Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
    Unavailable
    The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
    Unavailable
    The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
    Audiobook9 hours

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 6, 2018
    ISBN9780525589891
    Unavailable
    The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
    Author

    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

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Composition With Shadows

      May 8, 2022

      Composition With Shadows
      6 min read

    • Article

      Art Of The Possible

      Sep 1, 2018

      Art Of The Possible
      4 min read

    • Article

      Absolute CERTAINTY

      Jun 6, 2022

      Absolute CERTAINTY
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Psychology Of Start-ups

      May 25, 2021

      The Psychology Of Start-ups
      5 min read

    • Article

      Playing Go with Darwin

      Dec 16, 2020

      “I have lately been especially attending to Geograph. Distrib, & most splendid sport it is,—a grand game of chess with the world for a Board.”—Charles Darwin to C.J.F. Bunbury (1856) In 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, a young journalist in Tokyo, covered th

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Show Of Hands

      Sep 5, 2022

      A Show Of Hands
      10 min read

    • Article

      Would You Survive a Merger with AI?

      Oct 3, 2019

      The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently

      9 min read

    • Article

      Ethics Or Welfare?

      Apr 16, 2020

      ONE potential downside to developments in medicine is that it can blur the ethics line. Are we getting to a point where vets are doing too much? “A vet’s intention should always be to enhance welfare and keep in mind that euthanasia is an option when

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Word

      Dec 31, 2022

      Us and them; present and future; capital and labour – some of the dichotomies underpinning this issue of AQ. Very few things in life are binary, yet the thorniest of problems tend to appear so because our ideological frames of reference have drifted

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Defence Of Truth

      Dec 19, 2021

      Humans have always thrived on good information and have often suffered from disinformation. Thanks to science and its most pervasive and invasive recent off shoot, social media, we have never had so much of either, and the contrast between salutary a

      5 min read

    • Article

      Spaced Out

      Mar 17, 2021

      Spaced Out
      5 min read

    Reviews for The Strange Order of Things

    4/5

    33 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Homeostasis 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.
    • 2/5
      Don't know which one lost my attention 1st: The dissertation-like writing style or the monotonous narration.
    • 5/5
      Give 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

    • 4/5
      The 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

    • 5/5
      An astonishing and counter intuitive yet suddenly obvious view of what drives life and ultimately human culture.

      2 people found this helpful