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Overview

Human culture has produced some amazing things. The Mona Lisa, the Taj Mahal, space shuttles and that musical about Alexander Hamilton are all incredible examples of human innovation.

But when we reflect on our accomplishments, it’s easy to think that human intellect is the main factor. However, feelings are also important and often overlooked. Author Antonio Damasio wants to correct this oversight with his book “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.”

Feelings are critical to our consciousness as well as every human invention. They underlie every major advancement and continue to inspire us. We should take a hard look at how advancements have affected our well-being, especially in the last few decades.

In this talk, you’ll learn about the origin of emotions and how they developed over time. You will also learn about two components that make up consciousness, as well as how anxiety is a remnant of our survival instincts from ancient times.

Big Idea #1: We underestimate the role of feelings in human development.

The story of how human civilization developed may seem like a neat and tidy narrative, but it actually promotes an order that doesn’t make sense. It gives humans too much credit for intelligence while ignoring their emotions. We should really be giving more credit to our feelings in the development of society.

This story is misleading. Feelings have, in fact, played a vital role in our development. They provide feedback on how the body and mind are doing and spur action when necessary (i.e., hunger can lead to eating).

Other feelings, like curiosity and pain, drive us to find solutions for problems. Therefore, it’s feelings that have prompted us to question and understand the world better.

Thanks to our feelings, we’ve been able to provide ourselves with nourishment and clothing. We’ve also become healthier by getting medical attention.

Feelings can trigger developments, but they also monitor them. They evaluate how well something is working and if it needs improvement. Another human advancement that gets put in the wrong order is our social behavior. We tend to link our cooperative abilities to higher brain function, but these instinctual behaviors go back before humans even had ideas.

Scientists have found that social behavior can be seen in bacteria, one of the simplest organisms on Earth. While these microscopic organisms are emotionless, they do process sensory information about their environment and exhibit social behavior.

Bacteria will sometimes join forces and work together to defend themselves or gain access to resources. They can also recognize freeloaders, who refuse to pull their weight, and give them the cold shoulder by refusing to cooperate with them.

So, feelings are important in social interactions. In the next key point, we’ll look at how they came to be that way.

Big Idea #2: Feelings are part of our basic life functions, and they emerged relatively recently.

Bacteria are different from humans, but they have similar reactions to their surroundings. For example, if bacteria sense something that is harmful to them, then they react the same way as we do when we feel pain and try to avoid it by moving away.

Homeostasis is an instinctual desire for balance, and it’s in all living things. It’s the driving force behind every internal process that has kept organisms alive since day one.

You can also view your feelings about yourself as agents that work on behalf of homeostasis. After all, hunger and fear are part of the processes that keep you alive. Over time, those mechanisms have evolved to become what we call self-consciousness which has allowed us to reflect on our state of being and how it relates to homeostasis.