Antonio Damasio makes himself up as he goes along. Every waking moment, he is engaged in the study of his identity. Beyond the core self - the man who absent-mindedly picks up the orange juice or steps around the furniture - is an autobiographical fiction; he is an actor in a drama he writes for himself.
At least, that's how the Van Allen distinguished professor at the University of Iowa college of medicine sees it. Damasio is one of a worldwide brainstorm of neurologists exploring the great question of consciousness, the inexplicable mystery of why humans know who they are, where they came from and what they would really like for supper. And the key, for him, is that all human identity is a kind of fiction. We are all engaged in a process of self-creation.
"I make a distinction: there is the very simple self, the core self, something for which you do not need memory, for which you do not need language - you just have a feeling of being," he says. "Then there is the other self, which is the autobiographical, which gives us the sense that we have an identity, we have a personhood. We even have names for that collection, that history, and that is something very elaborate that I regard as a fiction, a literary fiction - something that we have built on the basis of events that have happened to us, and events that have not yet happened but that we presume will happen."
The centrepiece of Damasio's exploration is the brain; it is a spongy bundle of nerve cells not much heavier than a bag of sugar, just a virtual-reality headset internally fitted before birth, but each human brain becomes capable of containing and traversing the entire human universe.
It is part of the machinery of life management - it keeps the heart beating and the fight-or-flight machinery prepared for danger, and tells you when you are hungry - but it can also stun you with questions such as, "What was there before time began?" or "Why didn't they christen him Beckenham Beckham? Or maybe Penge?" Damasio, like his colleagues, is probing science's last great mystery, unravelling the enigma of the human mind, the thing inside that interprets the firings of the neurons and conjures up an "I" to watch the movie in the brain.
He is, however, at odds with many of his colleagues. Some of them think consciousness is an evolutionary adaptation conferring advantage in survival; some of them argue that the higher consciousness grew out of a capacity for language. He agrees with neither. He has a gut response, a visceral feeling that something else was at work first. He believes that human identity is a sensational response - a way of coping not just with feelings but with an awareness of those feelings. The human mind is a way of coping with fear, anger, disgust, laughter and other things as well: awe, social embarrassment, guilt and so on. These are all feelings, sensations, chemical events, changes in heart rate, skin responses. Knowledge of them is part of the bargain humans make with creation. Sea anemones and snails have feelings, but humans write novels about them. "The cost of a better existence is the loss of innocence about that very existence," Damasio writes. "The feeling of what happens is the answer to a question we never asked."
That is why he called his new book The Feeling of What Happens. He wanted to get the idea of feeling in before the idea of consciousness. "A lot of our constructions, such as morality and empathy and sympathy, really come from the fact that we feel, we know that we feel, and all of that comes from deep within, and is inseparable from being alive. Art is already an expression of a concern. I like the word concern."
Damasio was born in Portugal in 1944, and grew up in the shadow of the dictator Salazar. From his earliest years, he was fascinated by how things worked, by engines made from Meccano. He went from there to the mechanisms of the mind, dithered about being a writer or philosopher, and then read about brain research and said: "'This is exactly what I want to do!' I went into medical school and straight into the thing that interested me most."
Well into his career as a neurologist - he has a chair at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, as well as a department in Iowa - he began to get interested in cases of frontal-lobe damage. The most famous was that of a railway worker called Phineas Gage, who in 1848 was in the wrong place when an explosive charge was ignited. The blast drove an iron spike right through his skull and out the other side. Before the accident Gage was well-liked and was considered honest, trustworthy and dependable. With a hole in his frontal neocortex, he became vulgar, irresponsible, capricious and prone to offensive profanity.
The case was a classic piece of evidence that personality and identity were creations of the brain, and that the brain was a machine into which spanners could be thrown. Damasio, however, was more interested in the lesson to be drawn from the way patients with frontal-lobe damage will take decisions.
"What they have is an inability to decide correctly; they do it in a setting where the emotions are gone. If you suffer damage to your frontal lobe, especially in a particular territory, you will maintain your overt intelligence. You speak normally, you are very smart, you have lots of memory - and you make the most foolish decisions in relation to you, to your family, your work. In essence you go from being a productive member of society to a rather sociopathic kind of person."
"The big distinction is that you no longer have an ability to emote and feel normally, especially in relation to the social emotions. You don't feel embarrassment, you don't feel guilt - you don't feel pride for that matter - and so your ability to reason properly has been lost, together with your ability to feel properly. And that is what put me on to the idea that emotion is really the only explanation for this kind of problem. All my work starts from there."
In short, humans feel, therefore they are. The mind could not exist without a body to inhabit - even if, paradoxically, everything to be known is known through the mind. Humans don't just experience risk, danger and pain, they know they experience risk, danger and pain. That is the first step on the journey to consciousness and, ultimately, to the higher consciousness that - helped by prodigious memory and fed by a fantastic capacity for language - leads to art and philosophy and the creation of conscience. Damasio thinks conscience is one of humankind's great creations.
"You cannot create conscience, you cannot create a sense of moral good and moral evil, if you do not have a sense of self. You need to have a sense of self first. Although I think religion of itself is another of our great creations, conscience, religion, morals, arts and science are different, very important human creations. But I think you can have a moral sense without practising a religion."
People ask him, "Aren't you afraid of solving the problem of consciousness? Aren't you afraid of taking away the mystery?" Not at all. Consciousness is not the problem of mind, consciousness is the problem of knowing we own a mind. There is a difference between having a movie in the brain and knowing that this movie is different from someone else's. That is a problem neuroscientists might be able to solve.
"But how we begin to generate, from matter, the pictures in our brain?" he says. "That is a little bit more complicated."
