Amygdala > Brain Theories > Joseph Ledoux "We've got fear wrong, my bad"

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Joseph LeDoux is worried. The prominent cognitive neuropsychologist feels his field is at an “impasse.” He takes some of the blame: His own “work and writings,” he confesses, “are in part responsible for these misconceptions” about the workings of fear in the brain. He wants to “straighten out the story before it goes further off track.”

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Could there have been ethical lapses or technical failures or maybe oversold theories about the role of the amygdala or brain neurotransmitters? And, if so, what would be the impact on how we understand, experience, diagnose and treat anxiety disorders?

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“After 30 years,” he said in an interview a few years ago, “I’ve decided that I haven’t been studying fear or emotion at all. This is an issue within the field . . . I’m not studying feeling. I’m studying the way the rat brain detects and responds to danger.” Jumping around and squealing and defecating and cowering—rat reactions to pain—tell us nothing about what the rodent is experiencing. Nor do they tell us how interventions that change rat behavior might affect what human beings experience in scary circumstances.

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“Joseph LeDoux [is] the William James of our era. . . . This marvelous book is science at its best. It traces the evolution of a key set of scientific insights based on progressively better empirical data, most of these derived from LeDoux’s brilliant studies, and applies these new insights to a family of clinically important phenomenon. Anxious is an absolute must read for clinicians and basic scientists as well as for anyone else interested in anxiety and its disorders.” —Eric R. Kandel, Kavli Professor and University Professor, Columbia University; Senior Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; author of In Search of Memory and The Age of Insight; recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Reading the book would be a lot of work, it's challenging, for me anyways. Let's just listen to a lecture by him on this...

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So basically he really talks a lot about the difference between top-down cognitive treatments of fear as addressing a different aspect then the unconscious and physiological responses to fear. He doesn't rule out consciousness in animals, but he does point out that it must be very different, and we may be missing a giant piece of the puzzle to actually use therapies that encourage extinction of the defense response, and not conceptualize everything in the framework of cognitions or our anthropomorphic biases of cognition and conscious/unconscious experience.

This is the missing piece of the puzzle from modern psychotherapy? This is what can lead to better drugs or better interventions? I think it's inherently some of the most genius work I've ever come across that's all I know for sure... but it rings true as the current paradigm in some places seem to be missing this element.

I heard about this from edge.org, everyone should have that rss feed and know what they do there, it's quite something.

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