Joseph E. LeDoux (born December 7, 1949) is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety.
LeDoux attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge where he majored in Business Administration and minored in Psychology.
In high school, he was a disc jockey at the local radio station, KEUN, and the rhythm guitarist of two bands: the Deadbeats and the Countdowns.
In the fall of 1974 LeDoux began a PhD program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and completed his degree in 1977.
In 1978, LeDoux joined the Department of Neurology at Cornell Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow and remained there through the rank of associate professor until 1989.
During most of his time at Cornell, he worked in the Neurobiology Laboratory where he received technical training in state-of-the-art neuroscience techniques and began the research program on the brain mechanism of emotional memory that he has pursued ever since.
The band's lyrics, mostly written by LeDoux, are based on neuroscientific, psychological, and philosophical themes, and offer scholarly insights into the role of mind and brain in daily life.
They play regularly in New York City, and have also performed in Washington DC, San Antonio TX, Indianapolis IN, Lafayette LA, and Montreal.
[4] His work has shed light on how the brain detects and responds to threats, and how memories about such experiences are formed and stored through cellular, synaptic and molecular changes in the amygdala.
[5] A long-standing collaboration with NYU colleague Elizabeth Phelps has shown the validity of the rodent work for understanding threat processing in the human brain.
"[18] In 2018 he wrote that the amygdala may release hormones due to a trigger (such as an innate reaction to seeing a snake), but "then we elaborate it through cognitive and conscious processes".
[citation needed] In addition to numerous publications in scholarly journals, LeDoux has written: He has edited several volumes, including Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuroscience (with William Hirst, Cambridge University Press, 1986), The Self: From Soul to Brain (with Jacek Debiec and Henry Moss, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 2003), and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Basic Science and Clinical Practice (with Peter Shiromani and Terrence Keane, Humana Press, 2009).
He has contributed to The New York Times Opinionator column on anxiety and to the Huffington Post, and has conducted numerous television, radio, online, and print interviews.