Honda Worldwide | September 21, 2010 "USC's Neuroscience Pioneer ...
For the year 2010 will be awarded to Dr. Antonio Damasio, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, U. S. A. , for his pioneering efforts and remarkable... Brain research has advanced through a multitude of hypotheses and tests but even with the edge of modern neuroscience, it is not yet possible to fully elucidate the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Damasio's other work on the neural basis of the emotions led him to propose that the brain's insula was the cortical platform for the processing of emotional feelings, a hypothesis that has been widely confirmed. In his most influential Somatic Marker Hypothesis, he proposed that emotions and feelings play a central role in decision-making via a mechanism he termed "somatic markers". These early findings were later investigated with the tools of cognitive neuroscience, including experimental functional brain imaging. Somatic markers tag the images involved in the reasoning process with emotions related to past experiences, thus conferring differential values upon those images. Damasio first obtained the basis for this theory from his case studies of neurological patients with damage in brain regions related to emotion, such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. He focused his interest on the roles of emotions and feelings in human behavior, including consciousness and decision-making. In other words, in its ultrafast and partly unconscious computations, our brain uses somatic/emotional signals to make "intelligent" decisions that conform to previously acquired knowledge. As the main route of inquiry into the human mind shifts from philosophy to science, Dr. Damasio's research stands at the forefront. Since the early years of his career Dr. Damasio has been contributing to those missing pieces. These collaborative efforts are expected to have an impact in the management of brain diseases such as depression and psychopathy, and in the elucidation of social behaviors. In turn, his work on feelings has been applied to the problem of how the self and the conscious mind are constructed. It can instantly make decisions with a very small amount of energy, which would otherwise require several interlinked, high-powered supercomputers. Damasio is married to his longtime...
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