Antonio Damasio is a professor of neuroscience, neurology, psychology, and philosophy, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books have been translated into over thirty languages; he is the author of Descartes’ Error, Looking for Spinoza, and most recently The Strange Order of Things, all bestsellers.

In the past few decades, there have been many philosophers and researchers in the cognitive sciences who have looked at the subject of consciousness as problematic. Antonio Damasio, however, is convinced of the contrary, and shows that recent discoveries in neurobiology, psychology, and AI have provided the tools necessary to solve its mystery.

In this book, Damasio provides an explanation for each of its multiple facets, while also acknowledging the intuitive experience of consciousness we all share.

In the book’s 45 short chapters, Antonio Damasio helps us understand the relationship between consciousness and mind: why being conscious is not reduced to the fact of being awake or of feeling; how the role of feelings is essential; and how consciousness functions and develops in the brain.

By one of the greatest contemporary neuroscientists, an enlightening and captivating study of the phenomenon of consciousness.