Joseph E. 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. He 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.

Joseph LeDoux was born on December 7, 1949, in the Cajun Prairie town of Eunice, Louisiana, to Joseph E. "Boo" LeDoux, a traveling rodeo performer (bull rider) and butcher, and Priscilla Buller LeDoux. He attended St. Edmund's Elementary School and Eunice High School, graduating in 1967. LeDoux attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge where he majored in Business Administration and minored in Psychology. In 1972 he began work on a Masters of Science in Marketing from LSU. During this time, his interest in psychology grew and he volunteered in the laboratory of Robert Thompson, who introduced him to brain research.

With his Louisiana childhood, LeDoux was drawn to cajun/zydeco music, along with country, R&B, rock, and their fusion into "swamp pop". 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 Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now known as Stony Brook University), and completed his doctorate in 1977. He was hired by 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 researching the brain mechanism of emotional memory that he has pursued ever since. In 1989 he joined NYU's newly formed Center for Neural Science as their first outside hire. In 1991 he was promoted to full professor, and in 1996 he became the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science. In 2005, he was named "University Professor".

In 1971 LeDoux married LSU classmate Diana Steen. They divorced amicably in 1978. Since 1982 he has been married to art critic Nancy Princenthal. They reside in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. They have two children, Jacob S. LeDoux (died 2005) and Milo E. LeDoux. Milo is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied classics, and is pursuing a career in law.

In 2004, LeDoux and NYU Biology Professor Tyler Volk began performing as a cover band for small parties around NYU, and in 2006 they formed The Amygdaloids. The original band also included Daniela Schiller, (then an NYU postdoctoral fellow), and graduate student Nina Curley. 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. Their inaugural CD, Heavy Mental, was released in 2007. On their second CD, Theory of My Mind, LeDoux and Grammy winner Rosanne Cash sing "Crime of Passion" and "Mind over Matter", both written by LeDoux. In 2012, the band released All in Our Minds, an EP in which all songs had "mind" in their title. Anxious, a companion to LeDoux's book with the same title, was released in 2015 and explores some of the same scientific themes as the book, but through song. The band's unique focus on original songs about mind and brain has landed them considerable press. They play regularly in New York City, and have also performed in cities around the world. LeDoux and Amygdaloids' bassist Colin Dempsey perform as an acoustic duo called So We Are.

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 control behavioral responses by way of sensory pathways to the amygdala, and 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 (psychology) of responses to threats and 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 Mofils, 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, a finding that has proven useful in reducing drug relapse in humans.