Damasio finds much wisdom in Spinoza's ideas. For example, "Spinoza also proposed that the power of affects is such that the only hope of overcoming a detrimental affect--an irrational passion--is by overpowering it with a stronger positive affect, one triggered by reason. An affect cannot be restrained or neutralized except by a contrary affect that is stronger than the affect to be restrained ... Central to his thinking was the notion that the subdoing of the passions should be accomplished by reasoning induced emotion and not by pure reason alone."
"...More intriguing, however, was his notion that the human mind is the idea of the human body. ... As I shall discuss later I am convinced that mental processes are grounded in the brain's mappings of the body, collections of neural patters that portray responses to events that cause emotions and feelings."
