Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. Later, he moved to the United States as a visiting researcher for six months at the Aphasia Research Center in Boston. There, his work on behavioral neurology was under the supervision of Norman Geschwind. He is the David Dornsife Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Neurology at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Institute for the Neurological Study of Emotion and Creativity in the United States.

In addition to being a well-known researcher in several areas of neuroscience, he is the author of successful science books of an informative type. He is married to Hanna Damasio, a colleague and co-author of several of his books. As a researcher, Damasio has as a priority field of interest the neurological bases of the mind, especially with regard to the neural systems that underlie memory, language, emotions and decision processing. As a doctor, he studies and treats, together with his collaborators, behavioral and cognitive disorders, as well as movement disorders.

As a science writer, Damasio’s books deal with the relationship between emotions and feelings and the basis of feelings in the brain. His 1994 book “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain” was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His second book “The feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness” was considered one of the ten best books of 2001 by The New York Times Book Review. In his book, “In Search of Spinoza,” published in 2003, he explores philosophy’s relationship to neurobiology, suggesting that a set of guidelines for human ethics can be designed in relation to science.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. Damasio has received numerous awards, including the 2005 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, also presented to his wife.