Joseph LeDoux

In an interview with Neuron, Joseph LeDoux outlines his early work on consciousness in split-brain patients, his transition into studying emotional behavior in rodents, and his continued exploration of consciousness in books and other writings. He describes how his research fused with his interest in music, which he pursued though his band, The Amygdaloids, and their unique genre, “heavy mental.”

Detecting and responding to threat engages several neural nodes including the amygdala, hippocampus, insular cortex, and medial prefrontal cortices. Recent propositions call for the integration of more distributed neural nodes that process sensory and cognitive facets related to threat. Integrative, sensitive, and reproducible distributed neural decoders for the detection and response to threat and safety have yet to be established. We combine functional MRI data across varying threat conditioning and negative affect paradigms from 1465 participants with multivariate pattern analysis to investigate distributed neural representations of threat and safety. The trained decoders sensitively and specifically distinguish between threat and safety cues across multiple datasets. We further show that many neural nodes dynamically shift representations between threat and safety. Our results establish reproducible decoders …

The essence of who we are depends on our brains. They enable us to think, to feel joy and sorrow, communicate through speech, reflect on the moments of our lives, and to anticipate, plan for, and worry about our imagined futures. Although some of our abilities are comparatively new, key features of our behavior have deep roots that can be traced to the beginning of life. By following the story of behavior, step-by-step, over its roughly four-billion-year trajectory, we come to understand both how similar we are to all organisms that have ever lived, and how different we are from even our closest animal relatives. We care about our differences because they are ours. But differences do not make us superior; they simply make us different.

The mechanisms underlying the subjective experiences of mental disorders remain poorly understood. This is partly due to long-standing over-emphasis on behavioral and physiological symptoms and a de-emphasis of the patient’s subjective experiences when searching for treatments. Here, we provide a new perspective on the subjective experience of mental disorders based on findings in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, we propose the subjective experience that occurs in visual imagination depends on mechanisms similar to generative adversarial networks that have recently been developed in AI. The basic idea is that a generator network fabricates a prediction of the world, and a discriminator network determines whether it is likely real or not. Given that similar adversarial interactions occur in the two major visual pathways of perception in people, we explored whether we could …

The media, including news articles in both Nature and Science, have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’and empirically tested theory of consciousness. We are writing as researchers with some relevant expertise to express our concerns.

4. INSTRUMENT OF INSTRUMENTS Page 259 Bibliography LeDoux, Joseph E., and Richard Brown." A Higher-Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 10 (March 7, 2017): E2016-25. LeDoux, Joseph E., Matthias Michel, and Hakwan Lau.“A Little History Goes a Long Way Toward Understanding Why We Study Consciousness the Way We Do Today." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 13 (March 31, 2020): 6976-84. LeDoux, Joseph, Richard Brown, Daniel Pine, and Stefan Hofmann." Know Thyself: Well-Being and Subjective Experience." Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science 2018 (February 2018): cer-01-18. Machalinski, Anne." Hypovolemic Shock." WebMD, April 30, 2020. Mayo Clinic." Shock: First Aid." April 29, 2021. Web. Moss-Racusin, Corinne, and Laurie Rudman." Disruptions in Women's SelfPromotion: The …

In this chapter, we review preclinical and clinical data relevant to normal and pathological anxiety states. We begin with a brief summary of paradigms of fear learning. We then relate these preclinical paradigms with their neuroanatomical functional localization observed in animals models and more recently in humans with anxiety disorders. Subsequently, we present the major neurochemical systems mediating anxiety processes with a selection of supporting preclinical and clinical data. We then briefly describe findings specific to several of the individual anxiety disorders—panic disorder with and without agoraphobia, specific and social phobias, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—and we comment on the state of investigations into the genetic basis of anxiety. We conclude with some of the key questions that will drive future research investigations.(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Neuroscience has a long history of investigating the neural correlates of brain functions. One example is fear, which has been studied intensely in a variety of species. In parallel, unease about definitions of brain functions has existed for over 100 years. Because the translational impact of basic research hinges on how we define these functions, these definitions should be carefully considered.