Joseph LeDoux

Joseph LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University. His work, which has spanned the topics of emotion, memory, and consciousness, and their interaction in the brain. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received a numerous awards for his work and is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious, The Deep History of Ourselves, and The Four Realms of Existence. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, the Amygdaloids. His music has been the subject of a play, Map of Your Mind, and was featured in Werner Herzog’s 2024 film, Theatre of Thought. A documentary on Amazon, Neuroscience and Emotions, explores his life, work and music.

The Topology of Fear

How do emotions color and shape our actions? How do we decide to take action in the midst of fear for our own lives–go to war, fight an intruder, save a person falling on subway tracks–or to ward off catastrophes such as global climate change and the irreversible loss of species that could lead to... read more! »

Second Annual Heavy MeNtal Variety Show

A night of mind, brain, and magic. The Amygdaloids will play several suites of our original songs on mind/brain topics: the mind-body problem, memory, emotion, unconscious processes, and mental disorders. Each suite will be preceded by a short (3 min) lecture on the scientific or philosophical foundations of the topic by Neuroscientist and Amygdaloid, Joseph... read more! »

The Amygdaloids Warburg Symposium Concert

The Amygdaloids are a New York band made up of scientists who shed their scientific garb at night and take to the stage with songs about love and life peppered with insights drawn from research about mind and brain and mental disorders. At the Friday night concert, the group will play several suites of songs... read more! »

Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis: Day 2

This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with – and intuitions about – memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image – its elliptical and metaphoric functions – and of affect... read more! »

Fear: Wherefore, Whence?

Someone is shouting! Ho! Do you hear? Am I howling in vain? For if one is frightened, everything makes a noise! – Sophocles, Acrisius [fragment] …the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. They shall stumble over... read more! »

How Deep Do We Go? Behavior, Mind, and The 4-Billion-Year History of Life

The starting point of this roundtable discussion is Joseph LeDoux’s book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. LeDoux’s research on how the brain detects and responds to danger helped jumpstart and define the modern science of emotion. After three decades, he came to the realization that the commonly... read more! »

Emotion

What is human life without emotion? Could the “dawn of humankind” even be imagined without emotion exerting its effects right there from the start? And across the millennia emotion has forever been at the heart of most matters. Human history has been shaped by emotion and reshaped by attitudes toward emotion; a powerful human force... read more! »

Participant In These Roundtable Discussions