The Self Comes To Mind by Antonio Damasio

From The Week of January 30, 2011

Unless we unlock the secrets to immortality, we will all likely be dead before humanity learns the fundamental truths of the how, the why, and the where of human consciousness. Thanks to brilliant minds like that possessed by Dr. Damasio, we have pieces to the puzzle, but these pieces are only theories that have yet to be proven. How can they be proven? We barely have the tools to measure consciousness, let alone divine its origins. Yet there's a virtue to theorizing. It stimulates debate, insight and inquiry. It may be that The Self Comes To Mind will succeed at doing all three.

Dr. Damasio, a professor of Neuroscience at USC, has been, for 30 years, studying the human brain in an attempt to extract its secrets. Here, he lays out his model of consciousness, arguing that it is the product of three, major systems which hierarchically build on one another to create a self-aware, functioning human being who can think, feel, remember and adapt. The Protoself is a largely subconscious awareness of the body, a map which allows the brain to regulate heart, kidney, lungs, among other vital systems. Core Consciousness builds on the Protoself by plugging in a sense of being, that is the awareness of self as distinct from ones environment, coupled with an awareness of desires and needs that motivate us. Finally, Extended Consciousness takes this understanding of the physical self and envelopes it in an autobiographical self, a self that is capable of remembering and, therefore, learning from experience. This self allows us to create communities, tools, societies, all of the elements that comprise human culture.

This is a clean and coherent explanation of selfhood and Dr. Damasio backs it up with a wealth of evidence drawn from years of experimentation and investigation. He includes, here, some of these experiments, enlightening the reader on the long journey to his theory of the human mind which he seems to have grasped on a level that I never will. And so even if I disagreed with him, It'd be pointless for me to be critical of his methodology or his conclusions. However, I can critique the book which I found both fascinating and challenging. Dr. Damasio is at his best when he descends from the Olympian heights of his understanding of neurology to engage the reader in a discussion of the fundamentals of both his theory and what we know of the brain. Consequently, he's at his worst when he falls back on the technical details that no one without a degree in Neurology will understand. I'm left enlightened, but feeling like I'm watching Van Gogh put together a masterpiece that I can only follow on a level less profound than the one on which he understands and operates. (3/5 Stars)