The Highest and Lowest Suicide Rate

Book Bound With Human Skin

Book Bound With Human Skin of a Would-Be Assassin Bought at Car Boot Sale

This post is compliments of the abebooks.com blog. I'm not sure which part is weirdest, his preserved piece of skin that once bound a book together or way this odd piece of ephemera was bought at what is called a British car boot sale, a.k.a. a trunk sale. Oh how I wish I could come across something this rare while scouting for books.

The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio R. Damasio

This holiday weekend I got an order for a book I was sad to see leave because I was hoping I'd get a chance to crack it open or see what it was about before having to ship it off. As you might imagine, this happens a lot. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness is by Antonio R. Damasio, who also wrote Descartes Error.  The very top of the book declares  "New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice". This was where I went first to learn about the book the I'd just sealed in a bubble mailer. Before going into what William H. Calvin's NYT review said about Damasio's book I have to mention that they are both neurologists, which for me, goes a long way to explain why the word "body", clearly stated in the book's subtitle, is oddly missing from Calvin's review of the book. Actually he doesn't completely avoid this aspect of the book because it is is embedded in his reference to the qualia nature of the book. Aside from this aside, his discussion of the corporal dimension of the book lacking. The first part of the review is an cursory introduction to neurological discourse on consciousness to ensure the placement of Damasios contribution within a continuing discourse. The review is worth reading but it left me wondering what the book had to say about the physical body and it's relationship to consciousness.

The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine published a review of the book that did a good job articulating Damasio's importance for non-neurologists like myself.

Damasio has suggested that while the senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste smell function by nerve activation patterns that correspond to the state of the external world; emotions are nerve activation patterns that correspond to the state of the internal world. If we experience a state of fear, then our brains will record this body state in nerve cell activation patterns obtained from neural and hormonal feedback, and this information may then be used to adapt behaviour appropriately.

In short, the feeling or emotions of what happens to a given person is an expression of the internal physiological world.