applicable to the understanding of memory processes and of aspects of consciousness related to the access of mental contents. In “The Feeling of What Happens”, Damasio lays the foundations of the “enchainment of precedences”: “the nonconscious neural signaling of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core self and core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness. At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience. Damasio’s research depended significantly on establishing the modern human lesion method, an enterprise made possible by Hanna Damasio’s structural neuroimaging/ neuroanatomy work complemented by experimental neuroanatomy (with Gary Van Hoesen and Josef Parvizi), experimental neuropsychology (with Antoine Bechara, Ralph Adolphs, and Dan Tranel) and functional neuroimaging (with Kaspar Meyer, Jonas Kaplan, and Mary Helen Immordino- Yang). The experimental neuroanatomy work with Van Hoesen and Bradley Hyman led to the discovery of the disconnection of the hippocampus caused by neurofibrillary tangles in the entophinal cortex of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. As a clinician, he and his collaborators have studied and treated disorders of behaviour and cognition, and movement disorders. Damasio’s books deal with the relationship between emotions and feelings, and what their brain substrates. His 1994 book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, won the Science et Vie prize, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and is translated in over 30 languages. It is regarded as one of the most influential books of the past two decades. His second book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, was named as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the New York Times Book Review, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and has over 30 foreign editions. Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, was published in 2003. In it, Damasio suggested that Spinoza’s thinking foreshadowed discoveries in biology and neuroscience views on the mind- body problem. Spinoza was a protobiologist. His latest book is Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. In it Damasio suggests that the self is the key to conscious minds and that feelings, from the kind he designates as primordial to the well-known feelings of emotion, are the basic elements in the construction of the protoself and core self. The book received the Corinne International Book Prize. Damasio is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Damasio has received many awards including the Prince of Asturias Award in Science and Technology, the Honda Prize, the Kappers Neuroscience Medal, the Beaumont Medal from the American Medical Association, the Nonino Prize and the Reenpaa Prize in Neuroscience. He has received honorary doctoral degrees (Doctor honoris causa) from the University of Aachen (2002), University of Aveiro (2003), University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen Business School; 2009), University of Leiden (2010), University Ramon Llull, Barcelona (2010), University of Coimbra (2011) and from the EPFL, Lausanne (2011). His current work involves the social emotions, consciousness and the creative interface between neuroscience and the arts, especially music and film. The role of feelings states on sentience. Damasio is married to Dr. Hanna Damasio, his colleague and frequent co-author. Damasio himself notes, in fallibilist fashion, “Thave a difficult time seeing scientific results, especially in neurobiology, as anything but provisional approximations”. Whether despite or because of that fallibilism, Damasio writes in the belief that ‘scientific knowledge can be a pillar to help humans endure and prevail’. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017536