In this episode of the FFI Practitioner Podcast, Jordan Rich sits down with neuroscientist, Joseph LeDoux to explore:

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the latest issue of the FFI Practitioner Podcast. My name is Jordan Rich. Coming up, The Paradigm Shifts FFI Global Conference, October 28th through the 30th in New York. And it's our honor to have with us the opening keynote speaker, Professor Joseph LeDoux. Title of his talk is Starting Life over and Over. Our guest is an emeritus professor of neuroscience at New York University, a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor LeDoux is one of the most influential voices in cognitive neuroscience, but as you'll hear, he leads a full life. He's a co founder of a musical group called the Amygdaloids, merging science and music in a genre the band calls heavy mental songs, exploring the mind, brain and emotional life. Enjoy the conversation as we reflect on reinvention, curiosity, creativity, and the things that shape and reshape our lives over time. Well, your lecture, sir, is called Starting Life over and Over. What is it all about? Starting life over.

Speaker B: I've written a book called Starting Over. Uh, the subtitle is a, uh, Neuro Emotional Cajun Rock and Roll Memoir. So that kind of covers the whole topic that we'll be talking about. But you know, I grew up in South Louisiana in Cajun country. My father was a butcher. We were relatively comfortable people, but, you know, it was not a fancy kind of way to live. I went to college at LSU and my mother said that, uh, she would support me doing that rather than going to the local community college if I would promise to come back home and, uh, be a banker. After getting degrees in business administration, I didn't know what else I wanted to do except have a good time at a different place besides Eunice, Louisiana. I went off to college, got two degrees. One an undergraduate in business administration, another in marketing. At the tail end of my marketing degree, a two year degree. I took a course called Learning and Motivation from a, uh, psychology professor. And I thought it would be relevant to, uh, to the marketing kind of consumer stuff. I was doing consumer protection stuff. It was the 60s, so it wasn't cool to be involved in marketing and that kind of stuff. But I found a kind of edge that I could work with, uh, in terms of consumer protection. So I took this learning and motivation course. It turned out it was all about rat brains and memory. And I had no idea you could like, you know, make a living studying rat brains and memory. I said, well, maybe I better get out of this class because it's not for me. Professor encouraged me to stay and by the end of the semester, I was working in his lab, you know, cleaning out the rat poops out of the cages. Uh, but I'd learned a little bit about what he was doing. And at the end of the term, I said, well, I'd like to do this for my life. And, you know, he kind of looked at me like, are you crazy? You have no background in any kind of science or. And I said, let's give it a try. And he said, okay, I'll write you a letter. So I wrote a bunch of letters, and I was only accepted at one place, which was Stony Ah Brook out on Long Island. From there, I stumbled upon a professor named Michael Gazzaniga, who had become famous for doing the split brain studies. People whose brains are connections between the two hemispheres are separated to prevent seizures from bouncing all over the place. I mean, he wasn't studying epilepsy, but what he was studying, what was the psychological consequences of this kind of brain division, uh, sort of thing. So I had a one patient in particular that I, uh, ended up working on. This guy was unusual because normally in. In these patients, you have the left hemisphere that can talk to you, but the right hemisphere doesn't have speech, so it can't talk to you. So you could ask left hemisphere, like, you know, what's your name? Then he would say, oh, my name's Paul. It's a girlfriend's name. Her name is Liz. You could have a conversation about who he was, uh, through that left hemisphere. The right hemisphere, the only way to communicate with it was to flash a stimulus to the left side of space goes to the right hemisphere. And so the right hemisphere can't talk about it, but it can point to things like we flash a picture of an apple to the left side of space goes to the right hemisphere. The left hand can pick up the apple and say, that's what I saw. But he couldn't talk about it. But what we discovered, this guy could actually read in his right hemisphere. The other patients normally, um, couldn't do. They could only read out of the left hemisphere. So you have language in both hemispheres in a sense here. But we did this one experiment, uh, that kind of both changed my career and my professor's career on this. We presented one stimulus to the left side of space and another to the right side. The left side information to the right hemisphere. So it was a, uh, snow scene on the left side. So the right hemisphere saw that snow scene. The left hemisphere from the right side gets, uh, a picture of a chicken A chicken claw. And so the left hand points to the, the shovel and the right hand points to a, uh, chicken. So he said, why did you do that? So the left hemisphere says, well, I saw a chicken claw. So I pointed to the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken poop. The left hemisphere knew nothing about the snow scene, but it made up a story, a narrative that made his behavior make sense. And that bec became like a phenomenal thing, because normally we'd say, well, that's something that happens in neurological patients. They confabulate, you know, why they're doing what they do, because they don't know what they're doing. It's just coming out of their brain. What we concluded was that, uh, you know, this is not something just happens in neurological patients. It's something we do all the time. Our brain is massive in terms of unconscious processes, and it can control all kinds of unconscious behaviors. So when we see ourselves behaving in these unconscious ways, we have to, like, come to terms with that in some way. And what, what we conclud was, the human brain evolved the capacity to interpret the world in these ways that allows these unconscious processes to make sense when we see ourselves behaving that way. These patients were all operated on. So at Dartmouth, they were operated on. And so we would drive up there and test all these, uh, patients. We were just chit chatting. We'd go to the bar after the day's work. We're just talking. And Mike said, you know, there's not much work on emotion in, uh, neuroscience these days. And he knew that I had some kind of interest in that. So he said, you should, you know, think about that. And the light bulb went off, and I said, okay, that's what I'm going to do. So I had to figure out how I was going to do that. The idea was that the human brain has these mechanisms for controlling all these emotional behaviors unconsciously. Uh, that was our idea. All these emotional behaviors are being generated unconsciously. We're consciously aware that we're doing this. So I could study rats because it was assumed that the rat brains and human brains were very similar in terms of these primitive unconscious behaviors that are generated by emotional stimuli. So that's how I turned to studying, uh, rat brains and memory, uh, and ended up in this part of the brain called the amygdala.

Speaker A: Joe, over the years, your research is focused on the importance of the amygdala in the brain, but share with us, if you will, a little bit about how your Views based on the research have changed over the years.

Speaker B: You know, when I got started, I was working in a lab, a neurobiology lab at Cornell Medical School in New York. And the professor there was studying high blood pressure in relation to stress. Uh, so he wanted to figure out how the brain controls blood pressure. He gave me a job because, um, I could. I was going to study, you know, these kinds of emotional behaviors in rats. And that's what he was studying anyway. Um, and so I worked in his lab and said, okay, so you can do whatever you want as long as you record, uh, blood pressure and heart rate. Because the, uh, in the nih, it's all about blood pressure and heart rate. Cardiovascular system said, so as long as you record blood pressure and heart rate, you can do whatever you want. So I started doing these studies using kind, uh, of primitive technique, Pavlovian fear conditioning, where you give a rat a tone, and the rat, um, here's the tone. Nothing happens. The rat just goes about its business. But if you pair that tone with the shock, then the rat will start freezing when it hears the tone. So I studied that for a long time. Um, one thing led to another. You know, my goal was to try and follow the flow of that tone that elicits freezing response in the rat all the way from the ear, through the brain, all the way to the muscles that control freezing behavior. That was my goal. And so I started going through the brain like that, and one thing led to another, and I ended up in the amygdala, this part of the brain that was, uh, not a household word, uh, back then, the way it is now. So I did a lot of research on the amygdala. In 1996, I wrote a book called the Emotional Brain. And in it, it was kind of, um, I was going back and forth because I. What I was wanting to do was to study emotion as a conscious experience. Now, I couldn't do that in rats, but I could do it in people, because rats and people have similar kinds of systems for the behavior. I can at least study the emotional behavior. So, you know, when I was at that lab, I wrote a grant, my first grant to nih. Um, it was something like, um, emotional conditioning or something like that. So the grant review came back and says, neuroscientists do not study emotions. I said, whoa, really? Okay. That's why there's nobody studying, because you can't get any money to study it. So I changed the grant. I made it more about Pavlovian conditioning rather than, uh, about Emotion, uh, and I got funded. So I kind of disguised myself for a long time as a Pavlovian conditioning researcher in terms of my animal research. But then I would write these book chapters and stuff about emotion as a conscious experience. I couldn't do that in the science world because the science of, of uh, behavior was largely controlled still by the behaviorist who in the 1920s banned psychology from talking about consciousness or anything like that. And that was still going on in the 1970s. Uh, in terms of psychology, emotion was thought of as a psychological conscious, uh, experience, which I thought of it as, as well. But they didn't allow for that kind of even that low level control of behavior that I was trying to do. Anyway, over the years I, I wrote books. My first book, the Emotional Brain, I was just trying to work it all out for myself. And in part of the book I talked about emotion and fear and the amygdala because that was the place that the research took me. But at other parts of the book I talked about fear as a subjective experience. So in a way that was kind of misleading. And uh, a lot of people bought that book. It's, you know, it was, uh, it's still in print. Almost all interviewers. I had to ask you, I had to ask Jordan here. You're not just asking me about the amygdala and fear, right? Because that's what everybody wants to know about because they've read the emotional brain. But what happened was I came to realize over the years that rats were not having these emotional experience. It's not what we were measuring. And yet much money was being put into studying these kinds of behaviors in animals to discover drugs that would make the rats freeze less. And if the rats froze less, it was assumed that they were less fearful. So you give the person the, the drug and the, you um, assume that the, the person is going to feel better, but the medications just aren't doing that. They aren't that effective. Why is that? Because there's no way you're going to change the content of a human emotion. In other words, to me, an emotion is that content, that experience that you have. And there's no way you're going to change that by using a rat or a mouse to generate a drug. I got into a lot of trouble in the field because everybody else was on the fear and the emotion amygdala and all that. And it was assumed that, you know, if we kept trying and kept trying, we were going to solve a problem there. But I don't think that can be solved. You have to solve two problems. One is their emotional behaviors. And I think drugs can help you with the emotional behaviors. For example, what the drugs do is tame the amygdala, makes you less jittery, less freezing and so forth. But it doesn't change the mental part. To change the mental part, you have to somehow come to terms with who you are individually. You have to re narrate who you are. Just as that patient in that split brain study at the beginning that we talked about generated a narrative to explain his behavior, we have to explain our own behaviors with narratives, constantly update them, because our narrative changes. I mean, we are the same person we always were, but we're also different. And we generate narratives that allow us to continue to be who we always were, but allow us to also be who we're sort of changing as over time.

Speaker A: Professor, how does what we're talking about here and what you're going to be addressing impact, say the FFI practitioners that'll be listening?

Speaker B: First thing we have to do is realize that we were barking up the wrong tree, that you're not going to change this. With the medications that are available, you're gonna, you can maybe change the behavior. Let's say you've got a kid that's kind of hyperactive and maybe getting into trouble a little bit behaviorally, but maybe that kid doesn't want to be suffering like that. You can't just say, okay, here's the drug and it's going to make you better. The drugs can help you moderate your emotional behaviors and your hyper arousal because you know that that goes with it. It's not just behavior, but also physiological arousal goes with all that. You've got to tame those two things. And I like to talk about this in terms of a metaphor. I'm not saying the amygdala is the only part of the brain involved. Let's just use it as a metaphor. If we could tame the amygdala, then the person would then be set for a different kind of therapy, a more kind of one on one kind of therapy, personal therapy, discussion. Uh, therapy. Not just like, you know, you're going to have to go through all these rigorous responses. You have to tame the amygdala, make it calm, so that you can then have a mental state. For example, let's take a spider phobic. You got a person who's terribly afraid of spiders. Now what would normally be done is cognitive behavioral therapy. So that's a procedure where you repeat the stimulus over and over again until let's say no longer, um, disruptive, uh, to the patient. That's fine. In order that people who have that problem do not want to be in a room with a spider. So it's hard to do that. So I had an idea that, you know, you could take a picture of a spider and flash it to the. The left side, and it goes into the brain and gets to the amygdala. But it goes so fast because you flash it that you. The conscious person doesn't know that the amygdala has received a spider. And so you can repeat that spider over and over again without the person being consciously freaked out about being in the room with the spider. That makes sense. This is called subliminal perception. That you can have a very brief stimulus that can go into your brain and get into these unconscious circuits, allow you to re. Uh, to repeat the stimulus over and over again until it's sort of dampened out.

Speaker A: Is that the same principle that we all remember hearing about in the 60s and maybe the 50s? Even the subliminal advertising, you know, they'd flash a candy bar at the drive in. Yes.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, some of that. Some of that was, you know, bogus, but it's. There is a real point to that where you can flash stimuli that you aren't conscious of experiencing that sort of tames the. The deeper, darker parts of the brain without interfering with the more enlightened conscious brain.

Speaker A: Professor Joseph Ledoux, your talk to the folks at FFI is going to be pretty incredible. I just know that. And before we go, let's focus on your love of music and how you've incorporated music into your research. Not to mention the fact that what you thought would be pooh poohed by the academic community has actually been accepted. They appreciate what you're doing with the music. Please tell us more.

Speaker B: You know, I was never much of a musician. I mean, I had a guitar as a kid that was in the band, blah, blah, blah. I love pop music, but I was not, uh. I knew I was not very good in terms of, um, being able to play music. And so I kind of put it down for a long time, and then later in life came back to it and met up with a guy who also wrote books for lay people. We got together for dinner and turned out we were both, um, players of Stratocaster guitars, Fender guitars. And so we got together and started playing. We. We were trying to, like, do some cover songs of 60s bands like the Rolling Stones and so forth. One thing led to another, and Um, I, I was uh, given an invitation to um, give a lecture in Brooklyn to a secret science club, uh, in Park Slope. The, the people said we'll provide some entertainment. After I said, well, we'll bring the entertainment. So it was going to be me and uh, Tyler doing the entertainment. But I just gotten a postdoc, uh, from Israel, um, Daniela Schiller, who, uh, was a drummer. And she said also she had a uh, research assistant who was a bass player. So all of a sudden we were two guitars, drums and bass. We had a band. I had written a couple of songs on the topic of uh, mind and brain. So one was called, uh, the Mind Body Problem. You know, this was kind of a jokey song like My body wants you so but my mind says no, that kind of thing. Blues song. Another song was about the amygdala, uh, and fear and Because I was touting that in those days. Uh, another was when, uh, the night is dark about someone who's actually happy when they're in the dark. That went over really well. Um, the um, bunch of people there really liked the original song. So we started writing more and more. Played at a New York psychoanalytic Christmas, uh, party A month later in the spring, we got an invitation to play at the Kennedy center in uh, uh, Washington. We played in a club in, in uh, New York City in Greenwich Village. And a New York Times reporter showed up. In the audience was Oliver Sacks and John Nash from Beautiful Mind. Um, the title of the article in the Times was A band of scientists who really are a band. NYU could have said, you know, what's with all this, like fun, uh, time? You're supposed to be doing your research. But instead they embraced it. That spring they invited me to give the uh, send off of the kids at graduation in Madison Square Garden. So it was like, you know, 7,000 people there. And so I did the lecture and the amygdaloids played a couple of songs. And in the middle of the last song, you know, all the students on the floor started doing the wave. And then the whole Madison Square Garden was doing the wave. One thing like that led to another. And it's just every time I'm invited to give a lecture, um, I'm asked to bring the amygdala. I said no, but I'll bring Colin, who's the bass player. Colin. I have played in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Turin, Rome, Stockholm, at the Nobel Institute, uh, in Porto in Spain. It's just been like a real crazy thing. But my, my work and music became so interconnected, so fused together that it became one thing in a sense, you know, because it's not just one thing anymore. It's like two things. And it's been a very, very happy ride for the last, I don't know, maybe 20 years.

Speaker A: He's Professor Joseph LeDoux, the opening keynote speaker at the upcoming Paradigm Shifts FFI Global Conference in New York. The title, once again, is Starting Life over and over, something my guest on this podcast is certainly familiar with. You're a fascinating gentleman, and I know a lot of FFI practitioners and others are certainly going to enjoy a very spirited opening keynote address from you. Thank you, sir.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker A: You've been listening to a conversation with the opening keynote speaker at the upcoming FFI Conference in New York, Professor Joseph LeDoux. The title of the the talk will be Starting Life over and Over. To find out more about Paradigm Shifts, the FFI Global Conference in New York, October 28th through 30th, 2026, just go to FFI.org Once again, FFI.org this is the FFI Practitioner Podcast. Find out more@ffi.org I'm Jordan Rich, and as always, we thank you for listening.

Speaker B: It.