Damasio is the head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. He's made something of a reputation in philosophical circles for his writings on mind/body issues, starting with Descartes' Error (1994). The title of that 1994 book suggests the thesis: that any separation of mind from body (and concomitantly, any separation of intellectual judgment from emotional reaction) is erroneous. Damasio hypothesized that rationality requires emotional input. In part this was a development of the James-Lange theory of the emotions. That theory, you will recall, is this: our body instinctively reacts to a situation (by blushing, for example). The emotion we feel (embarrassment) is not the reason for the blushing. A sensory stimulus of some sort is the reason for the blushing. The emotion is a consequence of the bodily reaction. Damasio said that James was "well ahead of both his time and ours" in this respect, and that he had "sei...