# Antonio Damasio - The Quest to Understand Consciousness



## bubniakz (Jun 3, 2008)

http://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness.html

The influential work of Damasio and colleagues has centered around the idea that feeling states are produced by the integration of bodily sensations into conscious awareness, so that subjective feelings arise out of signals from afferent somatosensory systems, which in combination produce "interoception," definable as a sense of the internal milieu. A wealth of converging evidence suggests that the anterior insula is a crucial "hub" for this process. Across functional neuroimaging studies, anterior insula activation has been reported in a wide range of experimental contexts involving physical sensation or the induction of feeling states, including tactile stimulation, sexual arousal, visceral distension, happiness, anger, fear, sadness, and feelings of romantic love. Studies that have probed interoceptive awareness directly (e.g., by asking participants to make judgments about the timing of their own heartbeats) have identified anterior insula activity as directly correlated with such awareness, and statistically significant correlations between interoceptive awareness and self-reported emotional experience have also been demonstrated.

In DPD, then, it is possible to see anterior insula underactivity as the key neural correlate of the self-reported experience of de-affectualization. The involvement of anterior insula in representations of bodily state further suggests that reduced activity of this region may also be the biological substrate of the "desomatization" aspect of DPD symptomatology.


----------

