_____________________________________
On Tuesday, February 21 Joseph LeDoux will speak at City College on “Have We Misunderstood Fear and Anxiety?” The talk will take place from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at Shepard Hall Rm 95.
Fear is generally considered a response to an immediately present threat. As a result, when scientists study fear they measure the way the brain detects and responds to threats. These responses are viewed as proxies for the conscious feelings of fear. But are they? In humans so-called “fear” responses can occur without awareness of the stimulus and without any feeling of “fear.” Further, in humans, different brain circuits underlie the conscious feeling of fear and the behavioral and physiological responses that also occur. This means that fear responses should not be viewed as reliable measures of circuits that give rise to fearful feelings. This conclusion has profound implications for how we think about, do research on, and treat problems related to fear, and its partner, anxiety.
Joseph LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU in the Center for Neural Science, and he directs the Emotional Brain Institute of NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of memory and emotion and he is the author of The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, and Anxious. LeDoux has received numerous awards, most recently for his book Anxious, which received the 2016 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. LeDoux is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids.
