The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
Written by Antonio Damasio
Narrated by Antonio Damasio and Steve West
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture.
The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it.
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is the Van Allen Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center and is an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego. Descartes' Error was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. He lives in Iowa City and Chicago.
Related to The Strange Order of Things
Related audiobooks
A Place in History: The Biography of John C. Kendrew Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe GIFT OF AGING: Growing Older with Purpose, Planning, and Positivity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExistence and Necessity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Four Temperaments Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Holistic Cancer Medicine Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Origins of Creativity Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ideas That Shaped Mankind Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dark Light Consciousness: Melanin, Serpent Power, and the Luminous Matrix of Reality Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Survival Of Consciousness Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Human Anatomy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Our African Unconscious: The Black Origins of Mysticism and Psychology Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Holotropic Breathwork: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Spark: A Graham Hancock Reader: Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Birth of Civilization Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Systems Biology: A Very Short Introduction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whitehead’s The Function of Reason Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On The Trail Of The Hundredth Monkey Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What Is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain, Second Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Being Better: Stoicism for a World Worth Living In Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Think of an Elephant Book 2: FROM SUCCESS TO SIGNIFICANT CONNECTIONS Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEvolution: A Very Short Introduction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Social Science For You
Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lonely Dad Conversations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Radiolab: Journey Through The Human Body Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kindred Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Year of Magical Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Song of Achilles: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hate U Give Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Radiolab: Mixtape: How The Cassette Changed The World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Left Hand of Darkness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You're Cute When You're Mad: Simple Steps for Confronting Sexism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for The Strange Order of Things
33 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homeostasis does the heavy lifting in Antonio Damasio’s account of life, subjectivity, consciousness, and culture. Not the homeostasis that your mom told you about, the one that describes the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium of independent elements. It’s that, of course, but it is also much more. For Damasio, homeostasis includes the notion of prevailing. Life, from its earliest beginnings, hasn’t been about maintaining the status quo, it’s been about prevailing. All life. From the tiniest bacteria to multi-talented mankind. This redefinition or realization (it could be either) underwrites Damasio’s claim to be setting the standard view of consciousness, subjectivity, even culture, on its head. Consciousness, it turns out, is as embedded in the basic homeostatic drives as is hunger or thirst or what have you. The order goes from the bottom up, not the top down.Damasio is both a serious researcher and an accomplished writer on his scientific field of study. Much of this book is devoted to detailing the research by himself and others that support his view of homeostasis. Especially important in this regard is the fundamental contribution made by feelings. Feelings are not some flavouring added on to the dish of life. They are essential for homeostatic prevailing to succeed when life encounters a potentially hostile world. Damasio rightly notes the novelty of his position. If he’s right, philosophers and cognitive scientists have some hard thinking ahead.Where Damasio’s story begins to fray is perhaps where it began. His initial inspiration for this book stemmed from reading Jean Genet’s account of creativity: “Beauty has no other origin but the singular wound, different for each person, hidden or visible.” Could homeostatic prevailing also explain human culture? Perhaps. Certainly if Damasio’s earlier story is close to accurate, there is no reason to think that homeostasis doesn’t underwrite culture. If it underwrites all aspects of life, that would follow. But does saying that get us anywhere? When something explains everything, it ends up not explaining much at all. To which the useful admonishment is — back to the rough ground.Recommended.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Don't know which one lost my attention 1st: The dissertation-like writing style or the monotonous narration.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Give it a chance and this book will blow your mind. Or at least turn upside down then inside out everything you thought you knew about you, your self-awareness and the discipline you exercised over how your mind ranged around. Welcome aboard the most exciting and fascinating roller-coaster ride you are ever likely to encounter in book form. Except and it is a very reluctant except, hence the missing half-point, it is tediously and pedantically slow in many places and reiterative. But then an author possibly cannot win. Setting to out to explain state of the art thinking to the general lay reader, what background knowledge can you assume? How fast on the uptake should you expect?The book takes us on a slow evolutionary journey as ever increasingly complex organisms develop and check new mutations that give them a survival competitive edge over other rival organisms. Collaboratively these various evolving functions, energy intake, circulation, waste disposal, reproduction and so on, work together to optimise the organism's survival, leading to this integrated functional brain. Keeping all these basic systems working together intune with each other. More evolution and this evolving organism develops senses to experience the world it now inhabits, these senses, such as touch, sight, sound, taste also have to work collaboratively together but they have to respond to the driving needs of the function brain, so the senses brain and the function brain have to communicate and assign priorities between them. Until finally the magic happens and the organism evolves to have a sense of place, of itself within the world it inhabits which evolves to a self-awareness and to this brain which we know and believe to be the essence of us.
3 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The closest I've read to a theory of life and everything in a while. Damasio demonstrates how feelings are mental representations of how close the inner environment of the viscera and the endocrine system is to the ideal of homeostasis. If the organism is in a state conducive to homeostasis then the feelings are of a pleasant nature. If far then of an unpleasant nature. The interesting thing is that the nature of emotion and affect in accompanying the regulation of homeostasis is new in terms of evolutionary time. Single celled bacteria don't have feelings, but they do exhibit many of the behaviours that our affect goes along with. Brilliant book - possibly revolutionary.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An astonishing and counter intuitive yet suddenly obvious view of what drives life and ultimately human culture.
2 people found this helpful