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Hanna Damasio
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2024) 36 (8): 1653–1659.
Published: 01 July 2024
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In this article, we summarize our views on the problem of consciousness and outline the current version of a novel hypothesis for how conscious minds can be generated in mammalian organisms. We propose that a mind can be considered conscious when three processes are in place: the first is a continuous generation of interoceptive feelings, which results in experiencing of the organism's internal operations; the second is the equally continuous production of images, generated according to the organism's sensory perspective relative to its surround; the third combines feeling/experience and perspective resulting in a process of subjectivity relative to the image contents. We also propose a biological basis for these three components: the peripheral and central physiology of interoception and exteroception help explain the implementation of the first two components, whereas the third depends on central nervous system integration, at multiple levels, from spinal cord, brainstem, and diencephalic nuclei, to selected regions of the mesial cerebral cortices.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2018) 30 (2): 234–255.
Published: 01 February 2018
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Broca's area has long been implicated in sentence comprehension. Damage to this region is thought to be the central source of “agrammatic comprehension” in which performance is substantially worse (and near chance) on sentences with noncanonical word orders compared with canonical word order sentences (in English). This claim is supported by functional neuroimaging studies demonstrating greater activation in Broca's area for noncanonical versus canonical sentences. However, functional neuroimaging studies also have frequently implicated the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in sentence processing more broadly, and recent lesion–symptom mapping studies have implicated the ATL and mid temporal regions in agrammatic comprehension. This study investigates these seemingly conflicting findings in 66 left-hemisphere patients with chronic focal cerebral damage. Patients completed two sentence comprehension measures, sentence–picture matching and plausibility judgments. Patients with damage including Broca's area (but excluding the temporal lobe; n = 11) on average did not exhibit the expected agrammatic comprehension pattern—for example, their performance was >80% on noncanonical sentences in the sentence–picture matching task. Patients with ATL damage ( n = 18) also did not exhibit an agrammatic comprehension pattern. Across our entire patient sample, the lesions of patients with agrammatic comprehension patterns in either task had maximal overlap in posterior superior temporal and inferior parietal regions. Using voxel-based lesion–symptom mapping, we find that lower performances on canonical and noncanonical sentences in each task are both associated with damage to a large left superior temporal–inferior parietal network including portions of the ATL, but not Broca's area. Notably, however, response bias in plausibility judgments was significantly associated with damage to inferior frontal cortex, including gray and white matter in Broca's area, suggesting that the contribution of Broca's area to sentence comprehension may be related to task-related cognitive demands.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2005) 17 (10): 1509–1518.
Published: 01 October 2005
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Lesion and functional imaging studies in humans have shown that the ventral and medial prefrontal cortex is critically involved in the processing of emotional stimuli, but both of these methods have limited spatiotemporal resolution. Conversely, neurophysiological studies of emotion in nonhuman primates typically rely on stimuli that do not require elaborate cognitive processing. To begin bridging this gap, we recorded from a total of 267 neurons in the left and right orbital and anterior cingulate cortices of four patients who had chronically implanted depth electrodes for monitoring epilepsy. Peristimulus activity was recorded to standardized, complex visual scenes depicting neutral, pleasant, or aversive content. Recording locations were verified with postoperative magnetic resonance imaging. Using a conservative, multistep statistical evaluation, we found significant responses in 56 neurons; 16 of these were selective for only one emotion class, most often aversive. The findings suggest sparse and widely distributed processing of emotional value in the prefrontal cortex, with a predominance of responses to aversive stimuli.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2005) 17 (8): 1293–1305.
Published: 01 August 2005
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We have proposed that the left inferotemporal (IT) region contains structures that mediate between conceptual knowledge retrieval and word-form retrieval, and we have hypothesized that these structures are utilized for word retrieval irrespective of the sensory modality through which an entity is apprehended, thus being “modality neutral.” We tested this idea in two sensory modalities, visual and auditory, and for two categories of concrete entities, tools and animals. In a PET experiment, 10 normal participants named tools and animals either from pictures or from characteristic sounds (e.g., “scissors” from a picture of a scissors or from the sound of a scissors cutting; “rooster” from a picture of a rooster or from the sound of a rooster crowing). Visual and auditory naming of tools activated the left posterior/lateral IT; visual and auditory naming of animals activated the left anterior/ ventral IT. For both tools and animals, the left IT activations were similar in location and magnitude regardless of whether participants were naming entities from pictures or from sounds. The results provide novel evidence to support the notion that left IT structures contain “modality-neutral” systems for mediating between conceptual knowledge and word retrieval.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2004) 16 (7): 1143–1158.
Published: 01 September 2004
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Humans are able to use nonverbal behavior to make fast, reliable judgments of both emotional states and personality traits. Whereas a sizeable body of research has identified neural structures critical for emotion recognition, the neural substrates of personality trait attribution have not been explored in detail. In the present study, we investigated the neural systems involved in emotion and personality trait judgments. We used a type of visual stimulus that is known to convey both emotion and personality information, namely, point-light walkers. We compared the emotion and personality trait judgments made by subjects with brain damage to those made by neurologically normal subjects and then conducted a lesion overlap analysis to identify neural regions critical for these two tasks. Impairments on the two tasks dissociated: Some subjects were impaired at emotion recognition, but judged personality normally; other subjects were impaired on the personality task, but normal at emotion recognition. Moreover, these dissociations in performance were associated with damage to specific neural regions: Right somatosensory cortices were a primary focus of lesion overlap in subjects impaired on the emotion task, whereas left frontal opercular cortices were a primary focus of lesion overlap in subjects impaired on the personality task. These findings suggest that attributions of emotional states and personality traits are accomplished by partially dissociable neural systems.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (1995) 7 (4): 425–432.
Published: 01 October 1995
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Some patients with face agnosia (prosopagnosia) caused by occipitotemporal damage produce discriminatory covert responses to the familiar faces that they fail to identify overtly. For example, their average skin conductance responses (SCRs) to familiar faces are significantly larger than average SCRs to unfamiliar faces. In this study we describe the opposite dissociation in four patients with bilateral ventromedial frontal damage: The patients recognized the identity of familiar faces normally, yet failed to generate discriminatory SCRs to those same familiar faces. Taken together, the two sets of results constitute a double dissociation: bilateral occipitotemporal damage impairs recognition but allows SCR discrimination, whereas bilateral ventromedial damage causes the opposite. The findings suggest that the neural systems that process the somatic-based valence of stimuli are separate from and parallel to the neural systems that process the factual, nonsomatic information associated with the same stimuli.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (1993) 5 (3): 371–372.
Published: 01 July 1993