Joseph Ledoux Quotes & Sayings

The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence. — Dylan Evans

The problem is that there may not be any way to really prove animal consciousness with data. Clever experiments can show that animals perform behaviorally in ways that people behave when they are in a particular state of phenomenal consciousness. But we can create robots that behave the way humans behave when we are having a phenomenal experience. Consciousness is, and probably always will be, an inner experience that is unobservable to anyone other than the experiencing organism. And in the absence of verbal report, there is little to measure. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Prolonged exposure therapy, a variant of flooding, attempts to maintain a high level of fear arousal, but its key premise is that all aspects of fear, as defined by Lang's three response systems (behavioral avoidance, physiological responses, and verbal behavior), have to be reduced in order for exposure to be effective. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Through the topic of motivation, we begin to see the mental trilogy in action. A mind is not, as cognitive science has traditionally suggested, just a thinking device. It's an integrated system that includes, in the broadest possible terms, synaptic networks devoted to cognitive, emotional, and motivational functions. More important, it involves interactions between networks involved in different aspects of mental life. — Joseph E. Ledoux

What distinguishes the various kinds of fears is the combination and amount of the raw materials involved. What ties together all instances of fear is the awareness that a threat to well-being is present or is soon very likely to occur. In short, in order to be felt as fear, components of a nonconscious defensive motivational state have to invade and become a presence98 in conscious awareness. This can only happen in organisms that have the capacity to both be aware of brain representations of internal and external events and to know in a personal, autobiographical sense that the event is happening to them - someone has to be home in the brain in order to feel fear when the defensive state knocks on the door.99 — Joseph E. Ledoux

Everything we think and feel (and keep thinking and feeling) creates, deep within, the brain we have. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Emotions are a critical source of information for learning. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections - a new context. As Joseph LeDoux explains, "The brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated."30 Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal. — Nicholas Carr

We can also monitor signals coming from within our body. This is, again, the foundation of Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis (see Chapter 5). The most specific of these are signals from the somatosensory system, which transmits information about touch, temperature, irritation, and pain from skin and muscles to cortical processing areas, much like the visual or auditory systems do. When you have a headache, backache, sore muscles, an itch, feel warmth or cool air on your skin, or are feverish, you become aware of somatosensory information being processed in cortical areas. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Fear and other emotions are based on assumptions, presuppositions, and expectations; they are constructed in the brain from nonemotional ingredients. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Fear and anxiety are not biologically wired. They do not erupt from a brain circuit in a prepackaged way as a fully formed conscious experience. They are a consequence of the cognitive processing of nonemotional ingredients. They come about in the brain the same way any other conscious experience comes about but have ingredients that nonemotional experiences lack.108 — Joseph E. Ledoux

The cognitive sophistication of a mammalian species, in fact, is nicely predicted by the extent of the convergence that occurs in its cortex-more is present in humans than in monkeys, and more in monkeys than in rats. When plasticity occurs simultaneously in two regions that fed into a convergence zone, plasticity is also likely to occur in the convergence zone since it will be the recipient of the high level of activity that occurs when plasticity is being established in the individual regions. Obviously, synchrony and modulation also influence convergence zones, further increasing their potential to integrate information across systems. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Anxiety, in short, is a conscious feeling. It can arise in a bottom-up way, driven by activity in defensive circuits or from higher processes that conceptualize worry, either about an uncertain future or about existence itself. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project.51 — Joseph E. Ledoux

For example, one promising target is the peptide oxytocin, which has been reported to reduce anxiety, promote affiliation, attachment, and affection,33 and facilitate extinction of threat conditioning. — Joseph E. Ledoux

When split-brain patients fabricate verbal (left hemisphere based) explanations for behaviors that were produced by the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere is generating explanations of behaviors produced by nonconscious systems and does so in the maintenance of a sense of self. That is, our behavior is an important way we come to know who we are. This is the essence of Gazzaniga's interpreter theory of consciousness (see Chapter 6). — Joseph E. Ledoux

In Hull's view, all learning involves the reduction of basic drives (like hunger, thirst, sex, or pain), and current behavior is therefore a product of drive reduction in the past. That is, what we do today in a certain situation is a function of what we did in the past that was successful in reducing drives in similar situations. This is essentially a psychological version of the philosophical position known as hedonism, the idea that we live our lives in such a way as to seek pleasure and avoid pain. — Joseph E. Ledoux

If you are standing still and decide to take a step, the movement of your leg on the basis of your decision involves axons that originate in cell bodies located in the movement control regions in the frontal cortex (just behind your forehead) and that travel uninterrupted to the base of the spinal column (in the region of your lower back). — Joseph E. Ledoux

Heritability in psychiatric disorders typically involves complex inheritance patterns controlled by multiple genes that interact with environmental factors to produce their results. — Joseph E. Ledoux

The fear structure is viewed as a program (in the sense of a computer program) for escaping or avoiding danger and includes several kinds of stored propositions: It includes propositions about threats - when the threat signal (CS) occurs, a bad thing (US) follows; propositions about physiological changes - when the CS occurs, I sweat and my heart beats faster; propositions — Joseph E. Ledoux

Acceptance and commitment therapy, a variant on cognitive therapy, attempts to teach people to accept rather than change their emotions and make decisions within the context of what they value, as opposed to letting negative feelings control their behavior. — Joseph E. Ledoux

twin studies of anxiety have revealed that genetic factors account for roughly 30 percent to 50 percent of an individual's tendency to be generally anxious or to have a specific anxiety disorder.50 — Joseph E. Ledoux

Decision-making compresses trial-and-error learning experiences into an instantaneous mental evaluation about what the consequence of a particular action will be for a given situation. It requires the on-line integration of information from diverse sources: perceptual information about the stimulus and situation, relevant facts and experiences stored in memory, feedback from emotional systems and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal, expectations about the consequences of different courses of action, and the like. This sort of integrative processing, as we've seen is the business of working memory circuits in the prefrontal cortex. In chapters 7 and 8 , we discussed the role of the prefrontal cortex in working memory and considered the contribution of the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. Here, we will focus on two of the subareas of the medial prefrontal cortex in light of their relation to the motive circuits outlined above. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Unfortunately, one of the most signifi cant things ever said about emotion may be that everyone knows what it is until they are asked to define it. — Joseph E. Ledoux