#129 - Meet The Worlds Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant’s Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutJoseph 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…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:43 From Marketing Student to Neuroscientist0:06:18 Moving to New York and Meeting Gazzaniga0:07:37 How Split-Brain Surgery Works0:09:58 The Chicken and Shovel Experiment0:12:13 We Are Confabulating 24/70:17:13 Why He Chose to Study Emotion in Rats0:19:26 His Grant Was Rejected for Studying Emotions0:22:30 Masquerading as a Learning Researcher0:25:22 Growing Discomfort With the Amygdala Fear Centre0:28:23 Rethinking the Emotional Brain0:30:47 Why Fear Isn’t Universal — Danger Is0:33:19 Emotions as Acquired Schema0:35:22 The Four Realms of Existence0:40:36 Cognition vs Consciousness in Animals0:41:29 Tulving’s Three Kinds of Consciousness0:47:57 The Brain Region Only Humans Have0:53:40 Your Model Is Still on the Slide — And You Disagree0:55:05 The George Martin Analogy0:56:37 Why Anxiety Drugs Don’t Actually Work0:58:21 The Three-Step Fix for Fear1:01:27 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness1:05:36 Using AI to Decode Conscious vs Unconscious Speech...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.comGuest LinksNYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.htmlPersonal Website: https://www.joseph-ledoux.com/Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iAqJssMAAAAJ&hl=enPsychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/joseph-e-ledoux-phdThe Four Realms of Existence (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291003