Damasio, head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and adjunct professor at the Salk Institute , won international acclaim for his 1994 book, Descartes' Error . It is easy to predict that The Feeling of What Happens will have a similar impact. This basic, integrated representation of one moment and one place is independent of language and reasoning, of conventional as well as of working memory. Essentially, it stays stable across the whole lifetime of an organism. This is extended consciousness.
Human beings share it only with a much smaller number of other animals.
They are central to the new approach to the problem of consciousness that Damasio presents. It generates the subjective experience of possessing a transtemporal identity. This new idea of anchoring our traditional self-concept in a more fundamental notion of continuously changing bodily processes is the central motive of this exciting book. Never Asked For Damasio, solving the problem of consciousness has two aspects. We have to understand how a phenomenal self can be generated and perceived as being external to the brain while being fully immersed in a complex, multimodal scene.