Widely praised for his innovative scientific thinking and elegant writing, Antonio Damasio achieves a new understanding of consciousness by asking-and answering-profound questions: How is it that we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? A gifted medical clinician with decades of caring for patients with brain damage, a great scientific thinker, and an extraordinary writer, Damasio offers a new understanding of the biological roots of consciousness and its role in survival. Damasio's work on feeling and emotion forever joins our minds and bodies, offering an arrestingly original way of understanding what it is to be human. After reading Damasio's landmark, Descartes' Error, Jonas Salk wrote, "You will never again look at yourself or another without wondering what goes on behind the eyes that so meet." As to The Feeling of What Happens, the New York Times wrote, "Unlike any other book here, it will change your experience of yourself."

Antonio R. Damasio is the M.W. Van Allen Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine in Iowa City. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. Damasio, internationally recognized for his research on the neuroscience of the mind, is a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Among his many awards are the Pessoa Prize, which he shared with his wife, and, most recently, the Ipsen Prize.