Human mind and consciousness always represented a colossal challenge for study. Though the brain, their creator, and body, its instrument and executive, are tangible and thus profoundly elucidated, the conscious-mind is far from being well-known. The article “How the Brain Creates the Mind” by Antonio Damasio (2002) sheds light on his understanding of the structure of mind and its relationship with human brain.
The most essential and obvious fact is that the brain and conscious-mind are mutually conditioned. The brain is a generator of consciousness, thus, if certain parts of it are seriously damaged, a person can lose consciousness which leads to such dangerous states as coma, paralysis, persistent vegetative state or even brain death. However, the brain can be also affected by means of non-bodily injury. As a result, the mind can be devastated by numerous worst mental diseases of a humankind such as depression, Alzheimer disease, drug addiction, etc. (Damasio, 2011).
Many researchers consider the nature of conscious-mind to be extremely obscure and for this reason, the solution of it and its explication are impossible to reach. However, Damasio believes that there are still a lot of details and specificities to be studied from neurobiological and mental perspectives (2002, p.4). He applies his own approach and divides the problem of mind into two parts, namely, so-called “movie-in-the-brain” and a self, which actually gives us a personalized, component, the sense of person, the sense of ownership (2002, p.5) The first part is described as “a metaphor for the integrated and unified composite of diverse sensory images - visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and others - that constitutes the multimedia show we call mind.” (ibid.) The self is the constituent of our mind which actually makes all human beings individuals. As the first component is a place of the origin of the latter, it is much more investigated and widely studied.
However, the second one is still a riddle. Despite of complexity of the entity, Damasio hypothesizes that a self is a feeling within the mental process which appears in the interaction with an object that shows that the organism is the owner of this mental process and creates the basis of first-person perspective, characteristic to conscious mind only (2002, p.7). To sum up, the self is created and developed by the unmeasurable range of such feelings, or in other words, human experience. What is even more interesting, the self has 3 levels: proto self, core self and autobiographical self (Damasio, 2011). While first two levels are considered to be present in other species, the autobiographical level is the one that makes the humans distinct. As a result, Damasio proves that even impenetrably complicated concepts such as the conscious-mind are yield to be elucidated and absolutely worth attempting.
Works Cited
Antonio R, Damasio. “How the Brain Creates the Mind.” Scientific American. Aug. 2002. Web. 29 Feb 2016.
Antonio, Damasio. “The Quest to Understand Consciousness.” Video. Youtube.com. TED, Dec. 2011. Web. 1 March. 2016 < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMrzdk_YnYY>
