The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

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Pantheon Books, 2018 - Medical - 310 pages
From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture.

The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it.

www.antoniodamasio.com

 

Contents

BEGINNINGS
3
On the Human Condition
11
In a Region of Unlikeness
33
Varieties of Homeostasis
44
From Single Cells to Nervous Systems and Minds
53
The Origin of Minds
71
Expanding Minds
84
Affect
99
The Construction of Feelings
117
Consciousness
143
On Cultures
165
Medicine Immortality and Algorithms
194
On the Human Condition Now
211
The Strange Order of Things
234
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About the author (2018)

ANTONIO DAMASIO is University Profess∨ David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy; and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Awards he has received include the Prince of Asturias Prize in Science and Technology, the Grawemeyer Award, the Honda Prize, and the Pessoa and Signoret prizes. In 2017 he received the Freud Medal from the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. Damasio is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Descartes' Error, The Feeling of What Happens, Looking for Spinoza and Self Comes to Mind, all of which have been published in translation and are taught in universities throughout the world. www.antoniodamasio.com

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