In His Own Image

In His Own Image

Ethan Pines for The New York Times

Dr. Antonio Damasio.

By DAVID COLMAN

Published: January 6, 2011

MIRRORS, and the people who love them, may have a deservedly bad rap for being as shallow as silver plate. But not every mirror is made of silver and glass. Don’t we look for our reflections in all kinds of surfaces without even realizing it? How else can we recognize ourselves?

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Ethan Pines for The New York Times

A version of a sculpture that Dr. Damasio somehow believed was him.

These are the kinds of questions that fascinate Dr. Antonio Damasio, the author, neuroscientist and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. If you think that the way you wear your hat or the way you sip your tea is a good reflection of how you put yourself together, he would tell you that you’re only scratching the surface.

He should know: Not only has he tracked the ways we fabricate our identities in his newest book, “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain” (Pantheon), but he also has a ready example of his own, a mirror upon which he has reflected for decades.

It is an object that has helped him construct, interpret, ponder and crystallize his identity, or at least his idea of it. It came to him in the early 1970s, when he was in medical school at the University of Lisbon. The sculpture, made by a woman he had just begun dating (a fellow neuroscience student and a sculptor named Hanna Costa), is a little terra-cotta figure of a man seeming to fight his way forward in a storm. And it all but cried out to Dr. Damasio with a mysterious urgency.

“Somehow I felt that it was me, or belonged to me,” he recalled. “Even though she had done it before we met.”

The doctor was even more convinced that it was a sculpture of his favorite boyhood hero: Tintin, the boyish blond reporter and detective whose comic-book adventures, written by Georges Remi (a k a Hergé) from the 1930s to the early 1980s, delighted generations of European children. Dr. Damasio was one of them, having found endless inspiration in Tintin’s feats of derring-do and the restlessly inquisitive mind that dispatched mystery after mystery with faultlessly astute reasoning and a killer right punch. (Steven Spielberg is at work on a Tintin movie adventure, due out this year.)

“I am very influenced by mystery stories,” Dr. Damasio said. “I think my constant desire to understand mechanisms and solve puzzles in some ways goes back to Tintin, his sense of curiosity and opposition to contrary forces, going up against these very mysterious things that are gradually revealed to be far less complicated.”

However distinctive Tintin’s mind-set, the character is in large part a tabula rasa, too. Forever depicted between adolescence and adulthood, Tintin has neither parents nor girlfriend, just that little white dog. Like Dorothy Gale or James Bond, his everyman-like absence of history and personal ties seems daring and inspirational. Similarly, the blurriness of the terra-cotta figurine, which only suggests Tintin, makes it a nice surface to project ideas upon.

Yet his girlfriend, who is now his wife, had not known of Tintin. So if he thought she had been thinking about the boy detective when she made it, so much for that idea.

“No, that’s what makes it so interesting,” Dr. Damasio said. “It’s about the narrative of self and seeing oneself in a certain light. We create the autobiographical self. It’s a way in which we are our own writers and we adjust things.”

Because he treasures the figure, his wife suggested some years ago that they make a bronze of it, even going so far as to make a wax casting of the original. But Dr. Damasio didn’t want to part with it. Moreover, the wax rendering enhances the charming vagueness of the piece. Casting it in bronze would be rather like casting it in iron, and as Dr. Damasio noted, the piece may still have surprises to reveal. It revealed one just the other day.

“I just asked my wife if she agreed with all this,” he said, referring to his recollections about the sculpture. “And she said: ‘I didn’t give it to you. You took it.’ She gets it perfectly well. She’s very amused.”

Women. Now you know why Tintin never had a girlfriend.