Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio studied Medicine at the University of Lisbon and specialised in neurology, after which he moved to the United States to work in neuroscience research. Thanks to his contributions in the study of consciousness and cerebral processes linked to feelings and emotions, two great mysteries in the attempt to understand the human mind, he has become one of the most renowned figures in the field and has received such prestigious awards as the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2015) and the Grawemeyer Award (2014), as well as receiving the title of Honoris Causa from several universities around the world. As Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, he presently occupies the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and is director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Moreover, he is the author of several popular science and other more specialised books which have allowed wide dissemination of his discoveries and well as making known the most important unanswered questions that still predominate in neuroscience. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Among those published in Spanish and Catalan by Destino are Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994 (in Spanish, El error de Descartes, 2011) in which he questions one of the prevailing assumptions of western thought, namely the independent existence of mind and body; Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (in Catalan, I el cervell va crear l’home, 2010) in which he reviews the evolution of the human mind and the origins of consciousness; and the collection of informative articles Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, 2021 (in Spanish, Sentir y saber. El camino de la consciencia (2021).