Discover the Best Books Written by Joseph LeDoux

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 is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University and director of the Emotional Brain Institute, a collaboration between NYU and New York State with research sites at NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the band The Amygdaloids.

As explained in his 1996 book, The Emotional Brain, LeDoux developed an interest in the topic of emotion through his doctoral work with Michael Gazzaniga on split-brain patients in the mid-1970s. Because techniques for studying the human brain were limited at the time, he turned to studies of rodents where the brain could be studied in detail. He chose to focus on a simple behavioral model, Pavlovian fear conditioning. 

This procedure allowed him to follow the flow of information about a stimulus through the brain as it comes to controlling behavioral responses by way of sensory pathways to the amygdala. It gave rise to the notion of two sensory roads to the amygdala, with the "low road" being a quick and dirty subcortical pathway for rapid activity behavioral responses to threats and the "high road" providing slower but highly processed cortical information. 

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. 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.

LeDoux's work on amygdala processing of threats has helped understand exaggerated responses to threats in anxiety disorders in humans. For example, studies with Maria Morgan in the 1990s implicated the medial prefrontal cortex in the extinction of responses to threats. They paved the way for understanding how exposure therapy reduces threat reactions in people with anxiety by way of interactions between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. 

Work conducted with Karim Nader and Glenn Schafe triggered a wave of interest in the topic of memory reconsolidation, a process by which memories become labile and subject to change after being retrieved. This led to the idea that trauma-related cues might be weakened in humans by blocking reconsolidation. Studies with Marie Monfils, Daniela Schiller, and Phelps showed that extinction conducted shortly after triggering reconsolidation is considerably more effective in reducing the threat value of stimuli than conventional extinction. This finding has proven useful in reducing drug relapse in humans.

LeDoux has received a number of awards, including the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, the Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science, the Jean Louis Signoret Prize of the IPSEN Foundation, the Santiago Grisolia Prize, the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and the American Psychological Association Donald O. Hebb Award. 

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a William James Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.