CONFIDENTIAL The cellular basis of feelings and its medical implications A Research Proposal Antonio Damasio and Gil Carvalho University of Southern California 1. Feelings: biological origins and medical impact Feelings are the mental experiences that accompany and describe a particular class of ongoing body states. The physiological states eliciting feelings are of two main types: drives (hunger, thirst, pleasure, pain, etc.) and emotions (fear, sadness, joy, etc.). Feelings provide a high level of homeostatic regulation, since conscious experience forces attention on the underlying physiological conditions, and thus facilitates responses to and learning from both adverse and advantageous situations. In turn, such learning permits the anticipation of future situations and the planning of suitable behaviors, thus conferring an important evolutionary advantage on the organisms that possess them. The biological relevance of feelings is illustrated by the fact that their dysregulation underlies some of the most devastating medical and public health problems of our time — for example, depression, substance addictions and intractable 1 EFTA00588770