Quotes from Joseph LeDoux

You are your synapses

In order to eliminate negative emotions and avoidance and secure enduring therapeutic changes, Beck argues that it is necessary to identify and evaluate the maladaptive beliefs (some of which are unconscious) and replace them with more realistic thought patterns, which will result in healthier thinking, behaviors, and feelings.46

Fear and anxiety are not biologically wired. They do not erupt from a brain circuit in a prepackaged way as a fully formed conscious experience. They are a consequence of the cognitive processing of nonemotional ingredients. They come about in the brain the same way any other conscious experience comes about but have ingredients that nonemotional experiences lack.108

Autonoetic consciousness is our best friend and worst enemy. It enables us to write and revise our narrative, our self-story, as we live each moment of each day.

Conceptual Differences Between Consolidation and Reconsolidation. According to consolidation theory each time we retrieve a memory we retrieve the original memory. Reconsolidation theory, on the other hand, suggests that each time we retrieve a memory, the memory is potentially changed (updated); thus, you retrieve the memory you stored after the last retrieval rather than the original memory.

Humanistic therapies (existential, Gestalt, and client-centered) help people make rational choices and realize their potential in life while showing care and concern for others.7 Behavior therapy assumes that many problems are due to learning and uses principles of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning to change maladaptive behaviors.

Fear and other emotions are based on assumptions, presuppositions, and expectations; they are constructed in the brain from nonemotional ingredients.

Acceptance and commitment therapy, a variant on cognitive therapy, attempts to teach people to accept rather than change their emotions and make decisions within the context of what they value, as opposed to letting negative feelings control their behavior.

When split-brain patients fabricate verbal (left hemisphere based) explanations for behaviors that were produced by the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere is generating explanations of behaviors produced by nonconscious systems and does so in the maintenance of a sense of self. That is, our behavior is an important way we come to know who we are. This is the essence of Gazzaniga's interpreter theory of consciousness (see Chapter 6).

Anxious people exhibit: (1) increased attention to threats; (2) deficient discrimination of threat and safety; (3) increased avoidance of possible threats; (4) inflated estimates of threat likelihood and consequences; (5) heightened reactivity to threat uncertainty; and (6) disrupted cognitive and behavioral control in the presence of threats.

In line with contemporary learning theory, emotional processing theory holds that new information does not replace old information in the fear structure but instead creates a competing memory that suppresses the old memory.75

No doubt one of the reasons human cognition is so powerful is because we have language in our brains, which exponentially increases the ability to categorize information, to chunk. A whole culture, for instance, can be implied by a name.

Your conscious experiences are personal. They are yours, and could not exist without you. And a major fact that makes them personal is that they are experienced and interpreted through the lens of your memories. Conscious experiences, including experiences of fear and anxiety, are colored by memory.

It also enables us to fill in the blanks of our future self. The way we fill in those blanks is an important element in our overall outlook on life. Fearful, anxious people see troubles ahead and lead their lives dwelling on worst-case scenarios that often do not come to pass. They believe that worrying gave them the power to execute plans that prevented the bad things from happening in the past. But

As I have argued, the essence of anxiety is the unpleasant feeling—the apprehension, dread, angst, and worry—that one experiences when one perceives a lack of control in situations of uncertainty and risk. It

To be rid of fear, the theory goes, one has to overcome habitual avoidance and be reexposed to the fear-arousing stimulus, experience the fear, and then learn, via extinction, that the stimulus is not really the portent of a harmful outcome. The

Their function is to keep the organism alive. Emotion is the feeling an organism has when it consciously experiences these consequences. Keeping separate the processes that detect and respond to significant events from the processes that generate feelings is thus key to making progress in understanding what emotions actually are and how they work. Although these processes are related, conflating them only impedes a genuine understanding of the emotional brain.

Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far." —JODI PICOULT1

The amygdala plays an important role in the acquisition, storage, expression, and extinction of threat memories. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFCVM) regulates the acquisition, storage, expression, and extinction of threat memories by the amygdala. The hippocampus learns about the context of acquisition and modulates the expression and extinction of threat memories in relation to context.

Every human being has billions of neurons that together make trillions of synaptic connections among one another. Chemicals are oozing and sparks flying constantly, during wakefulness and during sleep, during thoughtfulness and during boredom. At any one moment, billions of synapses are active.

The balance between excitatory and inhibitory inputs to a neuron determines whether it will fire.

Emotional responses are not always external mirrors of internal feelings. but are rather controlled by more fundamental processes.

In the last chapter, I discussed how other animals might have domain-specific forms of consciousness, and in the case of nonhuman primates, domain-independent forms of nonverbal consciousness, but how only humans have verbal working memory, and thus language-based consciousness and the mental frills that language makes possible.

If you are standing still and decide to take a step, the movement of your leg on the basis of your decision involves axons that originate in cell bodies located in the movement control regions in the frontal cortex (just behind your forehead) and that travel uninterrupted to the base of the spinal column (in the region of your lower back).