Antonio Damasio
neuroscience · 1944- · Portugal / United States
Antonio Damasio reattached feeling to reason. Studying patients whose decision-making collapsed after damage to emotion-related brain regions, he argued that the old opposition between cool logic and hot feeling has it backwards: emotion is not noise against good judgment but an input to it, the body tagging our options with value before we deliberate.
What Vela reads them for
Damasio grounds Vela's attention to the body in emotion and in writing — the felt sense that precedes and shapes the reasoned account. The somatic-marker hypothesis is his contribution to the cohort, sitting on the body-first side of the field's central divide in tension with the constructionist frame.
Concepts they originated
Books in Vela's library
Honest framing
The strongest forms of the somatic-marker hypothesis and the experiments behind them have been seriously questioned. Vela keeps the core insight while noting the mechanism is less settled than its popular telling.