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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...
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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
