Dr. Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy

Antonio Damasio (0:00)

Everything that we do from the moment we have some maturity, whether it is professionally or whether it is in a variety of areas that have to do with the general culture or with the politics, you name it, are aimed at reflecting on the conditions under which you were led into pleasure or pain. And if you're smart, you're going to try to maximize one and reduce the other.

Michael Gervais (0:43)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade in training, a sports psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind these conversations behind this podcast is to learn how the extraordinary think and do. We wanna understand what they're searching for. We wanna understand how they organize their inner world and their outer life.

And we wanna understand the nuances that they've come to understand, and the mental skills that have allowed them to refine their craft.

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Now this week's conversation is with Dr. Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Antonio is trained as both a neurologist and a neuroscientist and he has brilliantly captured the complicated interplay between biology and psychology and culture. And doing it in a way that provides just the highest dignity between each discipline through a structurally artistic and rigorously scientific process. And his work is built on deep curiosity, deep thinking and deep contribution to humanity. Antonio has made seminal contributions to the understandings of brain processes, underlying emotions and feelings and consciousness. And his work on the role of affect in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience psychology as well as philosophy. And I wanted to speak with Antonio because his deep thought, I mean, really deep thought in understanding the nature of the mind. He doesn't waste words.