ANTONIO DAMASIO has spent the past 30 years -- with his wife Hanna -- studying how the brain operates and written about it in award-winning and best-selling books that readers understand. In Descartes' Error, he took on the enlightenment’s vision of mind over body and elevated the role that emotion and feelings play in the experience of human rationality. This 2010 conversation focuses on the research, ideas and questions in the book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Why do organisms have brains? How and why did the mind and the self evolve? How and why is consciousness created? …and what does it mean once it emerges?