What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.

One of the principal researchers profiled in Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, LeDoux is a leading authority in the field of neural science. In this provocative book, he explores the brain mechanisms underlying our emotions -- mechanisms that are only now being revealed.

In 1996 Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain presented a revelatory examination of the biological bases of our emotions and memories. Now, the world-renowned expert on the brain has produced with a groundbreaking work that tells a more profound story: how the little spaces between the neurons--the brain's synapses--are the channels through which we think, act, imagine, feel, and remember. Synapses encode the essence of personality, enabling each of us to function as a distinctive, integrated individual from moment to moment. Exploring the functioning of memory, the synaptic basis of mental illness and drug addiction, and the mechanism of self-awareness, Synaptic Self is a provocative and mind-expanding work that is destined to become a classic.

A rigorous, in-depth guide to the history, philosophy, and scientific exploration of this widespread emotional state . . . LeDoux] offers a magisterial review of the role of mind and brain in the generation of unconscious defense responses and consciously expressed anxiety. . . . His] charming personal asides give an impression of having a conversation with a world expert. --Nature

A comprehensive and accessible exploration of anxiety, from a leading neuroscientist and the author of Synaptic Self

Collectively, anxiety disorders are our most prevalent psychiatric problem, affecting about forty million adults in the United States. In Anxious, Joseph LeDoux, whose NYU lab has been at the forefront of research efforts to understand and treat fear and anxiety, explains the range of these disorders, their origins, and discoveries that can restore sufferers to normalcy.

LeDoux's groundbreaking premise is that we've been thinking about fear and anxiety in the wrong way. These are not innate states waiting to be unleashed from the brain, but experiences that we assemble cognitively. Treatment of these problems must address both their conscious manifestations and underlying non-conscious processes. While knowledge about how the brain works will help us discover new drugs, LeDoux argues that the greatest breakthroughs may come from using brain research to help reshape psychotherapy.

A major work on one of our most pressing mental health issues, Anxious explains the science behind fear and anxiety disorders.

Praise for Anxious

Anxious] helps to explain and prevent the kinds of debilitating anxieties all of us face in this increasingly stressful world. --Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain on Music

A careful tour through the current neuroscience of fear and anxiety . . . Anxious] will reward the informed reader. --The Wall Street Journal

An extraordinarily ambitious, provocative, challenging, and important book. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience (including work in his own laboratory), LeDoux provides explanations of the origins, nature, and impact of fear and anxiety disorders. --Psychology Today

Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today

Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human.

In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.

Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today

Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human.

In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.

The second edition of the book Rock Music and Psychoanalysis was published after the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic. Pandemic, as writes Heather Ferguson, has brought the world to its knees, leaving massive unemployment, hunger, loss, and death in its wake, disproportionately affecting people of color and poor communities world-wide. The pandemic has perturbed our ways of going-on-being, forcing social inequities into the spotlight. In our consultation rooms, we wonder how our social and psychic worlds will be altered, irrevocably, creating opportunities for revitalization, reorder, or a return to the status quo. Pandemic has affected both psychoanalytic practice and rock music playing. Both psychoanalysts and musicians have to practise through telematic platforms. Some authors of this book are analysts (such as Lewis Aron, Heather Ferguson, Giuseppe Leo and John Shaw) who play rock or pop music. Not all the contributors to this book are psychoanalysts: Joseph LeDoux is an influential neuroscientist, whose investigations have become precious clues for psychoanalysis, plus he is the founder of the band Amygdaloids; and Rod Tweedy is an essayist and editor whose chapter deals with David Bowie. However, their interests show that music, and pop/rock music in particular, have constantly oriented their scientific output. The book is dedicated to the memory of Lewis Aron with a tribute to him written by John Shaw.

In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux revealed the neural circuit of pain, and then used it as a model to study the neural foundations of the emotions. In The Synaptic Brain, he carries on his study and delves into the cellular interconnections of the emotional circuits, i.e. the synapses, the areas between neurons that chemical and electric signals travel across. This fundamental search leads Stern to ask a profound question: How are our personalities constituted? What maintains their endurance through time, in spite of all the life changes that we choose or are subjected to? We think, act, memorise and feel through our synapses, and they in turn determine our preferences and beliefs, thus defining our most intimate selves and enabling us to act as unique, differentiated iedividuals.LeDoux shows how neurons shape experience and how experience, through the learning process, determines the neuron network. Fear, for example, is both innate and learned. A rat will freeze at the sight of its very first rat ? but it can also be taught to freeze when there's no rat in sight. The synaptic interconnections are established by our personal experiences and, in this sense, we fashion our own brains, we create our own personalities.Joseph LeDoux is a professor at the Center for Neural Science, New York University. He is regarded as one of the world's foremost specialists in the neurosciences. His 1996 book, The Emotional Brain, has already become a classic in its field.

The field of gene therapy has undergone remarkable advances, promising to impact human healthcare significantly in the twenty-first century. In this first volume of Gene Therapy Protocols: Production and In Vivo Applications of Gene Transfer Vectors, readers will find a comprehensive resource of current and emerging methods for the production of viral and non-viral gene transfer vectors, as well as detailed protocols for critical applications in stem cell biology, cancer, diabetes, HIV and tissue engineering. This first volume of the new and completely revised third edition of Gene Therapy Protocols will prove a necessary tool for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and invaluable to basic and clinical researchers in both industry and academia.

The field of gene therapy has undergone remarkable advances, promising to impact human healthcare significantly in the twenty-first century. In this first volume of Gene Therapy Protocols: Production and In Vivo Applications of Gene Transfer Vectors, readers will find a comprehensive resource of current and emerging methods for the production of viral and non-viral gene transfer vectors, as well as detailed protocols for critical applications in stem cell biology, cancer, diabetes, HIV and tissue engineering. This first volume of the new and completely revised third edition of Gene Therapy Protocols will prove a necessary tool for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and invaluable to basic and clinical researchers in both industry and academia.

In Gene Therapy Protocols, Volumes 1 and 2, internationally recognized investigators describe cutting-edge laboratory techniques for the study of Production and In Vivo Applications of Gene Transfer Vectors (Volume 1) and Design and Characterization of Gene Transfer Vectors (Volume 2). This second volume of the new and completely revised third edition will prove a necessary tool for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and invaluable to basic and clinical researchers in both industry and academia. Readers will find a comprehensive resource of current and emerging methods for the processing and characterization of viral and non-viral gene transfer vectors, as well as promising approaches to design vectors for efficient, targeted and regulated gene delivery and expression.

In Gene Therapy Protocols, Volumes 1 and 2, internationally recognized investigators describe cutting-edge laboratory techniques for the study of Production and In Vivo Applications of Gene Transfer Vectors (Volume 1) and Design and Characterization of Gene Transfer Vectors (Volume 2). This second volume of the new and completely revised third edition will prove a necessary tool for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and invaluable to basic and clinical researchers in both industry and academia. Readers will find a comprehensive resource of current and emerging methods for the processing and characterization of viral and non-viral gene transfer vectors, as well as promising approaches to design vectors for efficient, targeted and regulated gene delivery and expression.