#129 - Meet The Worlds Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist

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Joseph LeDoux is, by almost any measure, the greatest emotion
neuroscientist who has ever lived. His work has been cited more
than 185,000 times, he wrote The Emotional Brain — the book that
defined the field — and he put the amygdala on the map as the
brain’s fear centre. Then he spent a decade arguing that
everyone, including himself, got the lesson wrong.


Expect to learn how a marketing student accidentally became the
most-cited emotion researcher alive, what split-brain experiments
reveal about why your brain invents fake explanations for your
behaviour, why the amygdala is not a fear centre and what it
actually does, how every act of remembering chemically rewrites
the memory, why anxiety drugs have been targeting the wrong brain
circuit for 50 years, what the Four Realms of Existence means for
the concept of self, why emotions are culturally acquired schema
rather than universal hardwired states, and much more…


Timestamps


0:00:00 Trailer


0:02:43 From Marketing Student to Neuroscientist


0:06:18 Moving to New York and Meeting Gazzaniga


0:07:37 How Split-Brain Surgery Works


0:09:58 The Chicken and Shovel Experiment


0:12:13 We Are Confabulating 24/7


0:17:13 Why He Chose to Study Emotion in Rats


0:19:26 His Grant Was Rejected for Studying Emotions


0:22:30 Masquerading as a Learning Researcher


0:25:22 Growing Discomfort With the Amygdala Fear Centre


0:28:23 Rethinking the Emotional Brain


0:30:47 Why Fear Isn’t Universal — Danger Is


0:33:19 Emotions as Acquired Schema


0:35:22 The Four Realms of Existence


0:40:36 Cognition vs Consciousness in Animals


0:41:29 Tulving’s Three Kinds of Consciousness


0:47:57 The Brain Region Only Humans Have


0:53:40 Your Model Is Still on the Slide — And You Disagree


0:55:05 The George Martin Analogy


0:56:37 Why Anxiety Drugs Don’t Actually Work


0:58:21 The Three-Step Fix for Fear


1:01:27 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness


1:05:36 Using AI to Decode Conscious vs Unconscious Speech...


...





Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com


Guest Links


NYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.html


Personal Website: https://www.joseph-ledoux.com/


Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iAqJssMAAAAJ&hl=en


Psychology Today:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/joseph-e-ledoux-phd


The Four Realms of Existence (Harvard University Press):
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291003