Stop Calling It Fear: It’s a Survival Reflex + A Story (Joseph LeDoux)

If you freeze to a snake at your feet that's walking through a field on a hike, all of a sudden you find yourself freezing, and then you see there's a snake there. So you didn't freeze because you were afraid, you froze because your amygdala detected danger. And then when you realize cognitively that you were in danger, you experience fear. That's the high road, taking information all the way to the prefrontal cortex where we cognitively assemble these states of fear and anxiety.

For decades, Dr. Joseph LeDoux has been at the absolute forefront of neuroscience, fundamentally altering our understanding of how the brain navigates fear and anxiety. As the director of the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU, his landmark discovery of the auditory low road shortcut to the amygdala put him on the map worldwide, revealing that our brains are wired to detect and react to threat long before we ever consciously perceive it. In this conversation, we explore the deep evolutionary history of danger, the profound difference between a survival response and a felt emotion, and how understanding yourself as a narrative memory network gives you the ultimate power to rewrite your own story.

My name is Dr. Fleet Maull, your co-host for this session, and I'm thrilled to be here today with Dr. Joseph Ledoux. Welcome.

Hi, thank you very much.

Oh, it's great to have you. I was reading a bit about you in various sources and your whole history with music, having grown up in Louisiana with the Cajun zydeco music and so forth.

Oh yeah, that's my roots. Not so much zydeco. I mean, I grew up in French, you know, the zydeco was the Black music and the traditional Cajun music was the white music. But now it's all kind of blended together. And so there's a lot of zydeco and Cajun kind of influences across the board. And it's wonderful music. As a kid, I didn't love it because, you know, it was kind of old man's music in a sense. And the Beatles had just arrived. So I was much more interested in that, but I've come to embrace it and love Cajun music now.

Wow, wonderful. So your research has really been dedicated to understanding fear and anxiety at the most basic level, and I'm wondering if there's any connection between that and your personal life, or if you've had moments of fear and anxiety that maybe influenced your work and your career, or even just a basic question, what led you in the direction from your roots in Louisiana to becoming a neuroscientist?

Okay, well that may take our whole story or time of the whole story here to tell that story. You know, when you ask about a personal experience, I always go back to one that happened when I was a very young child. My father ran a meat market and we lived above it. This is in Eunice, Louisiana, bayou country, and there are a lot of bayous and, you know, rivers and lakes around there. And one of the guys that worked in the market would sometimes take me fishing somewhere. And so I was probably like 6 or 7 years old and the guy took me to this bayou ledge to fish. And when we got there, the entire area of land on that side of the bayou was covered with water moccasins, slithering snakes. In my juvenile mind, young mind, I think there must have been thousands there. Maybe there were, you know, 20, but it seemed like 1,000 to me at the time. And I never got over that. I've had fear of snakes all my life. I mean, it's gotten better living in New York and I don't encounter many snakes. We have a house in upstate New York, and there are some snakes around there. But I kind of gotten over it over the years. But that is one thing that has stuck with me for a long time. Now, how did I get into neuroscience? Well, it was a perfectly reasonable pathway. I had an undergraduate degree in business administration from Louisiana State University. I then got a master's degree in marketing. And while taking the marketing class, this was late '60s and wasn't that cool to be involved in marketing, you know, so, but I was interested in psychology because it seemed much more interesting than marketing itself. And also relevant to marketing. So I signed up for a course called Learning and Motivation by a fellow named Robert Thompson. And it turns out that it was, had nothing to do with consumer behavior, nothing to do with humans. The guy was studying rat brains and memory. And, you know, I had no idea you could do that. And so I kind of just said, can I work in your lab? So I worked in his lab, applied to graduate school, and remarkably, I got in one graduate school, which is State University of New York at Stony Brook. Because somebody there knew the guy that I had spent a little time with at LSU. So I ended up at Stony Brook and started working with Mike Gazzaniga on split-brain patients. Mike had made split-brain patients famous in the '60s at Caltech, and we had a new group of patients. So I did my PhD studying consciousness in split-brain patients. So from within less than 4 years after leaving marketing, I had a PhD studying consciousness in split-brain patients. And Michael and I actually wrote a book on these patients that we'd studied called The Integrated Mind. And one of the features of that book was the idea that we humans are constantly explaining our behavior. This was based on a split-brain patient who's— I don't know if you know what this is, but it's a patient who's had epilepsy and the brain has been split in half to prevent the seizures from bouncing back and forth. You know, it was a useful technique back then when medications were not so good. But this patient was very— he revealed something to Mike and me while we were doing these studies. We would present stimuli to one hemisphere or the other. But the bottom line is that the left hemisphere in a split-brain patient can talk to you because language is usually there. The right hemisphere can't talk, but the question is, you know, what could it do? Well, it was able to respond to stimuli that it saw, the right hemisphere saw, by the left hand pointing pointing to the appropriate picture that matched it. And so we asked, when we presented stimuli to the right hemisphere and it pointed to the thing it saw, we asked the left hemisphere, "Why did you do that?" And the left hemisphere would always make up an explanation that would make sense. So like if there was a picture of an apple and the right hemisphere had been shown an apple and the left hand points to the apple and you ask the left hemisphere, "Why did you do that? Why did your body do that?" He said, "Well, you know, I saw, maybe he didn't have an apple, but a kind of a ball. So he said, I saw a round thing, so I pointed to the ball. So the left hemisphere is talking about what the left hand is doing, which is controlled by the right hemisphere. So the point was that he made up a story to make his behavior make sense to him mentally. He generated a narrative. And ever since that night in Vermont where we were testing this patient in a camper trailer, which we turned into a lab, Ever since that night, I have been trying to understand how the mind consciously allows us to make sense of our lives. So I decided emotional behaviors might be the kinds of behaviors that might require these kind of dissonance-reducing narratives to give us this sense of mental unity. So we do all kinds of things, like I'm waving my hands here. We do all kinds of things unconsciously, non-consciously, that don't matter very much. But sometimes we see things that cause cognitive dissonance that we're doing unconsciously. And we have to generate a narrative to explain that to ourselves. So for example, let's say you're having an argument with your partner and you see that awful thing is about to come out that you're going to say, you know it's coming, you know it's coming. This is all happening in microseconds. You know it's coming. And then you either stop it or it happens. If it happens, then you're you know, you've caused more trouble than you were in already from the argument. But the point is that the next day you would then have to generate a new narrative and apologize. And so the idea was that these emotional behaviors are the kinds of things that might be— that we might need these conscious explanations for. So I decided I was going to study emotions. And at the time, there wasn't a lot of research on emotion. This was in the late '70s, early '80s. And I decided there were no good techniques for studying the human brain and studying emotion. No PET scans or MRIs or anything like that. You just had to do a neurological exam on the patient and judge what he was doing behaviorally to get anything done. So the bottom line is that the— I turned to studies of rodents because I assumed that the neural systems that control emotional behavior in rodents was very similar to what is controlling emotional behavior in us. You know, the idea of the limbic system was popular then. It's something I no longer really believe in or think is real. But that's a whole nother story. But anyway, that, that took me to, to that assumption that the human limbic areas and the rodent limbic areas would be very similar. I started studying rodents using a procedure called Pavlovian conditioning, Pavlovian fear conditioning, where you give the rat a tone, pair it with a shock, and then the rat freezes and its blood pressure and heart rate go up. Same thing happens to us if we encounter a danger. We freeze and our blood pressure and heart rate go up. So, you know, I wasn't interested in fear. I was interested in emotion in general. But the fear conditioning paradigm seemed like a good way to study that in an animal. So for the longest time, for several years, I never talked about it as fear conditioning so much as emotional conditioning. And at the time, I had fortunately landed in a lab at Cornell Medical School in New York where every technique known to neuroscience was available at that point in that lab. So I spent a year trying to learn some neuroanatomy to pursue these Pavlovian fear conditioning circuits in the brain. I spent another year trying to learn the electrophysiological procedures for recording neural activity in the brain of a rodent. I spent some time trying to understand some molecular techniques for pursuing the cellular molecular mechanisms underlying this kind of learning. Now, fortunately for me, since I had no training at all, really, in in any of this stuff. I just landed into a spot where I could get training, on-the-job training. It was in a neurobiology lab, which meant that there wasn't a lot of research going on in these big, fancy neurobiology labs on behavior. It was all about cellular and molecular mechanisms. And so many of the people studying behavior, especially like Pavlovian conditioning and so forth, had no access to any of these techniques. So here I am, a total novice being handed all these techniques, and I was able to just— it was like a neuroscience candy store. Just go do what— anything you wanted to do was there in that thing. So within a few short years, I was able to map those pathways from the tone that is paired with the shock. The tone goes into the ear and it goes into the brain, activates certain areas of the brain, and then you get these behavioral and physiological responses that flow out. So this became the work that I did, and one of the very first discoveries turned out to be very important. So the auditory system in the brain carries information from the ear to the cerebral cortex where we have this part of the brain called the auditory cortex. And, you know, we have a visual cortex, we have a cortex for every kind of sensory system. And so the lower level pathways from the sensory inputs, like the eyes or the ears, takes that information to the cortex. So in the case of the auditory cortex, and in the visual, it was assumed that anything meaningful in life would have to be be processed by the cortex in order for it to be a significant response. Like an emotional response to a tone would have to go through the auditory cortex and then go to some limbic area, for example. But I wasn't looking for the limbic system or anything. I was just like, okay, I was going to follow the auditory stimulus all the way through the brain. So I made lesions in all of the auditory areas, just in different groups of animals. And the only lesion that had an effect— well, the lesions that had effect were the lower ones. So it's coming in from the ear, going up to the thalamus, and from the thalamus to the cortex. When I lesioned the auditory cortex, it had no effect on conditioning. So the animals could indeed learn something significant without having to use the auditory cortex. But how did they do that? If we lesioned the auditory thalamus, they couldn't learn the conditioning anymore. And so we used these tracer techniques to put a chemical in the thalamus that would then tell us where are all the connections of the thalamus in the brain. Obviously, there were connections to the auditory cortex from the auditory thalamus, but that's not— the lesion study said that's not what's causing the behavior. So we lesioned the auditory thalamus, and we looked at the connections of the auditory thalamus, not just to the auditory cortex, but also other areas. And one of the areas that was innervated, in other words, had connections from the auditory thalamus, was the amygdala. Now, you know, I didn't know much about the amygdala back then. Yeah, it was a limbic area and so forth. But what it was telling me was that the sound was going into the brain through the auditory system and it didn't have to go to the cortex. It had to go to the thalamus and then directly to the amygdala. It also went to the cortex for a more complex kind of situation. But with a pure tone, you could activate the amygdala directly. It took 7 milliseconds. That's fast. 7 milliseconds to get from the ear to the amygdala and then produce the response. So why was that important? Well, I did all this work at Cornell, as I said, and as a result of that, I was offered a job at NYU, which is where I have been since 1989. And the week before I arrived at NYU, Daniel Goleman, who was known for his work on emotional intelligence and wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, had been doing research for that book and stumbled across my this auditory shortcut to the amygdala that would allow us to respond rapidly before we even consciously know with our cortex what it is we're responding to. And so he wrote an article in the New York Times called "Brain's Design Emerges as the Key to Emotion." And so that really put me on the map, not just with other scientists, but also with laypeople. And it led to my book, The Emotional Brain. It also was a big part of Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence. I was all over the first 3 chapters of that book. Of that book and his idea of an emotional hijack and all of that, all based on my work. You know, I sometimes say that, and I think it's true, that my career would not be what it is without Goleman's, and Goleman's wouldn't have been what it was without my research.

Very interesting. Actually, when I was preparing for this interview, I read his books a long time ago, but I hadn't made the connection. And I know Danny Goleman, and I was wondering, well, is that, is the amygdala hijack idea from Goleman, does that hold up in Ledoux's work? And I didn't realize that there Internally connected. So what you're pointing to, I think anyway, I know you've spoken, written about this idea of there's kind of a low road of threat response, which is this more direct route to the amygdala. There's a higher road that involves more cognitive, more neurological, more cognitive processing and involves more what we maybe experience as emotions. So I wonder in terms of how we experience as humans experience threat, fear, and anxiety, if you could make that distinction between maybe a threat response that's perhaps purely neurological and then what we think of as more elaborated fear and anxiety that is what we mostly tend to experience.

Yeah, I mean, you know, fear and anxiety are as neurological as a threat response. It's all in the brain, right? It's not somewhere out there. But yeah, so my work, basically my work and work of a couple other people, there weren't many people no studying emotion at that time, I just have to say. And when I wrote my first grant for NIH on emotion, the grant was rejected because neuroscientists do not study emotions. It was like a kind of, you know, like you can't do that in neuroscience, you know? But I, you know, I persisted and changed the title of the grant and ended up getting the grant. But all of this took me to the amygdala. And, you know, everybody knows the amygdala now, but in 1985 when I started doing this, '84, whenever it was, the amygdala was not on the screen of most But it got on the screen. It became well-known as the brain's fear center, and I'm partly responsible for that. So over the years, I had to make amends for having kind of put that meme out into the culture. I mean, it wasn't just me, but my book, The Emotional Brain, had a big role in kind of introducing the whole idea of the amygdala fear center. And so I was, you know, I do feel kind of guilty about that because You know, from the split-brain days, my idea was that the things we were doing unconsciously, like for example, if you freeze to a snake at your feet that's walking through a field on a hike, all of a sudden you find yourself freezing, and then you see there's a snake there. So that's the low-road acting. You're freezing because your brain has automatically detected danger and causes you to freeze. That's an evolutionarily learned kind of response. And so the experience of fear is secondary to that, right? You didn't freeze because you were afraid. You froze because your amygdala detected danger. And then when you realized cognitively that you were in danger, you experienced fear. So that's the high road, taking information all the way to the prefrontal cortex where we cognitively assemble these states of fear and anxiety.

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Oh, this low road of our brain picks up on a potential threat even before we're sort of consciously aware of it, I guess. Right. And does that relate to what sometimes we hear about the notion of neuroception? And does that happen through the five senses or is the nervous system itself able to sense or detect danger or fear in some way independent of a particular sense or is it a combination of the five senses?

Well, so, you know, it depends on the circumstances, right? You're walking through a field and you find yourself freezing. That is the sight of a shape on the ground that, you know, is snake-like. And so you're freezing. But it could also be a stick on the ground. And I've gotten many pictures by, you know, talk about the snake and the stick. And many people have sent me pictures of where they have frozen and found themselves freezing to a stick and sent me pictures of the sticks they were freezing to, like just kind of a curvy shape. It's kind of an evolutionarily wired thing, you know, so to speak. You know, I think that that, you know, our ancestors, our primate ancestors were predated upon by snakes and they had built up some kind of feature detectors for snakes. So in that case, it's not a whole brain thing. It's a visual stimulus that's causing you to respond. Or it might be the sound of something. You're walking through a dark alley and all of a sudden you hear a noise and that sound causes you to freeze. It goes through your ear and goes to the amygdala. It's all going through the amygdala, no matter what it is, you know, in terms of danger like But the amygdala is not fear. The amygdala is threat detection. Now this goes back, you could say, why don't I call it fear? You know, well, if I wrote a book called The Deep History of Ourselves, the 4 billion year story of how we got conscious brains, in which I decided to trace the evolutionary history of danger as far back as I could. And so I went back to the, you know, all the ancestors, vertebrate ancestors we have, fish and so forth. Earth. I respond to danger. Their ancestors responded to danger. You got to go all the way back to 630 million years ago. That's the branch where, like, insects and octopus and all those things that are not vertebrates evolved. And the vertebrates evolved 30 million years ago is where they split. So that animal that gave rise to both of those lines was a flatworm, very simple thing that had a collection of neurons in the front of its brain, in front of its head, that those neurons were its brain. And it was able to control its bodily movements with that brain, but that was very primitive. Now, that creature evolved from what is now present-day jellyfish, or that sort of phyla of animal, where there was no collection of neurons in the front of the head or anything, because a jellyfish is circular. It doesn't have a front and a back. It doesn't have a left and a right. It's circular. And so it doesn't have a collection of neurons that protects it by being in the front. You know, if you put all your neurons in the front and you're an animal that can run away, then it's okay to lose your tail as long as you don't lose your brain, right? So if the predator chops off your tail, you're still going to be alive and functional and have a brain that's working. But if it chops off your head, And nothing you can do about it. So the jellyfish didn't have that feature. Its neurons are just distributed all over its, you know, the kind of dome that the jellyfish has. But it was able to detect and respond to danger with that. Now, the ancestors of jellyfish were like sponge-like animals. And all of these animals I've told you about have what's called synaptic plasticity molecules. They have the ability to learn. And to learn behaviors in a very primitive way, like Pavlovian conditioning, stimulus-response learning. And they all use the same kinds of molecules, enzymes in the brain that store memories. Now, the last group that I mentioned was sponges. So they have these molecules, but they don't have a nervous system. So what are they doing with synaptic plasticity molecules? Now let's ask that one step back. So the ancestors of all animals from sponges on were single-cell, protozoa. These are, you know, things that go into your gut and give you all kinds of problems. There's good bacteria and bad. It's not a bacteria, it's a protozoa. So it's the kind of thing that you get infections from and, you know, similar to bacteria, but it's not. So these protozoa also have these synaptic plasticity molecules. And protozoa is a single cell, so it doesn't have a nervous system, doesn't have any system. It has one cell with a membrane around it that allows it to go into the water and it's in the water, we go and move around in the water. Detect danger and move away from it, detect nutrients and move towards it. Now that goes back to some, you know, 2 billion years ago. And before that were bacteria. And that goes back to the beginning. So to the very beginning of life, 3.7 billion years ago, you have bacterial cells that learn, that figure out, they don't figure out, they evolve the capacity to do two things. One is to detect danger and the other is to detect nutrients. So they have to, you know, to put it in human terms, they're hungry, so they have to eat, and they're fearful, so they have to respond to danger. But there's no hunger and there's no fear. This is a single-cell bacterial cell that lived, you know, 3.7 billion years ago, that through a series of accidental evolutionary steps lived long enough to divide in half. And when it divided in half, then that was the beginning of all of life from that one cell. Every cell that has ever lived since, from that mother cell, so to speak. So this idea about danger, it goes back to the beginning of life. As soon as there was life, there was danger. It's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. And he meant it in terms of a child, but it's true for all of life. So there's all these things that we talk about in terms of danger are in us because those bacterial cells 3.7 billion years ago had that capacity. So that's why we freeze to the snake and jump to the sound and so forth. Not because we're afraid. Fear is something we've added to that whole process very late in evolution.

And we know, obviously, just again, the example of snakes, some people are fairly afraid of snakes. I used to play with them when I was a kid, but I think as I've gotten older, I'm less—

You went in the opposite direction of me.

Yeah, yeah. I was, lived in South America for a while where there were quite a few very nasty snakes. So I developed a strong caution, but we know there are people that have literally almost no fear of snakes and can handle snakes and so forth. So the fear is separate from the threat response. In terms of, this seems very important in terms of our summit, in terms of, you know, helping people navigate their experience of fear and anxiety and the ways in which that can become debilitating for many people. Yeah. So as you're describing it, fear at least is really baked into the human condition at the cellular level. The response to danger, which is a survival response, right? That's pretty much baked into the human condition.

Into life, all of life.

In all of life.

A tree has to, you know, do things to protect itself. Not that it has a capacity to move fast, but the roots have to find, you know, the right places to live, and otherwise it's not protected.

So where's the access point, or many perhaps, where this natural survival instinct is part of life that can then, and maybe it's a completely separate thing or maybe they're connected, then can elaborate into the emotions of fear and anxiety, which can become habitual and conditioned and can become related to traumatic memories and become quite debilitating. But at the same time, it's not like we're ever gonna be free of the survival response or free of the hunger response. So how does that point to how we work with this just ourselves and, you know, the normal way most human beings work with it?

Yeah.

Or how we work with it therapeutically where it's become debilitating for people.

So, you know, the, I guess the first point is that, you know, we often hear that fear is, and anxiety are useful things, right? But let's step back and let's see what's really useful. What's really useful are these innate survival responses. That is not fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety are conditions that we assemble in our brains. I'm gonna jump ahead. I'm gonna skip the whole evolutionary thing here and go into humans. And I'm gonna talk about— let's just take the word fear. And we know that that word is present across perhaps probably all cultures that are alive, that have ever lived, because danger is such a primitive aspect of life. And so if you're going to have an emotion, if you're going to construct an emotion, it's got to be about danger. That's got to be one of the primary— danger and also the ability to maintain metabolism. Those are the two key things. You have to stay alive by detecting and responding to danger, and you have to stay alive by finding food and keeping metabolism going to keep your body alive. So those are two things that have to go together. But that has nothing to do with fear. That's— these are the survival responses. Now, we have that word fear where we, you know, you pick a culture and it's there in their language. And we assume because the word is universal that the emotion is universal. And that is wrong. Let's say your life in South America. Do you feel that there's a slightly different perspective on fear where you grew up as opposed to in, say, New York or the United States?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, we know that emotions vary a lot across cultures. A lot of our emotions, all of our emotions, I would say, are based on schema that we've learned in the process of growing up in a culture. So, you know, schema is a body of, bodies of knowledge that we acquire in the process of becoming who we are. And so the experiences you have with fear in the context of your family, in the context of the culture in which you grew up. In other words, there are lots of layers that are affecting what kind of understanding what fear is to you. Your fear is different from everybody else's fear because you're the only one who went through that schema learning process of your fear. But because we have that word We think it's the same. And this is a problem, for example, at places like the UN, where the translation is sent from one country to another while the talk is going on. But what the person is saying when put into English or put into Russian or whatever, it's not the same thing, right? Because the subtlety of the nuance of the language is where all the important stuff that's happening at the UN is taking place. But that's not how, you know, you have to have a really good translator and I don't know how good they are, but it's hard to carry the nuance. So the point is that emotions are culturally, within a culture you acquire your emotions and within your family and you may have multiple families that through the course of your life, maybe your parents divorce. So you've got different kinds of situations that in which you are learning to be who you are. And I think that's true of all emotions. You know, you often hear about basic and social emotions, but I think all of them— there's no basic emotions. All emotions are cognitive interpretations of situations based on the schema that we've acquired in the process of learning what those emotions are. So we have all these survival responses that we think of as emotions because they go together in our minds. When you're running from the bear, you're afraid. Therefore, fear must be what caused you to run. But that's not true. The snake example shows that. That you don't freeze or run because you're afraid. You run. It's like what William James said, you know? We don't run from the bear 'cause we're afraid, because we run. I don't think that's exactly right, but it's very close to the point I'm making.

You've also, you've been quoted as saying, "No self, no fear." Now I'm curious about that. It depends on how we describe self, but if we think of self as basically a construct, so it's sort of a cognitive psychological construct that we create, and it doesn't have real existence, so it naturally might be, the underpinnings of it might be some trepidation, some insecurity about relying on building our whole life around this stuff that's simply a construct. And in your most recent book, you posited a different way of understanding ourselves and reality with these four realms of existence, biological, neurological, cognitive, and the final one being consciousness. And which I'm curious about that as well, whether being a neuroscientist and whether you're dealing with the hard problem of consciousness consciousness here in your work, but there's a hard problem. And so does that model provide us with a different way of being that might make us less prone to some kind of almost existential anxiety?

Mm-hmm. All right, well, first, the motto there is yourself is a story. It's a story that you tell yourself. And I've just written my memoir, which is all about that kind of stuff, but we'll save that for another day. It's not done yet, so it is basically— so yeah, so So in the deep history of ourselves, I said no self, no fear. In other words, you know, my views change in every book. And that's, you know, we change over time all the time. So I'm not ashamed to say that I've changed my mind. And that's what my memoir is all about. It's called Starting Over, just how all the times I've changed my mind about something. And scientists often don't change their minds. It's like down to the matter. The reason I can change my mind in science is because I didn't grow up indoctrinated in science. I just learned it myself in the process. George Martin, the Beatles producer, sort of said the same thing once. I saw, recently saw a documentary about him, and he said that when he went to music school, he felt like an outsider because he had never been indoctrinated into the world, the proper world of music. And, you know, he went on to be quite successful. And I've had some success in my life. I really think it's because I didn't have the indoctrination. That was driving. But anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, so the no self, no fear was about fear schema that would be required to— fear and self schema would be required to have that emotion. Because if you're not involved, then there's no emotion. But by self, I meant a very narrow thing. Again, it was the narration of who you are. And that wasn't necessarily that clear in the book. There was a lot about narration, but it's not just about It's not about the schema, the fear schema. It's about your understanding of the fear schema. The new book, The Four Realms of Existence, the motto there of yourself is a story is, I think, our whole lives, this is part of, we're acquiring these schema. And so these, the schema we acquire define who we are. There are lots of other ways to talk about self, which I tried to kind of put away in the book because many philosophers and scientists say that no one has ever seen a self. No one, the self is a fiction, it's made up. It's true. It's our fiction. But it's not something in there that is different from me. Myself is not some little person in there because I'm just me regardless. It's a layer that's been added that's unnecessary. It's who we are. And the only thing I think that's relevant about self is the narration. All the other stuff is important. It's useful as information about how the brain and mind work, but it's not really a self in there that's making you do, yourself is not making you do things. If you're doing something, it's you that's doing it. You know, you gotta own up to it and don't blame it on yourself. Yourself in the physical sense of something besides you.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. How might this change? So today, you know, I mean, there's always been threats to our survival and there's, you know, there's always been uncertainty in life. It seems like today a lot of people are experiencing a lot of uncertainty, political, economic uncertainty, climate anxiety, the fast pace of change of modern life, AI coming on, a lot of things. And there seems to be a lot of anxiety in the world and a lot of attempts to self-medicate it in all kinds of ways or psychiatrically medicate it or so forth. So how would this understanding of the distinction between the basic neurological survival survival mechanism versus the more elaborate neurological and cognitive process of emotion and fear and anxiety, this distinction you may just made about self, how might these understandings or insights help us better navigate whatever level of anxiety, fear we may be experiencing?

Auden had a poem, The Age of Anxiety in 1949, I think the year I was born. That's the year I was born, but I think that's when this book came out too. And, you know, students would always ask me, you know, say that, oh, our generation is the most anxious. I said, well, every generation thinks it's the most anxious. But now, today, I think there's no doubt that, well, I don't know, we may not necessarily be the most, we don't know how bad World War II was, at least we didn't live through it. But we're living through, you know, a hell right now, I think, in my personal opinion, with all this stuff going on. But to get to the question, you know, let's say that I'm correct that yourself is a narrative and that the things you learn as you go through life become part of that narrative, right? And your narrative changes, right? That changes all the time. So the good news is if your anxiety problem, your problem with anxiety, reflects a narrative about yourself that you have constructed, then the good news is that if you have a narrative, you can change that narrative. And, you know, that's not— I don't mean to oversimplify this. Someone who's been through some horrible, you know, trauma didn't narrate that for themselves. It just, you know, that's something that's been— was thrown upon them. That's not their fault that happened. I mean, sometimes we do things that are our fault and, you know, we have to deal with that as well. But I think the idea that we, you know, your program is rewriting, right? And I think that's what we have to do. We have to rewrite the narrative. And doesn't mean it's easy. And I know therapists are probably trying to do that all the time. But I'm coming at it from the point of view of the brain. I'm trying to reinforce that idea that the narrative is so important. Because, you know, and one narrative that we have these days is that, you know, we are anxious, we are schizophrenic, we are depressed. We are— we have autism. Those labels give you, unfortunately, a preset narrative that you automatically acquire, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to, you know, unravel yourself under that narrative. But the real narrative is your narrative, not the one that's been given to you. Yes, you may feel anxious. I feel anxious. You know, I do some meditation with a therapist that I know and like very much. We also play guitar together, and everybody has some anxiety, and it's just a matter of how far we go with it. But I think, you know, just, I'm trying to highlight the importance of the narrative and the whole process.

So what is, what do we understand about the relationship between the narrative, whatever narrative we've constructed and been somewhat a result of our influences, our conditioning, and then our own, whatever, whichever direction we've gone with constructing that, the relationship between that that and the neural architecture of our brain, and as we change the narrative through whatever process, through kind of some self-introspective understanding of wanting to change the narrative, we realize we can change the narrative, so we start creating a more adaptive narrative, or we do it therapeutically. For that to be then abiding, one would assume that there's a new narrative that's dominant, but is that actually reflected in the neural architecture and the neurological functioning of the brain then?

Well, a narrative is a A memory is a neural network that's been formed as a result of some experience and that has been modified by synaptic plasticity and so forth. So yeah, it's all in the brain. You know, the mind is in the brain. I'm a physicalist when it comes to consciousness and the mind. Other people are, you know, dualists and have influences from other spheres, but that's not science. So I'm sticking with the scientific point of view. View. You know, David Chalmers' hard problem. David is a colleague of mine at NYU. I like him. I know him. But I don't believe that the hard problem is a— I think that was a bad choice of words because the stuff he calls the easy problem is just the, you know, the basic neurobiological realm stuff that I talk about in the book. And the hard problem is just the perennial problem of consciousness. The easy problem has nothing to do with consciousness. It's all about these non-conscious, unconscious processes. The hard problem is just the consciousness problem. That doesn't make it easy, but there's kind of a straw man that was created in this whole thing. And you know, David is a dualist, so he believes that you can't drill down into the brain and find these mechanisms of consciousness. But you know, I'm a modest scientist. I believe we can find that kind of stuff.

So then the title of our show, Rewiring Fear and Anxiety. So you would say it's a valid analogy to talk about about both changing the narrative and rewiring the brain or reshaping our neural architecture. Those things are part and parcel. We're really talking about the same thing from different angles.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'd like to just say one thing. You know, at one point, I think it was in my book, Anxious, or maybe as a result of the book, I came up with this 3-step program that no one has really fallen attached to. But the basic idea, I'm talking from the point of view of what I know about the brain. Brain. So the basic idea is that, and every therapist does this, I'm sure, in one way or another, but I'm proposing a sequence in which it needs to be done. So I'm going to use 3 metaphors. One is the amygdala metaphor, one is the hippocampal metaphor, and one is the prefrontal cortex metaphor. So these are just an illustration. I think they have something to do with what I'm going to say, but it's not necessarily the answer is in those 3 metaphors, but it, because there's more to it. But the basic idea is that, you know, step one is you need to tame the amygdala if you're, let's say, an anxious person. So the amygdala is gonna be involved in controlling your physiological arousal, making you jittery, making you hyper-aroused, in other words. It's gonna be involved in your avoidance behaviors that prevent you from discovering whether you are still as afraid as you were when you started this all. But it's not gonna change change your who you are and your feelings of fear. For that, we have to take another step. So the second step is to turn to the hippocampus. I have to say, you have to do the— you don't do these things in the same session. Let's say you take a month on the amygdala. So now the person is less aroused and less tense and a little less avoidant. So they can approach the next step, which taming the hippocampus. In other words, beginning to rewrite their memories, rethinking the narrative without being jittery and, you know, tense. So if you can tame the amygdala, one way to do that would be with CBT, but not CBT with a lot of top-down talking and stuff. Just like a rat extinction experiment, you repeat the stimulus over and over again because if you start giving, if you have cognition interacting with all of that, the brain doesn't learn it as well, I think, as if you just do it routine. Just let the person think whatever they want, but kind of be trying to tame the amygdala with CBT, but also medications. That's where medications come in handy. They can change some of the behavioral and physiological symptoms, but there's no way a pill is going to change your feeling of fear. Your sense of fear is a sense of who you are. And so you have to do that in this other way by going to the hippocampus for a month and rewiring and re-narrating things.

On that personal point, isn't there also research demonstrating that mindfulness practices over time can actually shrink the amygdala somewhat or have them be less hypersensitive?

I would add that in the third step where you then have to maintain, right? None of this is gonna happen in a short time and be done. You're not gonna be fixed because there's nothing really broken. You're just trying to relearn who you are and who you wanna be. And you know, I'm not a therapist and I'm not saying this promoting anything, but I think therapy is probably a lifelong process if you want to main— if you're going to go through this kind of program and maintain— if you have success on those first two steps and you then can maintain it, I think you're going to be better off than if it's all pushed together at one time and, you know, the brain is a little confused about stuff. And again, I'm not a therapist, so just totally ignore what I'm saying if you don't like it.

Let me ask you something else from your perspective as a brain researcher and neuroscientist. So I'm a psychologist by training and a meditation teacher is probably the heart of what I do. And I've developed what I call neurosomatic mindfulness meditation, which I consider to be neuroscience-informed and trauma-informed and very deeply embodied at its basis and really designed to increase our access to interoception or interoceptive awareness. And so, and by developing greater interoceptive awareness of our bodily processes, do you feel like we can become have greater sort of consciousness of all these mechanisms you're talking about, both the low road and the high road, and therefore develop kind of a, you know, in my sense, it's almost like we're accessing over time an internal neurobiofeedback loop, which is our nervous system or brain is then learning how to self-move from intentional self-regulation to kind of almost a capacity for autoregulation just by learning at this deeper level of embodiment. I'm just curious what your thoughts about that from your research.

Yeah, so I would say that fits nicely in step 1, Step 1, the amygdala is not the only thing involved. So definitely, you know, the ability to introspect and know your body is a very important thing. I wish I did more of that myself. My body's always like doing things to me. Probably about my age too, right? I mean, the point is, I guess, yes, that is, I'm giving you 3 things, but this is another thing that maybe can go in thing 1 or maybe separate. Expert, you know. But I think all of these are, those are great ideas. And, you know, I really appreciate the time you put into getting into the essence of what my books were about and being able to ask me legitimate, good questions about what we've been talking about. 'Cause that doesn't always work that in an interview if they haven't figured out what they're gonna talk about and they don't understand where I'm coming from. So this has been great.

Well, I really have appreciated it too. And we're kind of near the end of our time, but I have one kind kind of final question. So we can, I don't know if you consider this lineage, but in terms of anxiety, we can kind of think of people experiencing sort of mental anxiety with a lot of looping thoughts and that kind of, or what we think of as emotional anxiety. I mentioned before, I think there can almost be a kind of an existential anxiety. And even when people get into deep states of meditation, there's this hum of, but then people experience anxiety in the body.

It's a bodily process.

So sometimes this question, you know, if it's mostly the narrative, if it's our narrative and not our fault, we're not saying it's our fault, but we've learned a narrative somehow, we've been conditioned into a narrative, we've picked up a narrative from our family, from our culture, and that narrative is exacerbating the experience of anxiety.

So in some ways saying that to a person, we're in some ways saying it's in your head, and by I mean more cognitively than biologically. And they're saying, no, you don't understand, I experienced this in my body, it's in my body. And they may feel like they're not being validated. So I'm just curious about your thoughts of how we communicate that.

So again, I would go back to that's, you know, what's going on in the, that's step one. Those are all these neurobiological processes that are not conscious, but that can be consciously noticed. And so when you consciously notice these bodily processes, you are anxious about them. If that's something that bothers you, if you like, let's say, have a family history of heart disease. And so every time there's a little something, you know, twitch of muscle in your chest, you become anxious because you have that history that you're interpreting on top of that. So the emotion is the interpretation. All of the body stuff are the underlying things that go back to, you know, the early, our earlier ancestors on and on back to the early bacteria that these survival responses that, you know, they're, they're are normally survival responses. But they can get out of hand. But a lot of our, it's not the body's, I mean, the body can be hyper-aroused, right? But that's the amygdala and periaqueductal gray and brainstem driving those responses in response to triggers from the environment that are subcortical and non-conscious that are causing those responses. And then consciously you're witnessing all of that. And that's when you become emotional is when you are experiencing what's going on. That's only one cause that the stuff in there is making you anxious, but you're anxious about it because you have a schema that tells you you're an anxious person or that this isn't a worry, that twitch in your chest may be a heart symptom, you know?

Mm-hmm.

So this points back to your 3-step process that for ourselves, therapeutically, self-help, or whether we're working with a therapist, the importance of beginning with the amygdala, as you said, there's some kind of self-soothing or calming so that we can get to the point where we could work with the narrative, work in an introspective way or therapeutic way, work on changing the narrative and developing greater understanding about that. But first we have to get to a place where we actually have the ability to do that. We need to lower the arousal with some kind of self-soothing or calming behaviors or techniques, whatever those might be.

Perfect. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Wonderful.

Well, this has been really illuminating. Thank you so much for everything you do and for your work. And I'm looking forward to learning more about your work and your music.

Music.

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