" Our complex, infinitely rich minds are, as is so often the case in the long history of life, the result of cooperative combinations of simple elements. In the case of minds, it is not a matter of cells assembled to form tissues and organs or of genes instructing amino acids to assemble myriad proteins. The basic unit for minds is the image, the image of a thing or of what a thing does, or what the thing causes you to feel; or the image of what you think of the thing; or the images of the words that translate any and all of the above. "

― António R. Damásio , The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures