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 received conception of human emotions as evolutionarily pre-formed states of mind is wrong. In The Deep History of Ourselves, he used the four-billion year story of life to explain why. His key insight was that single-cell microbes, the ancient ancestors of  modern day bacteria, had the same basic survival requirements we do—they had to detect danger, search for and incorporate nutrients, balance fluids and ions, and reproduce. When we do these things, we feel fear, hunger, thirst, and pleasure, and assume that these states underlie our behavior. But the purpose of these ancient processes has little direct relation to these psychological states, which came much later. Emotions, he concluded, result from our efforts to make sense of the significant moments in our lives. And to do this requires the precise kind of brain we have. Discussing these ideas with LeDoux will be experts from a range of scientific areas, including evolutionary biology (Niklas), the cognitive neuroscience of emotion (Lindquist), psychiatry (Hurowitz), and the philosophy of consciousness (Rosenthal).