Damasio; Self Comes to Mind
Book	Page		Topic
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	18		Minds emerge when the activity of small circuits is organized across large networks so as to compose momentary patterns.  The patterns represent things and events located outside the brain, even in the body or in the external world, but some patterns also represent the brain's own processing of other patterns.  The term map applies to all of those representational patterns.
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	55		Connecting Homeostasis, Value and Consciousness		37
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	63		Making Maps and Images		8
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	66		The most detailed maps in the brain are in the cerebral cortex,     although other parts of the brain can make maps, albeit with a lower resolution.		3
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	66		The fourth cortical layer is probably responsible for a large part of the detailed maps.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	70		Maps and Minds		4
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		By mapping the body in an integrated manner, the brain manages to create a critical component of what will become the self.		22
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		Body mapping is a key to the elucidation of the problem of consciousness.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		The close relationship of body and brain are essential to understanding our spontaneous bodily feelings, emotions, and emotional feelings.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		Body Mapping		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		How does the brain accomplish the mapping of the body?  By treating the body proper and its parts as any other object, one might say, but that would hardly do justice to the problem.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		As far as the brain is concerned, the body proper is more than just any object  -- it is central object of brain mapping.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		The term 'body proper' excludes the brain.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		The body uses both chemical signals and neural signals to communicate with the brain.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	92		Although part of the signaling from the body to brain results in a straightforward mapping, a substantial part of the signaling is first treated in subcortical nuclei, within the spinal cord and especially in the brain stem.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	93		Signals related to the body's interior comes to constitute feelings.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	93		Aspects of the body's physical structure and function are engraved in brain circuitry, from early development, and generate persistent patterns of activity.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	93		Stated emphatically, some version of the body is permanently re-created in brain activity.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	93		The brain can do more than merely map states that are actually occurring, it can also transform body states and, most dramatically, simulate body states that have not yet occurred.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	97		Interoception -- complex mapping of the interior sense of the body.		4
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	97		Exteroception -- body-to-brain channels that map the state    of skeletal muscles engaged in movement.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	98		Schematic of key brainstem nuclei involved in life regulation (homeostasis)  (diagram)		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	108		Emotions and Feelings		10
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	116		Feelings of Emotion		8
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	118		Activity in the insula is an important correlate for every conceivable kind of feeling.		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	118		The insular cortex is an important substrate of feelings -- from those that are associated with emotions to those that correspond to any shade of pleasure or pain, induced by a wide ranges stimuli -- hearing music one likes or hates; viewing pictures one loves, including erotic material, or pictures that can cause disgust; drinking wine; having sex; being high on drugs; being low on drugs and experiencing withdrawal; etc.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	118		The neural correlates of feelings are not confined to the insula.  The anterior cingulate cortex tends to become active in parallel with the insula when we experience feelings.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	118		The insula and anterior cingulate are closely interlocked regions, the two being joined by mutual connections.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	118		The insula has dual sensory and motor functions, albeit based toward the sensory side of the process, while the anterior cingulate operates as a motor structure.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	118		Several subcortical regions play a role in the construction of feeling states.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	120		How do we feel an emotion?		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	122		Varieties of Emotion		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	123		Universal emotions (fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise)		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	123		Emotions are produced across cultures and are easily recognized because one part of the action, their facial expressions, is quite characteristic.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	123		Charles Darwin recognized the universality of emotions, not only in humans but in animals.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	123		The universality of emotional expressions reveals the degree to which the emotional action program is unlearned and automated.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	123		Emotion can be modulated, with small changes in intensity or duration of components movements.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	123		The basic program routines of emotions are stereotypical at all body levels at which they are executed -- external motions; visceral changes in the heart, lungs, gut, and skin; and endocrine changes.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	124		Emotions are unlearned, automated, and set by the genome.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	125		Background emotions, such as enthusiasm and discouragement can be prompted by a variety of circumstances in a person's life but also brought on by internal states such a disease and fatigue.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	125		Background emotions are close relatives of moods.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	125		Social emotions are identified as having an unequivocal social setting.  Examples include -- compassion, embarrassment, chain, guilt, content, jealousy, envy, pride, admiration.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	130		Architecture for Memory		5
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	132		The Nature of Memory Records		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	133		What we normally refer to as the memory of an object is the composite memory of the sensory and motor activities related to the interaction between the organism and the object.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	133		In studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans, multivariate pattern analyses demonstrate the presence of specific patterns of brain activity for certain objects seen or heard by the subject.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	135		We have inherited from many prior species, abundant  networks of dispositions that run our basic mechanisms of life management.  They include the nuclei that control our endocrine system and the nuclei that serve the mechanisms of reward and punishment in the triggering and execution of the emotions.		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	136		In the process of recall -- the brain creates memory records from sensory maps and plays back an approximation of the original content.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	136		Where are the images reconstructed so that we can study them in our reverie?		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	137		Early sensory cortices (largely in the back sections of the brain) bring forward the components of perceptual information by brain pathways to multimodal cortices (largely in the frontal sections), which integrate them.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	137		Perception would operate on the basis of a cascade of processes going in one direction.  The cascade would extract, step-by-step, more and more refined signals, first in the sensory cortices of a single modality (e.g., visual) and later in multimodal cortices, those that receive signals from more than one modality (e.g., visual, auditory, and somatic).		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	137		The perception cascade would follow, in general, a caudo-rostral direction in the culminating and anterior temporal and frontal cortices, where the most integrated representations of the ongoing multisensory apprehension of reality are presumed to occur.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	137		The assumptions captured in the notion of a "grandmother cell," a neuron (or small ensemble of neurons) near the top of the processing cascade (e.g. the anterior temporal lobe) whose activity would comprehensively represent our grandmother when we perceive her.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	138		Reactivated grandmother cells would allow the playback of the same perceived contents in their entirety. The prediction of a grandmother cell is not borne out in the reality of neurophysiological findings.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	138		In regard to grandmother cells, patients with damage to the anterior brain regions -- frontal and temporal -- report normal perception and display only selected deficits in the recall and recognition of unique objects and events.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	138		Anterior damage permits the integrated view and the view of the parts.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	138		Only by damaging sectors of the cerebral cortex positioned farther back in the brain, near the main sensory and motor regions, will there be compromise to the access of separable memory components, those that correspond to varied objects or to features of objects, such as color or movement.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	138		Damage to the integrative, associative cortices does not preclude integrated perception, or recall of the parts that constitute a set, or recall of the meaning of non-unique sets of objects and features.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	138		Damage to the integrative, associative cortices precludes the recall of uniqueness and specificity of objects and scenes.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	139		The larger the sensorimotor context that is enacted relative to a particular entity or event, the greater the complexity.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	139		The memory of unique entities and events, those that are both unique and personal, requires high complexity contexts.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	139		Hierarchical progression of complexity -- unique personal entities and events require the highest complexity; unique nonpersonal entities and events are next; non-unique entities and events require least.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	140		The semantic/episodic distinction, or the generic/contextual distinction.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	140		Damasio's model of neural architecture accounting for recall and recognition.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	140		Images can be experienced during perception and during recall.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	140		In brains such as ours, thanks to the reciprocal connections between the map-making brain space and the dispositional space, maps can be recorded in dispositional form.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	140		Dispositions are a space-saving mechanism for information storage.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	140		Dispositions can be used to reconstruct the maps in early sensory cortices, and the format in which they were first experienced.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	140		Cell ensembles at the top levels of the processing hierarchies would not hold explicit representation of the maps for objects and events.  Rather, the ensembles would hold know how, i.e. dispositions, for the eventual reconstruction of explicit representations when they become needed.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		Dispositions are commanding the process of reactivating and putting together aspects of past perception, wherever they have been processed and then locally recorded.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		Dispositions act on a host of early sensory cortices originally engaged by perception.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		Dispositions act by way of connections diverging from the disposition site back to early sensory cortices.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		The locus where memory records would actually be played back would not be that different from the locus of original perception.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		Convergence-Divergence Zones		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		Convergence divergence zones (CDZs) record the coincidence of activity in neurons hailing from different brain sites, neurons that had been made active by, for example, the mapping of a certain object.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		No part of the overall map of an object as to the permanently re-represented in the CDZs, to be placed in memory.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		To reconstitute the original map, only the coincidence of signals from neurons linked to the map need to be recorded.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		To reconstitute the original map and thus produce recall, Damasio proposes the mechanism of time-locked retroactivation.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		The term retroactivation points to the fact that the mechanism requires a process of going back in order to induce activity.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	141		The term time-locked calls attention to the necessity to reactivate the components of the map approximately within the same time interval, so that what occurred simultaneously (or nearly so) in perception could be reinstated simultaneously (or nearly so) in recall.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	142		Separate processing in two kinds of brain systems -- one that manages maps/images in another that manages dispositions.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	142		For the image space, Damasio proposes several islands or early sensory cortices -- for example, the ensemble of visual cortices that encircled the primary visual cortex (area 17 or V1), the ensemble of auditory cortices, that of somatosensory cortices, etc.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	142		Schematic of Damasio's convergence-divergence architecture (diagram)		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		Cortical dispositional space includes all the higher-order association cortices in temporal, parietal, and frontal regions.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		An old set of dispositional devices remains beneath the cerebral cortex in the basal forebrain, basal ganglia, thalamus, hypothalamus, and brain stem.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		The image space is the space where explicit images of all sensory types occur, including both the images that become conscious and those that remained unconscious.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		The image space is located in the map-making brain, a large territory form by the aggregate of all the early sensory cortices, the regions of cerebral cortex located in and around the entry point of visual, auditory, and other sensory signals into the brain.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		Image space also includes the territories of the nucleus tractus solitarius, parabrachial nucleus, and superior colliculi, which have image making capability.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		Dispositional space is that in which dispositions hold the knowledge base as well is the devices for the reconstruction of that knowledge in recall.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		Dispositional space is the source of images in the process of imagination and reasoning and is also used to generate movement.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		Dispositional space is located in the cerebral cortices that are not otherwise occupied by the image space (the higher-order cortices and part of the limbic cortices) and in numerous subcortical nuclei.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		When dispositional circuits are activated, they signal to other circuits and cause images or actions to be generated.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		The contents exhibited in the image space are explicit, while the contents of the dispositional space are implicit.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		We can access the contents of images, if we are conscious, but we never access the contents of dispositions directly.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		Of necessity, the contents of dispositions are always unconscious.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	143		Dispositions produce a variety of results.  They can generate actions of many kinds in many levels of complexity -- the release of hormones into the bloodstream; the contraction of muscles in the viscera or of muscles in a limb or in the vocal apparatus.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		Cortical dispositions also hold records of an image that was actually perceived on some previous occasion, and they participate in the attempt to reconstruct a sketch of that image from memory.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		Dispositions also assist with the processing of a currently perceived image, for instance, by influencing the degree of attention accorded to the current image.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		We are never aware of the knowledge necessary to perform any of the dispositional tasks, nor are we ever aware of the intermediate steps that are taken.  We are aware only of the results, like a state of well-being, the racing of the heart, the movement of a hand, a fragment of a recalled sound, the edited version of an ongoing perception of landscape.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		All of our memories, inherited from evolution and available at birth or acquired through learning thereafter -- exist in our brains in dispositional form, waiting to become explicit images or actions.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		Our knowledge base is implicit, encrypted, and unconscious.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		Dispositions are not words; they are abstract records of potentialities.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		The basis for enactment of words or signs exist as dispositions before they come to life in the form of images and actions, as in the production of speech or sign language.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		The rules with which we put words and signs together, the grammar of a language, are also held as dispositions.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		A convergence-divergence zone (CDZ) is an ensemble of neurons within which many feedforward-feedback loops make contact.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		A CDZ receives feedforward connections from sensory areas located earlier in the signal-processing chains, which begin at the entry point of the sensory signals in the cerebral cortex.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		A CDZ sends reciprocal feedback projections to the originating areas.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	144		A CDZ also sends feedforward projections to regions located in the next connectional level of the chain and receives return projections from them.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		CDZs are microscopic and are located within convergence-divergence regions (CDRegions), which are macroscopic.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		Damasio envisions the number of CDZs to be on the order of many thousands.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		CDRegions number in the dozens.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		CDZs are micronodes; CDRegions are macronodes.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		CDRegions are located in strategic areas in association cortices, area toward which several major pathways converge.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		Experimental neuroanatomical studies have shown that convergence-divergence patterns of connectivity exists in the primate brain.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		CDRegions play an important role in producing and organizing critical components of the conscious mind, including those that make up the autobiographical self.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		Both CDRegions and CDZs come into existence under genetic control.  As the organism interacts with the environment during development, synaptic strengthening and weakening modifies convergence regions significantly and massively modifies CDZs.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		Synaptic strengthening occurs when  external circumstances match the survival needs of the organism.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		The function of CDZs consists of re-creating separate sets of neural activity that were once approximately simultaneous during perception -- i.e. that coincided during the time window necessary for us to attend to them and be conscious of them.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	145		The CDZ would prompt an extremely fast sequence of activations that would make separate neural regions come online in some order, the sequence being imperceptible to consciousness.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	148		Knowledge retrieval would be based on relatively simultaneous, attended activity in many early cortical regions, engendered over several iterations of such reactivation cycles.		3
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	148		The level at which knowledge is retrieved would depend on the scope of multiregional activation.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	148		Reading lips in the absence of a sound induces activity in the auditory cortices, and the evoked activity patterns overlap with those elicited during the perception of spoken words.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	149		Mental imagery -- the process of imagination consists of the recall of images and their subsequent manipulation.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	149		Images constructed during perception are reconstructed during the process of imagery.  They are approximations rather than replicas, attempts at getting back at past reality and thus not quite as vivid or accurate.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	149		Research studies indicate unequivocally that imagery tasks in modalities such as visual and auditory usually evoke brain activity patterns that overlap to a considerable extent with the patterns observed during actual perception.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	149		Focal brain damage often causes simultaneous deficits in perception and imagery.  An example is the inability to both perceive and imagine colors caused by damage to the occipitotemporal region. Patients with focal damage to this regions see their visual world in black and white, literally in shades of gray.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	150		Evidence from both functional imaging and lesion studies suggests that the recall of objects and events relies, at least in part, on the activity near the points where sensory signals enter the cortex, as well is near motor output sites. These are the sites engaged in the original perception of objects and events.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	150		Mirror neuron research provides evidence that a convergence-divergence architecture is satisfactory means to explain certain complex behaviors and mental operations.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	150		The key finding in mirror neuron research is that the mere observation of an action leads to activity in motor related areas.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	151		The perception or recall of most objects and events depends on activity in varied image-making regions of the brain and often involves parts of the brain related to movement.  This highly dispersed pattern of activity occurs within the image space.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	151		Dispositional space is made up of CDZs and CDRs in association cortices, which are not image making cortices.  The dispositional space guides the image making but is not involved in displaying images itself.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	151		Dispositional space can be considered to contain "grandmother cells," defined liberally as neurons whose activity correlates with the presence of the specific object but not as neurons whose activity permits, in and of themselves, explicit mental images of objects and events.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	151		Neurons in anterior medial temporal cortices can respond to unique objects, in perception and recall, with high specificity, suggesting that they receive convergence signals.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	151		To recognize or remember our 'grandmother,' we must reinstate a substantial part of the collection of explicit maps that, in their entirety, represent her meaning.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	151		Like mirror neurons, so-called 'grandmother neurons' are CDZs.  They enable time-locked multiregional retroactivation of explicit maps in early sensorimotor cortices.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	153		The CDC framework posits two somewhat separate "brain spaces."  One space constructs explicit maps of objects and events during perception and reconstructs them during recall.  The other space holds dispositions rather than maps, i.e. implicit formulas for how to reconstruct maps in the image space.		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	153		The explicit image space is constituted by the aggregate of early sensorimotor cortices.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	153		The implicit, dispositional space is constituted by the aggregate of association cortices.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	153		The two brain spaces point to different ages in brain evolution, one in which dispositions sufficed to guide adequate behavior and another in which maps gave rise to images and to an upgrade of the quality of behavior.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	159		Being awake is a prerequisite of being conscious.		6
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	159		Dream consciousness is not standard consciousness.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	160		Images are the main currency of our minds, and the term refers to patterns of all sensory modalities, not just visual, and to abstract as well is concrete patterns.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	161		Patients in a vegetative state have no manifestation suggested of consciousness.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	161		Along with wake-pattern EEGs, patients in vegetative state will often have their eyes open, although they stare vacantly into space, not directing their gaze to any particular object.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	161		No electrical EEG pattern is noted when patients are in coma, a situation in which all phenomena associated with consciousness (wakefulness, mind, and self) appear to be absent.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	162		Direct brain observations, offer evidence compatible with some preservation of both wakefulness and mind, while behavioral observations revealed no evidence that consciousness accompanies such operations.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	162		Direct brain observation of vegetative state patients provides evidence that mind processes operate unconsciously.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	166		Patients with disturbances of consciousness fail to exhibit signs of ongoing emotion.  Their faces have a blank, vacuous expression.		4
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	166		Patients in any variant of akinetic mute or vegetative state, not to mention coma, have little or no emotional expression.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	167		Why are emotions such a telltale sign of consciousness?		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	167		The execution of most emotions is carried out by the periaqueductal gray (PAG) in close cooperation with the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) and the parabrachial nucleus (PBN), the structures whose ensemble engenders bodily feelings (such as primordial feelings) and the variations thereof that we call emotional feelings.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	167		Just as signs of emotion are part of the externally observable conscious state, experiences of bodily feelings are a deep and vital part of consciousness from a first-person, introspective perspective.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	167		Consciousness fluctuates -- "intensity" scale of consciousness.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	168		Intensity scale ranges from dull to sharp, with all the shades in between.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	168		Core consciousness -- the sense of the here and now, unencumbered by much past and by little or no future.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	168		Extended or autobiographical consciousness -- manifests itself powerfully when a substantial part of one's life comes into play and both the lived past and the anticipated future dominate the proceedings.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	169		When we think about consciousness we usually have in mind a broad-scope consciousness associated with an autobiographical self.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	169		The levels of consciousness fluctuate with the situation.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	170		The level of consciousness shifts rapidly when one daydreams.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	170		Daydreaming requires not merely a lateral wandering away from the contents of the activity at hand but it downshift core self.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	170		Online consciousness downshifted to core self and distracted to another topic is still normal consciousness.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	170		The catalog of states of abnormal consciousness is long and varied and includes the most inventive aberrations of mind and self		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	170		Even in ever-so-faint states of consciousness, the self is a necessary presence in the mind.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	171		Consciousness can be confined to the here and now or it can encompass a whole life history.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	171		The core and extended or autobiographical kinds of consciousness are not rigid categories.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	171		Damasio has always envisioned many grades between core and autobiographical endpoints of the consciousness scale.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	171		We may propose that the lower notches of the consciousness scale are by no means human alone.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	171		In all probability, the lower notches of the consciousness scale are present in numerous nonhuman species that have brains complex enough to construct them.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	171		No one can prove satisfactorily that nonhuman, nonlanguage beings have consciousness, core or otherwise, although it is reasonable to conclude that it is highly likely that they do.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	172		Core consciousness does not require language.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	172		Autobiographical consciousness relies extensively on language.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	173		The brain constantly produces an overabundant quantity of images.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	173		The brain's overabundance of images requires a process of selecting the right images and ordering them in a procession of time units and space frames.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	173		Only a small number of images can be displayed clearly at any given time because the image making space is so scarce.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	174		The making of images was naturally selected in evolution because images permit a more precise evaluation of the environment.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	174		The strategic management of images likely evolved bottom-up, early own, well before consciousness did.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	174		Especially valuable images, given their importance for survival, were 'highlighted' by emotional factors.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	174		The brain probably achieves the highlighting of especially valuable images by generating an emotional state that accompanies the image in a parallel track.  This is the mechanism described in this "somatic marker hypothesis."		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	175		Gut feeling -- fully formed emotion, overtly experienced as a feeling.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	175		A bias -- a covert, emotion related signal of which the subject is not aware.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	176		The foundations for the processes of consciousness are the unconscious processes in charge of life regulation -- the blind dispositions that regulate metabolic functions  and are housed in brainstem nuclei and hypothalamus; the dispositions that deliver reward and punishment and promote drives, motivations, and emotion; and the mapping apparatus that manufactures images, in perception and recall, and that can select and edit such images.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	178		Dreams offer direct evidence of mind processes unassisted by consciousness.		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	178		During dreams some kind of nonstandard consciousness is going on, the term paradoxical being quite apt.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	178		Lucid dreaming, during which trained dreamers manage to direct their dreams to a certain extent.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	178		Remembering dreams is a vexing issue.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	179		We dream profusely, several times a night, when we are in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and we even dream, albeit far less so, when we are in slow wave sleep, also known as  non-REM.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	180		The brain constructs consciousness by generating a self process within an awake mind.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	180		The essence of the self is a focusing of the mind on the material organism that it inhabits.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	180		Wakefulness and the mind are indispensable components of consciousness, but the self is the distinctive element.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	180		The self is built in stages.  The simplest stage emerges from the part of the brain that stands for the organism (the proto-self) and consists of gathering of images that describe a relatively stable aspects of the body and generate spontaneous feelings of the living body (primordial feelings).		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	180		The second stage of the self results from establishing a relationship between the organism (as represented by the proto-self) and any part of the brain that represents an object-to-be-known. This results in the core self.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	181		The third stage allows multiple objects, previously recorded as lived experience or as anticipated future, to interact with a protoself and produce an abundance of core self pulses.  The result is the autobiographical self.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	181		All three stages of self are constructed in separate but coordinated workspaces.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	181		The image spaces of the self are the 'playground' for the abundance of both ongoing perception and the dispositions contained in convergence-divergence regions.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	182		From an evolutionary standpoint, self processes were especially efficient at ordering and organizing minds toward the homeostatic needs of their organisms and thus increasing the chances of survival.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	182		Much later in evolution, knowledge was deposited in memories residing inside the brain, held in convergence-divergence regions and in memories that have been recorded externally, and instruments of culture.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	182		Consciousness in the fullest sense of the term emerged after such knowledge was categorized, symbolized in various forms (including recursive language), and manipulated by imagination and reason.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	182		The ongoing digital revolution, the globalization of cultural information, and the coming of the age of empathy are pressures likely to lead to structural modifications of mind and self.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	183		The reason why conscious minds prevailed in evolution was the fact that consciousness optimized life regulation.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	183		The self in each conscious mind is the first representative of individual life regulation mechanisms.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	184		Introspection can provide misleading information.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	185		There is some deeper feeling to be found in the depths of the conscious mind. It is the feeling that my own body exists, and it is present, independently of any object with which it interacts, as a rock-solid, wordless affirmation that I am alive. This fundamental feeling, a critical element of the self process, is what Damasio calls a primordial feeling.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	185		The primordial feeling has a definite quality, a valence, somewhere along the pleasure-to-pain range.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	185		The primordial feeling is the primitive behind all feelings of emotion and therefore is the basis of all feelings caused by interactions between objects and organism.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	185		Primordial feelings are produced by the protoself.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	185		The conscious mind is a composite different images.  One set of those images describes the objects in consciousness.  Other images describe me an individual.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	185		Images that describe me the individual include: (1) the perspective in which the objects are being mapped (the fact that my mind has a standpoint of dealing, touching, hearing, and that the standpoint is my body); (2) the feeling that the objects have been represented in a mind belonging to me and no one else (ownership); (3) the feeling that I have agency relative to the objects in that the actions being carried out by my body are commanded by my mind; and (4) primordial feelings, which signify the existence of my living body independently of how objects engage it or not.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	186		When the aggregate images of the self are folded together with the images of the nonself objects, the result is a conscious mind.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	186		The basic ingredients in the construction of conscious minds are wakefulness and images.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	186		Wakefulness depends on the operation of certain nuclei in the brainstem tegmentum and the hypothalamus. Using both neural and chemical routes, these nuclei influence the cerebral cortex. As a result, vigilance is either diminished (producing sleep) or enhanced (producing wakefulness).		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	186		The function of the brain stem nuclei is assisted by the thalamus.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	186		The delicate balance of wakefulness depends on the close interplay of the hypothalamus, brainstem, and cerebral cortex.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	187		The brainstem answers questions that no one poses, such as how much should the situation matter to the beholder?  Value determines the signal and degree of emotional responses to a situation as well as how awake and alert we are to be.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	187		Anesthetics suspend wakefulness altogether		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	187		Brain stem wakefulness nuclei are anatomically close to the brain stem protoself nuclei for good reason: both sets of nuclei participate in life regulation.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	187		Images come in all sensory varieties, not just visual, and they pertain to any object or action being processed in the brain.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	188		Conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between the organism and an object-to-be-known.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	188		The entire fabric of the conscious mind is created from images generated by the brain's map-making abilities.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	188		Images that represent the organism are a particular class.  They originate in the body's interior and represent aspects of the body in action. They have a special status because they are felt.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	188		Felt images of the body, primordial bodily feelings, are primitives of all of the feelings, including feelings of the emotions.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	188		Images that describe the relationship between the organism and object draw on both kinds of images -- conventional sensory images and variations on bodily feelings.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	188		All images occur in an aggregate workspace form by separate early sensory regions of the cerebral cortices and, in the case of feelings, by selected regions of the brainstem.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	189		The image space is controlled by a number of cortical and subcortical sites whose circuits contain dispositional knowledge recorded in dormant form in the convergence-divergence neural architecture.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	189		The image space regions can operate either consciously or unconsciously, but  in either case they do so within precisely the same neural substrates.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	189		The difference between conscious and unconscious modes of operation in the participating regions depends on degrees of wakefulness and on the level of self processing.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	189		Bernard Baars originated the notion of global workspace.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	189		Giulio Tononi on binocular rivalry.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	189		Conscious states require early sensory engagement and the engagement of association cortices.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		The protoself is the basis for the construction of the core self.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		The protoself is an integrated collection of separate neural patterns that map, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organisms physical structure.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		Protoself maps are distinctive in that they generate not merely body images but also felt body images.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		The primordial feelings of the body are spontaneously present and in normal awake brain.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		The protoself includes master interoceptive maps, master organism maps, and externally directed sensory portal maps.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		From an anatomical standpoint, protoself maps arise both around the brainstem and from the cortical regions.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		The integration of all the diverse and spatially distributed protoself maps takes place by cross signaling within the same time window.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		The interoceptive signals tell the central nervous system about the ongoing state of the organism, which may range from optimal or the routine to the problematic.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		Nociceptive signals, which are the basis of feelings of pain.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	190		Interoceptive signals signify the need for physiological corrections, like feelings of hunger and thirst.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	191		Interoceptive signals participate in the making of hedonic states and the corresponding feelings of pleasure.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	191		On any given moment, a subset of these interoceptive signals, as assembled and modified in certain upper brain stem nuclei, generate primordial feelings.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	191		The brain stem is not a mere pass-through of the body signals to the cerebral cortex.  It is a decision station, capable of sensing changes and responding in predetermined but modulated ways.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	191		Primordial feelings are a byproduct of a particular way in which the brain stem nuclei are organized and of their unbreakable loop with the body.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	193		Primordial feelings precede all of the feelings.		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	194		The neural and chemical signals that describe body states enter the central nervous system at many levels of the spinal cord, the trigeminal nerve in the brain stem, and the special collections of neurons that hover on the margin of the brain ventricles.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		From all of the entry points, the signals describing body states are relayed to major integrative nuclei in the brainstem; the most important are in the nucleus tractus solitarius,  parabrachial nucleus, and the hypothalamus.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		After being used to regulate life processes and generate primordial feelings, the body-state brainstem signals are also relayed to the sector most clearly identified with interoreception, the insula cortex, after a stop in the thalamic relay nuclei.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		Damasio believes that the brainstem component is foundational for the self process.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		The brainstem component can provide an operational protoself, even when they cortical component is extensively compromised.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		The master organism maps describe a schema of the entire body with its major components -- head, trunk, and limb -- in repose.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		The movements of the body are mapped against that master map.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		Unlike the interoreceptive maps, the master organism maps change dramatically during development.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	195		The master interoceptive system must fit within the general framework created by the master organism schema.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	196		The representation of the varied sensory portals of the body -- like the body regions encasing the eyes, ears, tongue, nose -- is a separate and special case of a master organism map.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	196		Sensory portal maps play a dual role, first in the building of perspective (a major aspect of consciousness) and then in the construction of qualitative aspects of mind.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	196		One of the curious aspects of our awareness of an object is the exquisite relation we established between the mental contents that describe the object and those that correspond to the body part engaged in the perception.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	197		The ensemble of body structures encasing a sensory structure constitutes what Damasio calls a sensory portal.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	197		Eye movements and blinking play a critical role in the editing of our own visual images.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	197		The sensory portal for hearing is comparable to that for vision.  The vibration of the tympanic membrane and a set of minuscule bones in the middle ear can be signaled to the brain in parallel with the sound itself, which occurs in the internal ear, at the level of the cochleas, where sound frequencies, time, and timbre are mapped.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	198		Sensory portals play a crucial role in defining the perspective of the mind relative to the rest of the world.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	198		An effect we all experience in our minds: having a standpoint for whatever is happening outside the mind.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	198		The standpoint is drawn from the collection of body regions  around which perceptions arise.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	198		Organism perspective is grounded in a variety of sources.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	198		Sight, sound, spatial balance, taste, and smell all depend on sensory portals not far from one another, all located in the head.  We can think of the head is a multidimensional surveillance device.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	198		Touch has a broader sensory portal, but perspective related to touch still points unequivocally to the singular organism as the surveyor, and it identifies a place on the surveyor's surface.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	198		The perception of our own movement does relate to the entire body but always originates within the singular organism.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	199		In the cerebral cortex, most of the sensory portal data must land in the somatosensory system -- with SI and  SII favored over the insula.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	199		For vision, sensory portal data are conveyed to the frontal eye fields, which are located in Brodmann area 8 in the superior and lateral aspects of the frontal cortex.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	199		Somatosensory cortices convey signals from the external world and from the body.  The sensory portal component rightfully belongs to organism structure and thus to protoself.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	199		There is a remarkable contrast between the two distinct patterns -- the infinite variety of patterns describing objects, and the narrow range of patterns related to the body's interior and its tightly controlled regulation.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	200		The fact that the body proper remains inseparably attached of the brain at all times underlies the generation of primordial feelings and the unique relationship between body, as object, and the brain that represents that object.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	200		The protoself is a collection of maps that remains connected interactively with its source (the body), a deep root that cannot be alienated.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	200		The protoself is not to be confused with a homunculus.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	201		Nothing could be further from Damasio's notion of protoself than the idea of homunculus.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	202		The self would amount to the unadorned and felt representation of life within the brain, a sheer experience unconnected to anything but its own body.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	202		The self consists of the primordial feeling that the protoself, in its native state, spontaneously and relentlessly delivers, instant after instant.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	203		The core self is created by linking the modified protoself to the object that causes the modification, an object that now has been hallmarked by feeling and enhanced by attention.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	203		The mind Includes images regarding a simple and very common sequence of events -- an object engaged the body when that object was looked at, touched, or heard, from a specific perspective; the engagement caused the body to change; the presence of the object was felt; the object was made salient.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	203		Producing a conscious mind is a series of images, an image of the organism (provided by the modified protoself proxy); the image of an object-related emotional response (i.e. a feeling); and an image of a momentarily enhanced causative object.  The self comes to mind in the form of images, relentlessly telling a story of such engagements.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	204		Michael Gazzaniga advanced the notion of "interpreter" as a way of explaining the generation of consciousness.  He has related it to the machinery of the left hemisphere and to the language processes therein.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		The production of pulses of core self relative to a large number of objects interacting with the organism guarantees the production of object-related feelings.  Such feelings construct a robust self process that contributes to the maintenance of wakefulness.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		The core self pulses also confer degrees of value upon the images of the causative object, thus giving it more or less salience.  This differentiation of the flowing images organizes the landscape of the mind, shaping it in relation to the needs and goals of the organism.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		How might the brain implement the core self state?		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		The interoceptive component of the protoself is based in the upper brain stem and in the insula.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		The sensory portal component of the protoself is based in the conventional somatosensory cortices and frontal eye fields.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		When a perceived object precipitates an emotional reaction and alters the master interoceptive maps, a modification of the protoself ensues, thus altering the primordial feelings.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		The sensory portal components of the protoself change when an object engages a perceptual system.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		The regions involved in making images of the body inevitably change at protoself sites -- brainstem, insula cortex, and somatosensory cortices.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	205		The varied events generate microsequences of images that are introduced into the mind process.  They are introduced into the image workspace of the early sensory cortices and of select regions of the brainstem, those in which feeling states are generated and  modified.		0
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	206		The microsequences of images succeed each other like beats in a pulse, irregularly but dependably, for as long is events continue to happen in the wakefulness level is maintained above threshold		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	207		A neural coordinating device to create the coherent narrative that defines the protoself.  One candidate for the role of coordinator is the thalamus, specifically the associative nuclei of the thalamus, whose situation is ideal to establish functional linkages among separate sets of cortical activity.		1
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind	209		Reward nuclei in regions such as the brainstem's ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the basal ganglia accomplish this special treatment of images by selectively releasing neuromodulators in image making areas.		2
Damasio; Self Comes to Mind