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Dr. LeDoux on Rethinking Emotions, Fear, The Non-existence of the Limbic System, The amygdala, and More!
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This week we are joined by the esteemed Dr. Joseph LeDoux. He has produced some amazing work, with a healthy perspective on the brain and its functions! In this episode we discussed the amygdala, as not being the 'fear center' of the brain. We also touched on emotions not existing independently of cognition.
We discussed trauma, diagnoses, labels, etc. We discussed the history of some prominent treatments for mental health. Lastly we discussed the fallacies of the limbic system and everything wrong with it! We also touched on the importance of history and philosophy.
I hope you enjoy the episode!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Liev Dalton
Welcome everybody to another episode of the Beyond Drain podcast. I'm your host, Liam Dalton. If you're new around here, why don't you give us a follow or subscribe, be much appreciated. Uh, if you like the show, give us a reviewer comment and always sharing is the best way to support us. Uh, and it would be much appreciated today. We have a fantastic guest, uh, Dr. Joseph Ladue. Very, very interesting work. Um, this gentleman, he speaks very well. I've listened to a few podcasts of his, uh, a lot of papers as well.
00:00:31
Liev Dalton
Um, and the listeners of the show might remember, we, we discussed a little bit of his work with, uh, Emirates Goldsworthy. So if you want to go back to our first episode together, this was actually, um, where I was introduced to, to this gentleman's work. So very excited to have him on, uh, really looking forward to this discussion. Uh, Dr. LeDoux, thanks so much for taking the time.
Health and Well-being Balance
00:00:50
joseph ledoux
My pleasure.
00:00:52
Liev Dalton
Uh, so the first question I ask all my guests is, uh, sort of an interesting interesting one. It's what is health and you could take it in any direction that you'd like. What does it look like? How does it manifest? you know how do we How do we become healthy?
00:01:05
Liev Dalton
um So I'll give you the floor and you can take it away.
00:01:06
joseph ledoux
Oh, they're starting with a hard question. It's a little bit out of my comfort zone there, but you know health is ah health is part of life, and but so is disease. And so they're just kind of yin and the yang of of being alive. um Everything that lives is going to suffer some kind of Assault from bacteria or whatever is what else is going around in their world and their lives so ah I think it's just ah You know, we all want to live in a healthy way But we also want to live in a way that we enjoy so, you know, we may drink more whiskey than we're supposed to or do other things that and we should do exercise more than we do but I
00:01:54
joseph ledoux
You know, sometimes you just follow what you want and it gets you into trouble or it maybe it doesn't. So I like to try to stay somewhere in the middle ground of not too much of either way.
00:02:09
Liev Dalton
Yeah, well put a little bit of balance. Uh, you know, I would also include that, you know, that enjoyment part of life as a living, a healthy lifestyle, you know, if you're constantly depriving yourself of things that you enjoy and, um, like you said, maybe having some whiskey and, you know, maybe skipping a workout, if you're a little tired, you know, you got to listen to your body too and find that balance.
00:02:32
joseph ledoux
Yep, yeah. yeah
00:02:33
Liev Dalton
So yeah, I enjoy that answer a lot. Um,
Amygdala vs. Fear
00:02:38
Liev Dalton
so. In reading a lot of your work, you know, I think central, uh, obviously is the discussion of the amygdala. Um, not a topic that we've necessarily discussed in depth, uh, on the podcast so far. So, um, maybe you could discuss a little bit about it, why you think that it's the fear center of the brain. Um, and you know, maybe give us a ah ah general overview of of your understanding of the amygdala and its role.
00:03:05
joseph ledoux
Well, but you know that may be a long answer because even though I'm um known for having help make the amygdala a fear center, I do not believe that that is an accurate depiction of of what it does.
00:03:09
Liev Dalton
It's OK.
00:03:17
joseph ledoux
um the What the amygdala does is detect and respond to danger. If there's a threat, you respond to that automatically long before you're consciously afraid.
00:03:27
joseph ledoux
right so The fear itself is not something that the amygdala does. It controls the behavioral and physiological responses that are often associated with fear, but it is not what fear is. Fear is the cognitive interpretation of the situation you find yourself. So every person in every culture around the world has been exposed to some kind of danger.
00:03:52
joseph ledoux
And we often hear that that fear is a universal emotion, a basic emotion. But I think that's wrong also. So fear is is not a basic emotion. I don't believe in basic emotions. Fear is the conscious experience you have. And the conscious experience you have is shaped by all of the experiences you've had over the course of your life with danger. And it's contextualized by the culture in which you grew up.
00:04:20
joseph ledoux
So while every culture has a language that has a word for fear, ah that you can translate across cultures, it does not mean that fear is the same across cultures. It means that the word is the same, but the experience of the emotion fear varies because of the cultural differences. you know Some cultures are kind of very skittish and afraid, others are more less so. And so it's just, ah we grow up ah contextualizing all of our emotions in terms of the experiences that we've had with stimuli related to those emotions.
Misconceptions and Pharma's Role
00:04:59
joseph ledoux
But often in the case is the the stimulus that you are exposed to that might elicit fear is not necessarily ah going to the amygdala and making you afraid. What it's doing is in parallel
00:05:13
joseph ledoux
going to the amygdala to trigger behavioral and physiological responses that keep you alive and simultaneously going to the neocortex and especially to the prefrontal cortex to allow you to cognitively construct the situation as one of fear because of the elements of danger that allow you to pattern complete the experience of fear on the basis of limited information, like there's something dangerous here. um If you see a snake on the ground, you freeze, um you know that snakes are dangerous, your heart is beating fast, so all of that is coming together
00:05:49
joseph ledoux
into the into what's called a schema, a body of knowledge about what danger is that you've acquired over the course of your life. So your schema is the basis for your fear, and my schema is the basis for mine. So we may and probably do have different kinds of subtly different kinds of experiences of fear.
00:06:09
joseph ledoux
Whereas the behavioral and physiological responses are often very parallel, often very similar across people because those are hardwired in the amygdala when it detects and responds to danger. So we have inherited these hardwired states from other animals, but to much to a much lesser degree, we've inherited the emotions. you know Charles Darwin was having trouble getting one of his books read by the British population because um the the British at that time, Victorian England, they were not very keen on the idea that we might have inherited things from animals like emotions. So he they they thought it was more important to take care of their pets than human emotions. It didn't like gel the way that it does for us today. um So he flipped things around. Instead of talking about,
00:07:07
joseph ledoux
humans as having animal-like emotions. He talked about animals having human-like emotions, sort of flip the whole evolutionary thing around. And that allowed his his theories to go forward in Victorian England and for his books to become famous. But in doing so, he left a trail of misunderstanding about what emotions are.
00:07:29
joseph ledoux
that he said we had inherited these emotions from animals. Even though he talked about it as human-like emotions, we inherited those animal-like emotions to have human-like emotions, which are kind of like animal emotions and his.
00:07:43
joseph ledoux
It was a hard way. So you know it's he the the field went down that road for so for over a century, still going down that road to the extent of believing that what we've inherited in the amygdala is the emotion fear. But that's not what we've inherited. We've inherited the ability of the amygdala to detect and respond to danger. Now, every organism that has ever lived, the earliest bacterial cell three billion years ago,
00:08:09
joseph ledoux
are the most complex human being. um These both have to detect and respond to danger. Bacteria have to detect danger, otherwise they can't stay alive. And they also have to be able to find nutrients in order to stay alive. So they approach nutrients and they avoid danger.
00:08:27
joseph ledoux
So we think of of approach and avoidance as very psychological things. that you know It's a very complicated thing. No, it's as primitive as life itself. um But the psychological experience, which we humans have, and whether other animals have that kind of experience, we simply don't know. But we know that we humans have these experiences of ah fear and love and grief and anger and awe and wisdom and and so forth. um So that's my take on the amygdala that the common sense view is actually incorrect and you know I've i've studied this for over 50 years so I may be wrong too but I've come up with a view over those 50 years that allows me to comfortably feel that I understand what's going on.
00:09:16
Liev Dalton
Definitely, yeah.
Complexity of Trauma and PTSD
00:09:17
Liev Dalton
um You know, when I was sort of sort of diving into this work, trying to understand emotions, you know, what emotions are was always a really confusing thing for me. um You know, like, how do we process emotions? How do we think about emotions and feel emotion? It just all was very confusing to me when I was learning about it. It it just For some reason, we couldn't talk about it in a nice, like, you know, logical cut and dry way.
00:09:49
Liev Dalton
Like, this is what this is what we're talking about. um Obviously, it's a very difficult thing to talk about. You know, what it is. There's no doubt about it.
00:10:00
Liev Dalton
Emotions are a really interesting topic.
00:10:04
Liev Dalton
I'm curious if you think that...
00:10:04
joseph ledoux
I can talk about it. not I don't find it hard to talk about
00:10:07
Liev Dalton
Yeah, no, you're very good at talking about it. Obviously, you're showing your expertise here. um um I'm curious if you think that emotions can exist independently of cognition. Do you think that they're always intertwined with with thoughts and and perceptions and things of that nature?
00:10:24
joseph ledoux
Yeah, i I think there's no cognition, sorry, no emotion without cognition. now let Let me just step back a bit and try to help you understand why it's important to think about, for example, the amygdala in this way.
00:10:32
Liev Dalton
Thanks.
00:10:38
joseph ledoux
It's not simply an an ivory tower kind of academic argument. ah There's a big reason for that. What the amygdala does is detect and respond to danger. And the assumption has always been that the respond detecting responding to danger is because the amygdala is the seed of fear that drives those responses. So the pharmaceutical industry in the 1940s and 1950s, hoping to put Freud in the rear view mirror.
00:11:08
joseph ledoux
eliminated eliminated everything subjective from mental states. They took the mental out of mental disorders. And the idea was that you could put a rat or a mouse into a a behavioral test in a pharmaceutical company, give the rat a medication that will make the rat respond less behaviorally. And the assumption is the reason it's responding less behaviorally is because it's gone to the amygdala and made the amygdala less fearful and therefore the rat is no longer feeling fear as indicated by the behavior. So for the past
00:11:44
joseph ledoux
nineteen fifty s the on and on, the search has been to use that approach to find new medications. The only medications that The only types of medications that have ever worked are medications that were discovered in the 1940s and 50s accidentally, either through and mostly through ah studies of humans who were given a medication for some reason. For example, patients in a tuberculosis ward.
00:12:18
joseph ledoux
were found to be seem to be happier when they had a medication that was supposed to treat the tuberculosis. It didn't help the tuberculosis, but the ward seemed more relaxed and and calm, less depressed. That became the basis of antidepressant medications. The same thing with anti-anxiety medication and accidental finding in for some other reason turns the medication into an anti-anxiety medication.
00:12:45
joseph ledoux
So you have benzodiazepines to treat anxiety, and you also can use SSRI serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. But those are that was known in 1963, 1964, and nothing new has come since. It's just keep trying to tweak the medication.
00:13:05
joseph ledoux
Give the rat a different version of it. try you know Do something different. But try new medications altogether. But the new ones don't work as good as the old ones. Sometimes they work very well in changing behavior, but they don't change the mental state of the patient.
00:13:21
joseph ledoux
So patients go to therapists. you You're studying
Labeling Mental Disorders
00:13:24
joseph ledoux
to be a therapist, correct? but So patient comes to your office and says, and well, I'm having problems with anxiety. I can't go to a party, but I'm too anxious to go to a party. And so I don't know if you're going to be a psychiatrist or just a you know someone who can administer medication, but let's say you were someone who could administer medication. And so you said, okay, I'm going to give you an anti-anxiety medication, and it's going to go to your brain, affect the the fear and anxiety centers of your brain, and make you feel less fearful and anxious, and you'll be able to have a better time at the party.
00:14:03
joseph ledoux
so the patient goes to the party and they're still anxious, the medications. they But they find that they are a little bit less aroused, behaviorally aroused, physiologically aroused, and a little less kind of jittery at the party. But they're still anxious. So the patient is disappointed because they want to feel better at and you know ah better in terms of fear and anxiety. um And The pharmaceutical industry is disappointed because the patients don't feel better. But the patients go to you in the first place because they want to feel better. If you're just changing behavior and physiology, because that's what happens in the rat studies and the pharmaceutical chamber industry, you're not solving the problem that the patient needs to be treated for. Now, it's important to reduce physiological arousal and to reduce behavioral timidity um you know and make the the animal less behaviorally inhibited.
00:15:01
joseph ledoux
or the person um because those will allow then the therapeutic process to advance more precisely because you're no longer feeling aroused and feeling jittery. The medications can help kind of tone that down. It's like you go into a restaurant in New York City where I live and often the music is way too loud and you ask the waiter, you know can you turn down the music? Let's say it's some heavy metal song. I don't like heavy metal very much. and So I ask them to turn the metal heavy metal down. It's still the same song I don't like. But the volume is down, and so it doesn't affect me as much. And I think that's the same way with the medications. They turn down the volume, but they can't change your mental state. How is it possible you take a pill, goes into your blood into your digestive system, goes to your bloodstream, finds its way throughout the body, finds the exact spot in the brain where it's got to like turn off the fear center, and all of a sudden you're fine. That's not the way it's going to work.
00:16:01
joseph ledoux
um The medications have so many side effects because they go all over the body. And there's no fear center to turn off in the second place. So there there's a huge problem in the industry and it all goes back to the misconception of what emotions are, what fear and anxiety are.
00:16:20
Liev Dalton
Wow. Amazing. So when we're talking about, when we think about trauma, how how would you define trauma and bring that into the conversation here? You know, is it tied to this emotional, emotional responses? Is that what being stored in the memory? You know, is that where we're, we're looking for the answers?
00:16:38
joseph ledoux
Well, trauma is started out as a constrained notion. um But now people have PTSD for almost any kind of thing. but I had PTSD because i you know somebody said something to me or something. um But the but real trauma, the thing that is traumatic, is a very, very complex cognitive, emotional, behavioral, physiological condition where You are under tremendous, tremendous psychological and or physiological, physical threat. Danger, harm is in your way. You are are you perceive a very significant amount of harm. You see bad things happening to other people. you know Consider a war zone where moms are going off daily every here left and right spot. People live under trauma under those conditions. That's not the same thing as someone saying something you don't like.
00:17:36
joseph ledoux
you know um So that that kind of serious trauma involves so much of the brain. It kind of takes over the brain. It involves cognition. It involves behavioral and physiological arousal. It involves i memory. It involves just about everything of the body. So when we think of how can we develop a drug to treat PTSD, it's impossible.
00:18:01
joseph ledoux
you not you PTSD is a ah collection of symptoms. And if you have a problem that is so complex, you're not going to find one pill that can do all of that. What you have to do with a complex psychological problem is work on each kind of symptom separately, because each symptom is different. They come together and have the ah the the connectivity of something that we call post-traumatic stress disorder. and But what it is is going to be different for every person because there are going to be different variations on the symptoms. So that's why the in in psychiatry now, there has been a movement to de-emphasize the names of mental disorders. Because you can, for example, have
00:18:51
joseph ledoux
You can be afraid of a lot of things you can be afraid of having a heart attack that's not ah a symptom of a heart attack but it's a ah something that can go along with having a heart attack right so you have all these kinds of.
00:19:08
joseph ledoux
ah threatening conditions, for example, schizophrenics have, a feel threatened, people with anxiety feel threatened, people with depression feel threatened in one way or another. You know, threat is a common thing in many disorders. It's a way of, it's a kind of thing that happens ah you can because you feel threatened by your condition, basically, too.
00:19:31
joseph ledoux
So it it's a these disorders are not things. They're things that we've named because it's convenient to categorize them. But the symptoms move don't move, but they they manifest across a lot of different different kinds of so-called disorders. So if you want to treat a problem that a person's had,
00:19:53
joseph ledoux
Let's not call it PTSD. Let's say the person has been um in a situation where something really horrible has happened, like an automobile accident or something like that. um Then I think the therapist's job is to pick away at the component symptoms.
00:20:11
joseph ledoux
and not say that you know we're not going to erase the trauma. We're going to have to make the trauma less disturbing to you, less disruptive to your life. And to do that, we've got to change the behavioral and physiological responses in the person. that would be equivalent Metaphorically, that would be like taming the amygdala to calm down the behavioral and physiological responses.
00:20:37
joseph ledoux
Step two, you would need to address all of the memories the person has, both the episodic memory of the trauma, but also semantic memories or episodic memories from the long past where you can't understand what fear and anxiety are.
00:20:55
joseph ledoux
um in your to you what fear and anxiety are to you. So you have to kind of begin to change the memories of what fear and anxiety are to that person, not just fear and anxiety in general, but what they are to that person. So once you've tamed the amygdala and tamed the hippocampus with the the memory changes, I think the patient is then in a situation where ah they're ready for talk therapy because you've gotten rid of some of the noise that gets in the way of talk therapy.
00:21:28
Liev Dalton
Yeah, there's that big, uh, you know, getting to know thyself piece. And if you're working with, you know, uh, like a counselor or therapist, whatever, you know, there's that attunement piece trying to attune to the client's worldview. You know, even you mentioned, what does anxiety mean to the client? Like if someone is having anxious thoughts, you know, what, what does that, what does that actually mean? Right now you can kind of see how all of these things are based in, you know, cultural factors.
00:21:57
Liev Dalton
Um, all of your experiences, you know, what you were told, uh, in development, what these things mean, you know, so, so tracing that back and, um, you're showcasing really well that. Why it's so individual, you know, we've had some individuals on and we've critiqued, you know, the DSM and you know, it's limiting, right?
00:22:10
joseph ledoux
Right.
00:22:15
Liev Dalton
It's limiting when you're talking about individuals, you know, because, um, it's best to speak of what happened to the individual, you know, they're not a label, right?
00:22:25
joseph ledoux
Right.
00:22:25
Liev Dalton
They're labeled there.
00:22:26
joseph ledoux
Yeah.
00:22:26
Liev Dalton
Like. They might be a manifestation of what happened to them, right? But again, the labels are for they serve others other than the individual.
00:22:38
Liev Dalton
oh
00:22:38
joseph ledoux
Yeah, because once you label yourself, you know, that then you've like acquired a whole new body of knowledge and information about who you are.
00:22:39
Liev Dalton
so
00:22:46
joseph ledoux
That is not useful, really, I think to the the patient. um You know, there's just ah' it's so complicated and I'm not a therapist.
00:22:58
joseph ledoux
So I'm just talking from about all this with the perspective of what I know about the brain.
00:23:07
Liev Dalton
ah Yeah, definitely. No, that that makes sense. Like, um I think that label piece is big. As you mentioned, you know, like even giving yourself a label, you know, and then and then wearing that, you know, because often you see individuals will carry this, you know, I am a anxious person or I am a depressed person.
00:23:27
Liev Dalton
And then it's almost like another barrier ah to get over when you're trying to heal, right?
00:23:30
joseph ledoux
Right.
00:23:32
Liev Dalton
You're like trying to
00:23:33
joseph ledoux
Yeah.
00:23:34
Liev Dalton
Like now, first of all, you got to break down that self belief that you're a depressed person because like you have to figure out what life could be if you are not a depressed person, you know, so it's, it's very, I think that this is really important.
00:23:46
joseph ledoux
You know, there's another thing I want to mention, which I think is also
Evolution of Therapy and Medication
00:23:50
joseph ledoux
important. So going back again to like when, you know, the pharmaceutical industry was coming on.
00:23:51
Liev Dalton
Please.
00:23:57
joseph ledoux
But at the same time, you had ah the behaviorist ah were still kind of in charge of psychology back then. So you had behavior therapy, ah which is based on Pavlovian and then instrumental conditioning. um And then you had cognitive behavioral therapy. So cognitive behavioral therapy was developed by you know the and ah by taking behavioral therapy and adding this cognitive component to it. so But when when that was done, that was good, but slowly the the process changed because ah in order for a patient to be reimbursed by the insurance industry, you have to have physical ah objective measures and that your checklist
00:24:52
joseph ledoux
And so it becomes less about the subjective experience of the patient and more about the physical symptoms that can be measured. And so even cognitive behavioral therapy became more behavioristic over time. ah The mental is buried in there somewhere, but it's not the focus of the of the whole thing. you know I wrote a paper in the psychiatry journal, I think it was two years ago,
00:25:19
joseph ledoux
calling putting the mental back into mental disorders. And it's the whole history of how this thing evolved with the insurance companies kind of merging everything into a measurable kind of condition.
00:25:35
Liev Dalton
Yeah, I've looked a little bit into that, that history as well. And, you know, what, what I've noticed is that we've moved away from serving the the people, right. And you have to really have the heart, um, to, to be in it for the right reasons.
00:25:48
Liev Dalton
Right. Because sort of the system is created, it's a system there's, you know, you could say it's good or bad or whatever.
00:25:52
joseph ledoux
Yeah.
00:25:55
Liev Dalton
It's just a system and that's how systems work.
00:25:55
joseph ledoux
right
00:25:57
Liev Dalton
They need generalizations and, um, So that's why it's really important to, to, if you are working with someone that they do have this attunement piece that they're in it for the right reasons that they're working for you as the individual, they're trying to go from your worldview and your culture. You know, I think that the cultural factors are something that is beginning to be looked at a little bit more. Um, it's still, we're trying to create a system around cultural factors. You know, we're trying to look at, you know, this culture is how, you know, you give this test for this culture and it's adapted to this culture, right? But it's,
00:26:30
joseph ledoux
but
00:26:30
Liev Dalton
you know, how does the individual even identify with their culture, right? Because, you know, their family lineage might've done something slightly different and that might throw off the whole thing, right?
00:26:36
joseph ledoux
right
00:26:40
Liev Dalton
So that that individual piece that we kind of keep coming back here to is is really important.
00:26:40
joseph ledoux
yeah
00:26:46
Liev Dalton
Really curious about your thoughts on, like from your perspective and your background, you know, can we approach healing the mental realm from our thoughts?
00:26:59
Liev Dalton
like Can you change your thoughts and then change you know the way that you're you feel? right Can you change the emotions if you could change your thoughts?
00:27:09
Liev Dalton
Do you think that you can approach it from that standpoint?
00:27:09
joseph ledoux
Yeah.
00:27:11
Liev Dalton
And that's kind of the cognitive behavioral point of view, I guess. Just curious about your thoughts on that.
00:27:17
joseph ledoux
yeah no i I think that that it is possible. The problem is that um We live in a kind of internal narration, right? And when we think we're changing something,
00:27:30
joseph ledoux
that big that comes to be built into our narration. um But the narration is not always that accurate. That's where the I think the therapist can be very useful to kind of keep the benchmarks of how that process is going. you know um you know i think most i didn't I certainly didn't mean to um put down therapists because I think most therapists that that I know really want to help the patient. They have to play they have to play the game you know of the so-called system you just described, they have to do that ah for the whole system to work and for them to to make their living and for the patients to get help. But inside the session, they're there with the patient and are wanting to help. um I think that part of the problem is that the
00:28:19
joseph ledoux
The field has been so, um I'm going to use traumatized in this in this inappropriate way here, traumatized by, buts let's say that it's been bullied by the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry into marginalizing subjective experience as a real important factor. It's viewed as a kind of you know it's I have some scientific friends, colleagues who do not like my views of fear in the amygdala and so forth. It's not in the amygdala. It's an interpretation. um And they think of subjective experience as the weakest measure of fear. it's it's the It's the most unreliable, weakest measure. They're much more comfortable measuring behavior and physiology in the patient or in a rat.
00:29:07
joseph ledoux
um But it's missing the boat. i mean The boat is the subject of experience. That's what's going to take you into the problem and out of the problem.
Critique of Limbic System Theory
00:29:19
Liev Dalton
Yeah, well put. So, you know, in approaching emotional processing, um, again, in your expertise, where how how do you approach emotional processing?
00:29:32
Liev Dalton
It's not, you know, we're not targeting the limbic system here, right? We're probably targeting other.
00:29:36
joseph ledoux
Well, they may the limbic system is another one of my pet peeves. I do not believe in the limbic system. um been so i've been I've been on that kick since 1987 trying to get the limbic system out of the field.
00:29:43
Liev Dalton
Maybe we can, uh, we could go into that a little bit.
00:29:51
Liev Dalton
I kind of thought that was going to be a little trigger there for you, but let's talk about it. let let Tell us about the limbic system, what it is and what it isn't.
00:29:57
joseph ledoux
Okay, so the limbic system was a beautifully presented theory by Paul D. McLean in 1949. This was right after World War II, and I have to realize that during World War II, all research went into the war effort.
00:30:16
joseph ledoux
So there was no research on the brain, no research on psychology, unless it was related to the war. All the money went into the you know whatever had to be done just in World War II. So as soon as the the war began to end, and look at 46 47, you know, it's kind of like winding down everything is Coming back to normal to the but to the extent possible and research is coming back online not more research but research on how the brain works and What McLean did was he looked back on the history of the pre-war? research that it had taken place he
00:30:56
joseph ledoux
included William James, Walter Cannon, the physiologist who questioned James's theory in the 1930s. There was something called the Kluver-Busey syndrome in 1937, which was very important where These researchers who had fled from Germany, we're now in the US, and doing research on and psychedelics actually, ah trying to understand how psychedelics induce, I think it was, I think maybe it was psilocybin with the the medication they were using, to try and understand how the brain generates these visual hallucinations.
00:31:40
joseph ledoux
And they followed the visual processing in monkeys from the visual cortex into the temporal lobe where there's a ah clear of continuation of the visual system into the temporal lobe. And when they lesioned the visual cortex and then the temporal lobe, what they found was that the monkeys were no longer able to recognize things that were previously attractive to them, like certain foods, or they couldn't also they couldn't ah they also couldn't recognize danger. So if they saw a snake, they would try to pick it up. Things had lost their psychological significance from these temporal lobe lesions. And this was the beginning on three kinds of areas of research.
00:32:29
joseph ledoux
um that all really kind of have some roots in Canada. The first was Brenda Milner's work at McGill on on memory on patient HM. That was the discovery in 1956, the damage to the hippocampus and the temporal lobe disrupted the ability to form new long-term memories, cognitive memories. um There was also a discovery ah that the
00:33:00
joseph ledoux
The other area of the temporal lobe that was of interest was the amygdala. It was discovered that those Clue-Verbusy syndrome conditions about losing the ability to detect what's good for you and bad for you, it turned out to be due to damage to specifically the amygdala in the temporal lobe.
00:33:19
joseph ledoux
So that's how the amygdala and the hippocampus kind of got on board and became sort of the the main focal areas of the brain for emotions over the years. So McLean put all that together into a systematic theory.
00:33:35
joseph ledoux
in which the the hippocampus was the core of the limbic system, the core of the emotion system of the brain. um The amygdala was an output structure for controlling emotional behaviors and physiological responses. And you had this rim in the medial prefrontal cortex all the way into the back. the rim went ah this We're looking at a hot dog bun now that we've opened up. And you see the white part of the hot dog bun. that's the medial That would be the medial cortex when you open up the hemispheres of the brain. So in the medial cortex, you have this rim going around from the back of the brain all the way around the amygdala and hippocampus. And that rim,
00:34:21
joseph ledoux
If you take the the Latin word for rim, it's limbless. And so the circuit under there became the limbic system, the limbless system. So that is where that comes from. And it was said to be a a circuit, a ah component of the brain that is involved in emotion, but not cognition.
00:34:40
joseph ledoux
but ah soon ah Right after McLean proposed that, that's when the hippocampus became the seat of the most important kinds of cognition, memory in the brain. um And so, according to the limbic system theory, that should not be happened. The hippocampus should be all about emotion and not cognition.
00:35:00
joseph ledoux
And so the no matter what you did with the limbic system, ah it was it had a way out of the problem. Well, OK, if it's not the hippocampus, it's the amygdala. And the search went on to try and find you know the amygdala in emotion and the hippocampus in emotion. And the emotion hippocampus got left out and became cognitive. and So it was always like shift it was of a shifting kind of set of criteria for what the limbic system were over the years.
00:35:29
joseph ledoux
um and But the biggest problem was in the 1970s, researchers discovered that the the core foundation of the limbic system was the idea that this was a mammalian structure. It's what separated mammal mammals from reptiles. And that's why McLean later talked about the triune brain, the reptilian brain, the yeah ah mammalian brain and the primate brain, three brains. But the idea was that each of those were new structures altogether. They did not exist in the previous kind of species. But then it was found that reptiles and birds have precursors of the ah the neocortex in their brains.
00:36:13
joseph ledoux
And it was found that the that mammals have precursors of the so-called primate brain, ah the prefrontal cortex. So none of those turned out to be actually new. They were always there. Just they weren't used in that particular kind of way. So it became a flawed theory. um But it's still in the textbooks. It's still on podcasts. It's still everywhere, despite many, many legitimate scientists saying,
00:36:41
joseph ledoux
This is BS. Get rid of it. um But it's still there. you know it's it's a The amygdala fear center is a cultural meme. The limbic system is a cultural meme. The dopamine hypothesis of of pleasure is a cultural meme. All of these things start out in science. They go into the culture. They become established as cultural truths.
00:37:06
joseph ledoux
Then sometimes, you know this can take decades. So the the amygdala, the dopamine is in the culture. All of that's in the culture. um And then you people young people are starting to grow up having learned about the amygdala. So there's a Batman cartoon, Batman comic book strip um about the amygdala. ah You can find the amygdala in and science fiction novels. It's everywhere in culture.
00:37:31
joseph ledoux
um as the seed of fear. So those young people are growing up with that meme. They go to college, they get interested in science, they become neuroscientists, and they bring the meme back into science. So the amygdala is now, you know you can't once the cat is out of the bag, once the meme is out of the bag, you can't put it back in because the people coming in believe it. And you know people like me are old quirks, but what what does that guy know? it's The amygdala is the fear center. So it you can't erase these things that go out and come back.
00:38:07
Liev Dalton
Yeah, truly takes a paradigm shift, right? um Yeah, well put, very well put.
Cultural Memes in Neuroscience
00:38:15
Liev Dalton
I'm curious about your thoughts on the implications of this understanding of the Olympic system. You know, how how do you think that it plays a role in how we understand um emotions, emotional processing, therapeutic interventions, stuff like that?
00:38:35
joseph ledoux
Yeah, good good question. So the point is that there is no limbic system, but there is a limbic brain. There is a set of brain structures under the limbus that constitutes a limbic component of the brain, just like the neocortex is a component of the brain, but it does a lot of things. The limbic system does a lot of things. It's involved in memory.
00:39:01
joseph ledoux
um with the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex. Those are important for memory. ah It's involved in ah regulation of emotion. It's involved in self-processing. It's involved in a lot of things, but it's not something that works as a system the way the visual system or the motor system works. It's not a system. It's a set of structures that contributes to a lot of things.
00:39:27
Liev Dalton
Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, that's interesting. Wow. um It's funny, you know, you learn so much about the limbic system. It's amazing that it's still being taught in university curriculums, but if you understand the cycles of how that that works as well, right, it really does take big shifts.
00:39:47
Liev Dalton
um
00:39:47
joseph ledoux
Yeah, I appreciate that you accept what I'm saying because not everybody in the scientific world is going to accept what I say. um But ah I think it's you know the amygdala thing is coming along. I've been talking about the amygdala is not a seed of fear since a paper I wrote in 2012.
00:40:06
joseph ledoux
And it's catching up. People are slowly kind of coming along to that. The limbic system, a lot of people understand it and are not talking about it quite so so much. Dopamine is no longer as seriously thought about as as the chemical of pleasure. It's more about a circuit, a system in the brain that that releases dopamine and fuses synapses together when you're learning about rewards and so forth.
00:40:32
joseph ledoux
um So, you know, I'm gonna give you another story from Canada, and which happened at a lot to have so much happened at McGill. We would not have neuroscience today if it wasn't for McGill and the people who were there over the time. So, um James Old and Peter Milner, Peter Milner was the husband of of Brenda Milner.
00:40:53
joseph ledoux
They were at McGill at the same time. Everyone is under Donald Hebb, the kingpin of neuroscience. We wouldn't have neuroscience without Donald Hebb having been there and done all this stuff. um So in Hebb's department, all this stuff was happening. Brendan Milner was discovering the hippocampus. a lot of people John O'Keefe, who discovered place cells in the hippocampus at in Canada as well, working under Donald Hebb and went on to live in England and got the Nobel Prize for his work on play cells. It's just been a tremendously important source of ah discovery that happened in McGill. I forget what your question was that took me there. but
00:41:40
Liev Dalton
No, that was a little aside that you had a little story for us.
00:41:44
joseph ledoux
know that Okay, the Peter Milner, the the milner the the ah the story about dopamine.
00:41:45
Liev Dalton
ah
00:41:51
joseph ledoux
So and the these two researchers were there, and they put electrodes in the rat brain, and they thought they were putting it, like I think, in the hippoch and the hypothalamus, but they put it into the midbrain accidentally.
00:41:52
Liev Dalton
Yes.
00:42:06
joseph ledoux
that you know They didn't have a good way to target it. and so and ah Jim Olds, who was the leading researcher along with them Peter Milner, ah went on to move the electrodes around. And when when they hit one spot, what they found was the rat would press the bar incessantly to get electrical stimulation in that part of the brain. And when they took it out, they weren't in the in the midbrain or the hypothalamus. They were somewhere like around the hypothalamus.
00:42:40
joseph ledoux
And what they came to understand was that that was reinforcing the behavior, that electrical stimulation was the reinforcement of the behavior. um Now, that was 1952 or so. In 1956, James Olds, the lead author on that work, and published a paper in Science called um Pleasure Centers of the Brain.
00:43:06
joseph ledoux
OK, if you read the paper, the set the paper inside, there's no word of pleasure in the article. I'm certain the editors of the article call the the title of the paper, put pleasure in the title to make it sexy.
00:43:21
joseph ledoux
um Jim Oles got hooked on the idea and started promoting the idea that the that the just the the like they dopamine that that the dopamine system in the brain was the center of pleasure. And then a guy in Washington at and NIH, what was his name? I forget his name, but he he came up with the... Oles and Milner had the the the
00:43:53
joseph ledoux
the ah pleasure hypothesis, but not the dopamine hypothesis. Then this other guy, Roy Wise at NIH got the dopamine hypothesis. And from the dopamine hypothesis came the dopamine pleasure idea. Now, both Ols and Wise, the two people who started the pleasure center and then the dopamine pleasure hypothesis, both recanted that.
00:44:18
joseph ledoux
But again, it was too late because the meme was out in both cases. Yeah.
00:44:26
Liev Dalton
This is like the new age Thomas Kuhn.
00:44:27
joseph ledoux
That was a little disorganized. I'm sorry. but
00:44:30
Liev Dalton
No, that's okay. It's like explaining it in these terms is is I think is is helpful for probably a lot of people. um You could see very well how once it gets sent into the culture, right?
00:44:42
Liev Dalton
And that's exactly what happened as you mentioned earlier with you know the the whole dopamine ah depression or serotonin depression hypothesis, right?
00:44:51
joseph ledoux
but
00:44:51
Liev Dalton
Like the deficiency in serotonin, right?
00:44:52
joseph ledoux
Right.
00:44:54
Liev Dalton
that's It's the same thing that happened. there was no papers on the subject, but that was like the hypothesis and the hypothesis got pushed out before there was any evidence. And still to this day, people will still think that there is something wrong in the serotonin system.
00:45:03
joseph ledoux
Right. Right.
00:45:09
Liev Dalton
And that's why they're depressed, you know, and, um, it's very, very interesting. You know, once that, that mean gets out there and, um, you know, even in science, they want these titles to be appealing.
00:45:18
joseph ledoux
right
00:45:20
Liev Dalton
They want them to get them, you know, have a, they want to click, they want people to read them too. Right. So.
00:45:25
joseph ledoux
yeah
00:45:25
Liev Dalton
Yeah, that the these simplifications.
00:45:29
joseph ledoux
So it's like one one of the things and I'm trying to do in our little discussion here is illustrate the importance of history in all of this.
00:45:31
Liev Dalton
Yeah.
00:45:40
joseph ledoux
Because students don't get enough of the history of psychology and neuroscience. And and you know as as many have said, if you don't know history, you're going to repeat it and make the same mistakes.
00:45:52
Liev Dalton
Yeah. Well, we get one lecture. at the start of the, start at the start of the course.
00:45:58
joseph ledoux
Yeah.
00:45:59
Liev Dalton
Typically you get one lecture on history. That's about it. Right.
00:46:02
joseph ledoux
That's good. That's better than nothing.
00:46:04
Liev Dalton
I guess, I guess, but still I, I agree. And yeah, my favorite, uh, my favorite quote about history is a Hegel quote. It's, we learn from history that we don't learn from history.
00:46:16
Liev Dalton
And that's, I think pretty accurate. Um, but you're right. Yeah. having to delve in, especially in science. you know um One thing I find with research is it can be sometimes narrow-minded.
00:46:29
Liev Dalton
And now we don't really consider philosophy and history and you know very important ah fields.
00:46:32
joseph ledoux
Yeah.
00:46:36
Liev Dalton
I really think that we should take a ah holistic point of view when we are discussing scientific things. If we are going to be engaging in induction, right we need to be acting as holistic as possible.
00:46:46
Liev Dalton
And um I think that's that's really important.
00:46:47
joseph ledoux
Yeah, yeah i used to go ahead so i was you know I used to be a big fan of of philosophy.
00:46:49
Liev Dalton
But yeah, I'm really Go ahead. No, please.
00:46:58
joseph ledoux
I've read a lot of philosophy in my career. And I've ah i've been impressed with how philosophers are taught to think, but scientists are taught to collect data.
00:47:10
joseph ledoux
um And we don't have enough thinking. We don't get trained enough in how to think about things. um But now we're having a problem in neuroscience, especially in the study of consciousness, which is philosophers have taken their role too seriously, and they're beginning to do experiments. If a scientist does a bad experiment, they get called out.
00:47:35
joseph ledoux
If a philosopher does a bad experiment, they're just kind of ignored because it's just philosophy. um But the there are a lot of philosophers now that are taking on scientific problems. um And I'm sure you've heard of qualia in the philosophical sense of what it's like to be conscious.
00:47:55
joseph ledoux
not a physical product of the brain um and so that's why he calls consciousness the hard problem because but if it's dualistic it's not part of the brain you'll never solve it.
00:48:08
joseph ledoux
But he has encouraged neuroscientists to go looking for his hard problem in the brain. And so scientists are looking, trying to find this thing that he says doesn't exist. But they're looking because he's told them that it's in the brain. So it's it's very complicated. um And you know he's ah he's a very, very smart person, very brilliant.
00:48:31
joseph ledoux
but His perspective is different than that of a scientist, and we need to we do need some borders between the disciplines because things can change in a bad way that way.
00:48:45
Liev Dalton
Yeah, well put great point.
00:48:45
joseph ledoux
There are a lot of theories like ah that that are panpsychic. that consciousness is everywhere in the universe. you know So that has lots of implications. For example, um you know there's a there's always a debate in society about whether a fetus is conscious, but in panpsychism, even a rock is conscious to some extent.
00:49:08
joseph ledoux
Your iPhone is conscious, stars are conscious.
00:49:11
Liev Dalton
Sure.
00:49:12
joseph ledoux
So that, Is that what we're talking about with a conscious fetus or are we talking about the other stuff? I mean, how far do we go with these things? The other problem with panpsychism, it's one step from pantheism. If if consciousness is everywhere,
00:49:32
joseph ledoux
It's one step to God is everywhere. And that becomes the ruling law of the land in a sense. I mean, I'm really concerned about what's going to happen in my country next week with elections um and what the implications are going to be for the kind of just society that we had been working on for so long.
00:49:39
Liev Dalton
Yeah.
00:49:53
Liev Dalton
Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Yeah. And for me, you know, I think it, I think we, I think we need to take our power as individuals, do what we can.
Conclusion and Engagement Encouragement
00:50:07
Liev Dalton
Um, and I think that starts with healing. I think that starts with becoming the best version of ourselves. And, um, yeah, I think that's, that's really important. And that's why I think this, this discussion is so important. Um,
00:50:21
Liev Dalton
Maybe I could get, uh, any final thoughts on the, on the episode, anything about emotions, limbic system, uh, anything that you want to add, anything that you think you might've missed.
00:50:30
joseph ledoux
Oh, I think I kind of covered it all.
00:50:33
Liev Dalton
I think we did. All right.
00:50:34
joseph ledoux
I think I covered everything I wanted to say, and I really appreciate you having me and talking with you. I like the your approach, and yeah good luck with your podcast.
00:50:45
Liev Dalton
appreciate Appreciate it very much. Where can the listeners learn more from you about you? How can they support you?
00:50:51
joseph ledoux
OK, that can go to joseph-ladoo.com. and I'll be there. I have a dual career. I'm also a musician. I have a band called the Amygdaloids. You can find the Amygdaloids on their YouTube channel, the Amygdaloids YouTube, lots of videos, lots of music. I've got one video on there called Fearing. It's based on fear and anxiety. and based on an Emily Dickinson poem, actually. It's got almost 100,000 views. Bring us over the 100,000 more by watching Fury.
00:51:28
Liev Dalton
Amazing. Wow. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. We'll put some links down below. I think that's so cool too, that you, yeah you're a musician too. I think that is such ah a very healing thing, um engaging in arts and stuff like that. So.
00:51:41
Liev Dalton
Anyways, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate all the wisdom that you've had to share. Um, yeah, this has been great. Thank you.
00:51:48
joseph ledoux
Thank you.
00:51:50
Liev Dalton
Great. I want to thank you all for listening. You should all know that this is not medical advice or psychotherapeutic advice of any kind. This is for your informational purposes only. Uh, but also remember that we're all responsible, sovereign beings, capable of thinking, criticizing and understanding absolutely anything.
00:52:03
Liev Dalton
Uh, we, the people in greater forces are together, self healers, self-governable self teachers, and so much more. Please reach out if you have any questions, criticism, comments, concerns, whatever it may be. You can find me on Instagram. Really appreciate all your comments on the episodes. Really love chatting with you guys. You guys are truly amazing and you give some great support. So if you want to support us even further, give us a like, a comment, a review would be great if you're on the podcast and platforms. ah Those are definitely great ways to help us grow, but sharing is always the best way to get this message out there.
00:52:34
Liev Dalton
Let's remember folks that there are two types of people in the world. Those believe they can, those believe they can't, and they are both correct. Thanks for listening guys. Take care.