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Information about Antonio Damasio

Neuropsychology


Topics
Brain-computer interfaces • Brain damage
Brain regions • Clinical neuropsychology
Cognitive neuroscience • Human brain
Neuroanatomy • Neurophysiology
Phrenology • Popular misconceptions
Brain functions
arousal • attention
concentration • consciousness
decision-making • executive functions
language • learning • memory
motor coordination • perception
planning • problem solving
thinking
People
Arthur L. Benton • Antnio Damsio
Kenneth Heilman • Phineas Gage
Norman Geschwind • Elkhonon Goldberg
Donald Hebb • Alexander Luria
Muriel D. Lezak • Brenda Milner
Karl Pribram • Oliver Sacks
Roger Sperry
Tests
Bender-Gestalt Test
Benton Visual Retention Test
Clinical Dementia Rating
Continuous Performance Task
Glasgow Coma Score
Hayling and Brixton tests
Lexical decision task
Mini mental state examination
Stroop task
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
Wisconsin card sorting task
This box:  •  • [ edit]


António Damasio, GOSE, pron. IPA: [ɐ̃'tɔniu dɐ'maziu], (IPA: [ɐ̃'tɔniu dɐ'maziu]) (b. 1944, Lisbon, Portugal) is a behavioral neurologist and neuroscientist. He is 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, Iowa City, Iowa, United States. His career at Iowa lasted from 1976-2005. Besides being a well-known researcher in several areas of the neurology, he is a best-selling author of books which describe his scientific thinking.

Life and work

Damasio studied medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School in Portugal, where he also did his medical residency rotation and completed his doctorate. Later, he moved to the United States as a research fellow at the Aphasia Research Center in Boston. His work there on behavioral neurology was done under the supervision of Norman Geschwind.

As a researcher, Dr. Damasio's main interest is the neurobiology of the mind, especially neural systems which subserve memory, language, emotion, and decision-making. His research has helped to elucidate the neural basis for the emotions and has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.

As a clinician, he and his collaborators study and treat the disorders of behavior and cognition, and movement disorders.

Damasio's books deal with the relationship between emotions and feelings, and what are their bases in the brain. His 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and is translated in over 30 languages. 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 New York Times Book Review, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and has thirty foreign editions. Damasio's most recent book, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, was published in 2003. In it, Damasio explores philosophy and its relations to neurobiology, suggesting that it might provide guidelines for human ethics.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine, and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. Damasio has received many awards including the Prince of Asturias Award in Science and Technology, Kappers Neuroscience Medal, the Beaumont Medal from the American Medical Association and the Reenpaa Prize in Neuroscience. He is also in the editorial board of many important journals in the field.

His current work involves the social emotions, decision neuroscience and creativity.

Prof. Damasio is married to Dr. Hanna Damasio, his colleague and co-author of several works.

Bibliography

  • , Penguin Books, 1994 - 2005, ISBN 0-380-72647-5
  • The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt, 1999, ISBN 0-15-100569-6/ Harvest Books, 2000 ISBN 0-15-601075-5
  • Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, 2003, ISBN 0-15-100557-5

See also

External links

Neuropsychology is an interdisciplinary branch of psychology and neuroscience that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relate to specific psychological processes and overt behaviors.
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A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device.
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Brain damage or brain injury is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells.

Brain damage may occur due to a wide range of conditions, illnesses, injuries, and as a result of iatrogenesis.
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Clinical neuropsychology is a sub-specialty of clinical psychology that specialises in the diagnostic assessment and treatment of patients with brain injury or neurocognitive deficits.
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Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological mechanisms underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes and their behavioral manifestations.
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The human brain controls the central nervous system (CNS), by way of the cranial nerves and spinal cord, the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and regulates virtually all human activity.
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Neuroanatomy is the branch of anatomy that studies the anatomical organization of the nervous system. In vertebrate animals, the routes that the myriad nerves take from the brain to the rest of the body (or "periphery"), and the internal structure of the brain in particular, are
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Neurophysiology is a part of physiology. Neurophysiology is the study of nervous system function. Primarily, it is connected with neurophysiology and also to with neurobiology, psychology, neurology, clinical neurophysiology, electrophysiology, ethology, neuroanatomy, cognitive
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Phrenology (from Greek: φρήν, phrēn, "mind"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is a theory which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head (i.e.
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Wikipedia articles related to Brain Function

  • Visual system
  • Auditory system
  • Olfactory system
  • Gustatory system
  • Somatosensory system
  • Visual perception
  • Motor cortex
  • Broca's area (aka Language Area)
  • Lateralization of brain function

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Arousal is a physiological and psychological state of being awake. It involves the activation of the reticular activating system in the brain stem, the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system, leading to increased heart rate and blood pressure and a condition of
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Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Examples include listening carefully to what someone is saying while ignoring other conversations in the room (the cocktail party effect) or listening to a
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Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Examples include listening carefully to what someone is saying while ignoring other conversations in the room (the cocktail party effect) or listening to a
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Consciousness is a characteristic of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment.
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Decision making is the cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among variations. Every decision making process produces a final choice. It can be an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but know not what.
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Executive functions is a term synonymous with cognitive control, and used by psychologists and neuroscientists to describe a loosely defined collection of brain processes whose role is to guide thought and behaviour in accordance with internally generated goals or plans.
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In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is a language that is spoken, written, or signed (visually or tactilely) by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages (such as computer-programming
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Learning is the acquisition and development of memories and behaviors, including skills, knowledge, understanding, values, and wisdom. It is the goal of education, and the product of experience.
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In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. Traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing the memory.
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Gross motor coordination addresses the gross motor skills: walking, running, climbing, jumping, crawling, lifting one's head, sitting up, etc.

Fine motor coordination
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perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was proclaimed that building perceiving machines would take about a decade, but, needless to say,
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For planning in AI, see .


Planning is both the organizational process of creating and maintaining a plan; and the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired future on some scale.
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Problem solving forms part of thinking. Considered the most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of more routine or fundamental skills (Goldstein & Levin, 1987).
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Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires.
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Arthur Lester Benton, Ph.D., (October 16, 1909 - December 27, 2006) was a neuropsychologist and Emeritus Professor of Neurology and Psychology at the University of Iowa.

He received his A.B. from Oberlin College in 1931, his A.M.
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Kenneth M. Heilman is an American behavioral neurologist.

Biography

Early Life and Career

Kenneth Heilman was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended and graduated from medical school at the University of Virginia in 1963.
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Phineas P. Gage (1823 – May 21, 1860) was a railroad construction foreman who suffered a traumatic brain injury when a tamping iron accidentally passed through his skull, damaging the frontal lobes of his brain.
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Norman Geschwind can be considered the father of modern behavioral neurology in America. He was mentor to the cadre of behavioral neurologists who would shape the subspecialty for the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Dr.
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Elkhonon Goldberg (1946) is a neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist.

Biography

Elkhonon Golderg was born in Riga, Latvia in 1946, studied at Moscow State University with the great neuropsychologist Alexander Luria and moved to the United States in 1974.
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Donald Olding Hebb (July 22, 1904 – August 20, 1985) was a psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning.
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