安东尼奥·达马西奥

安东尼奥·达马西奥（葡萄牙语：António Damásio，1944年2月25日—）是一位葡萄牙裔美国神经科学家，南加州大学和索尔克研究所教授，2005年与其妻子安娜·达马西奥共同获得阿斯图里亚斯亲王奖的科学技术奖，主要作品有《感受与认知——让意识照亮心智》（Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious）等。

Antonio Damasio (Portuguese: António Damásio; born 25 February 1944) is a Portuguese neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books. One of the most renowned neuroscientists of his generation, Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.

Life and work

During the 1960s, "Damasio studied medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School, where he also did his neurological residency and completed his doctorate in 1974." "For part of his studies, he researched behavioral neurology under the supervision of Norman Geschwind of the Aphasia Research Center in Boston."

Damasio's main field is neurobiology, especially the neural systems which underlie emotion, decision-making, memory, language and consciousness.

Damasio formulated the somatic marker hypothesis, a theory about how emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously). According to the theory, emotions provide the scaffolding for the construction of social cognition and are required for the self processes which undergird consciousness. "Damasio provides a contemporary scientific validation of the linkage between feelings and the body by highlighting the connection between mind and nerve cells ... this personalized embodiment of mind."

The somatic marker hypothesis has inspired many neuroscience experiments carried out in laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, and has had a major impact in contemporary science and philosophy. Damasio has been named by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the most highly cited researchers in the past decade. Current work on the biology of moral decisions, neuro-economics, social communication, and drug-addiction, has been strongly influenced by Damasio's hypothesis. An article published in the Archives of Scientific Psychology in 2014 named Damasio one of the 100 most eminent psychologist of the modern era. (Diener et al. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 2014, 2, 20–32). The June–July issue of Sciences Humaines included Damasio in its list of 50 key thinkers in the human sciences of the past two centuries.

Damasio also proposed that emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and are rooted in reward/punishment mechanisms. He recovered William James' perspective on feelings as a read-out of body states, but expanded it with an "as-if-body-loop" device which allows for the substrate of feelings to be simulated rather than actual (foreshadowing the simulation process later uncovered by mirror neurons). He demonstrated experimentally that the insular cortex is a critical platform for feelings, a finding that has been widely replicated, and he uncovered cortical and subcortical induction sites for human emotions, e.g. in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala. He also demonstrated that while the insular cortex plays a major role in feelings, it is not necessary for feelings to occur, suggesting that brain stem structures play a basic role in the feeling process.

Damasio has continued to investigate the neural basis of feelings and demonstrated that although the insular cortex is a major substrate for this process it is not exclusive, suggesting that brain stem nuclei are critical platforms as well. He regards feelings as the necessary foundation of sentience.