Self Comes to Mind Constructing the Conscious Brain

Key Note: A profound and groundbreaking new book telling the story of consciousness and the human mind, from one of the world's leading neuroscientists.

Key Features

• Oliver Sacks: 'Damasio is a profound thinker and an elegant writer'.
• For readers of Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality and AS Byatt's Memory: an Anthology
• The Feeling of What Happens backlisst very well in Vintage, having done 15,000 through bookscan.
• Will do for the human mind what Roger Penrose's groundbreaking The Road to Reality (30k hbs, 55k pbs) did for the universe.

About the Book: Self Comes to Mind, Constructing the Conscious Brain

Self Comes to Mind explores two questions that have haunted philosophers, neurologists, cognitive scientists and psychologists for centuries: how do brains construct minds, and how do minds become conscious?

Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In this revelatory work, he debunks the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting astounding new scientific evidence that consciousness-what we think of as "self"-is in fact a biological process created by the brain. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the personal, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces the evolutionary perspective, which entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told.

Beautifully told, through fascinating and moving human stories, Self Comes to Mind will ultimately reveal how our minds work-often without knowing or even
controlling what we do-and allow us to glimpse the root of our fondest constructs: self, identity, personhood, and self-image.

About the Author: Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio is the director of the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute. Damasio's books include Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain; The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review); and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

• ''Awareness may be mostly mystery, but Damasio shapes its hints and glimmerings into an imaginative, informed narrative.''-Kirkus
  'The marvel of reading Damasio's book is to be convinced one can follow the brain at work as it makes the private reality that is the deepest self.'- V. S. Naipaul
• 'Damasio makes a grand transition from higher-brain views of emotions to deeply evolutionary, lower-brain contributions to emotional, sensory and homeostatic experiences. He affirms that the roots of consciousness are affective and shared by our fellow animals. Damasio's creative vision leads relentlessly toward a natural
  understanding of the very font of being.'-Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience
• 'I was totally captivated by Self Comes to Mind.In this work Antonio Damasio presents his seminal discoveries in the field of neuroscience in the broader contexts of evolutionary biology and cultural development.This trailblazing book gives us a new way of thinking about ourselves, our history, and the importance of culture in shaping our common future.'- Yo-Yo Ma, musician