82
" Herpes simplex encephalitis used to be a prominent cause of such a disabling loss, but Alzheimer’s disease has now become the most frequent culprit. Specific cells within the hippocampal circuitry and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer’s disease. The gradual disruption no longer permits effective learning or recall of integrated events. The result is a progressive loss of spatial and temporal orientation. Unique people, events, and objects can no longer be recalled or recognized. No new ones can be learned. It is now clear that the hippocampus is an important site for neurogenesis, the process of generating new neurons that become incorporated in the local circuitry. New memory formation partly depends on neurogenesis. Interestingly, it is known that stress, which impairs memory, reduces neurogenesis. "
― António R. Damásio , The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
90
" The immediate causes of feelings include (a) the background flow of life processes in our organisms, which are experienced as spontaneous or homeostatic feelings; (b) the emotive responses triggered by processing myriad sensory stimuli such as tastes, smells, tactile, auditory, and visual stimuli, the experience of which is one of the sources of qualia; and (c) the emotive responses resulting from engaging drives (such as hunger or thirst) or motivations (such as lust and play) or emotions, in the more conventional sense of the term, which are action programs activated by confrontation with numerous and sometimes complex situations; examples of emotions include joy, sadness, fear, anger, envy, jealousy, contempt, compassion, and admiration. "
― António R. Damásio , The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
92
" Feelings accompany the unfolding of life in our organisms, whatever one perceives, learns, remembers, imagines, reasons, judges, decides, plans, or mentally creates. "
― António R. Damásio , The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
93
" Hypothetically, if you would reduce the feeling “tracks” of your mind, you would be left with desiccated chains of sensory images of the exterior world in all the familiar varieties—sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, more or less concrete or abstract, translated or not in some symbolic form, namely, verbal, arising from actual perception or recalled from memory. Worse, if you had been born without the feeling tracks, the rest of the images would have traveled in your mind unaffected and unqualified "
― António R. Damásio , The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
94
" Once feeling would have been removed, you would have become unable to classify images as beautiful or ugly, pleasurable or painful, tasteful or vulgar, spiritual or earthy. If no feelings were available, you might still be trained, at great effort, to make aesthetic or moral classifications of objects or events. So might a robot, of course. "
― António R. Damásio , The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
96
" In a simple way, the region of unlikeness called life, at the level of humble cells—without and with a nucleus—or of large multicellular organisms such as we humans are, can be defined by these two traits: the ability to regulate its life by maintaining internal structures and operations for as long as possible, and the possibility of reproducing itself and taking a stab at perpetuity. It is as if, in an extraordinary way, each of us, each cell in us, and every other cell were part of one single, gigantic, supertentacular organism, the one and only organism that began 3.8 billion years ago and still keeps going. "
― António R. Damásio , The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures