The Amygdala

therapies for children and adults with anxiety disorder. Joseph lad has been working on the link between emotion, memory and the brain since then. He's credited with putting the amygdala in the spotlight and making this previously esoteric subcortical brain region a house whole. Name. Lid founded the Emotional Brain Institute. He's also a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at ny U Langon Medical Center.

In addition to articles in scholarly journals, he's the author of the books The Emotional Brain, The Mysterious Underpinnings of the Emotional Life, and Synaptic Self, How our brains become who we are. He also has a book called Anxious and his latest book, which we didn't really talk about. That's why it's not at the top of my brain right now. But oh my god, what's going on with this? I just tried to put his name into um Amazon

and but it just didn't It just didn't go so well. UM. His latest book, though, is The Deep History of Ourselves, the four billion year Story of How we got conscious brains that came out in twenty and his book before that was called Anxious, Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. Now Anxious is literally I mean, it's so dense and in the best of ways, it's just so packed with science and information. It's it's honestly

like taking a home study college course. It's it's so informative. UM. And The Deep History of Ourselves, the four billion year Story of how we got conscious. We didn't talk about that book, but we skirted around some of the issues that he talks about in the book. So at one point in the interview, I asked him a question about you know, emotions and our soul and the concept of that and and uh. And I also asked him if if neuroscientists are control freaks who are really trying to

just conquer figuring out the brain. And you know, he was kind of like, no, I mean, you've got to really, you know, the brain is part of this four billion year evolution, and as slow as it may seem to us, you know, we are evolving. So there really is no completely mastering knowing the brain, I guess. But it was interesting talking to Joseph because I've always known his work.

I knew that he was someone who, um it was kind of a pioneers, as I just said in the intro and getting the word the amygdala into our lexicon, and a lot of people just casually say the amygdalasa fear center, and that's really an oversimplification that it's beyond and over simplifications just not true exactly. But um, he does explain how the amygdala has something to do with a fear response, but there's no such thing as like

the fear center of the brain. And so I feel like our talk today when before I interviewed him, I thought it might be this very scientific talk and it was, but from my end, because I'm not a neuroscientists, I don't have the language quite that he does. I don't have I can't quite follow um every trail of questioning and talking with someone in the academic way. So as he's speaking in an academic way, I can follow the train. I understand what he's saying, but I'm not learned enough

to speak it back. So I would kind of come up questions in the moment that we're more like, okay, so let's talk about you know, the emotion of that, and do think there's a human soul? And as I didn't expect the interview to go that way, and it was it was my limitations that that made me take it that way. But I think it's good because I am not a neuroscientist. I'm not here to be you know,

one on one neuroscientist and neuroscientist. I'm here to be all of our voices, and so it may seem like I'm a dingdong and that's fine, but I also really

enjoy the you know talk. You know, him kind of reminded me of talking to um Dr Lisa Felman Barrett, who I talked to in one of the earlier episodes, and their work is very similar and they have they agree mostly on on their discoveries and on things in the brain, because you know, even within the brain, there there is an exact science, but there are some moments here and there that that tend to hindle a little

bit on a philosophy. And there is this interesting intersection that I've never really dug too deeply into with either of these guests between um, I think, between philosophy and neuroscience, where there are just some things that are a thousand percent proven, but the way you look at it or interpret it or put a narrative to it is kind of up to your own personal philosophy, if that makes

any sense. And so with Dr Lisa Film and Barrett, you know, I think she's very like no bones about it, like, here's how the brain works when you're having a panic attack. This is what's going on in your brain. And with Joseph Lead, it's the same science and it's the same um. Yes, this is coming from our brain and our nervous system,

and our brain is processing. But he brings it more to talk about emotions, and so in his work he's used the brain to understand our emotions, and I think in other neuroscientists work it's like using the brain to understand anxious response. And so I didn't get too deeply into emotions with Joseph lad And and part of me regrets it because I really didn't. I don't think I really quite thought to frame the interview that way, um, because I first wanted to understand the brain concepts that

he was talking about. But I did find it fascinating that in his work that he discovered what he was famous for is saying, you know, we can study rats all we want, and we can stimulate them and then take things away from them and watch them get addicted or watch them get anxious, but we cannot determine human feelings from that because these an almos just they do

not have feelings. And I know that it is very controversial to all of you out there, Like my cat definitely has feelings, and I can tell my cats thinking something, and listen, I I say the same thing about animals, and I'm all for projecting our feelings onto animals. But um, I think you get at what he was saying scientifically, is that like it's it's sort of that problem we run into, right if any of you out there, like myself,

have been medicated for anxiety or depression. When you talk to a doctor about it, who only has, you know, a half hour with you to explain all of this in very very simplified layman's terms. They go into their spiel about we're just like cave in and we have these leftover responses and we're having panic attacks and this

medicine helps blah blah blah blah blah. And you know, at the end of the day, like the medicine definitely can help with some of the physical response and you know, getting more serotonin flowing in our brain and all of that, but you would still have to account for the fact that you're human being with emotions that are based on

memories and that are based on habits and patterns. And that gets into my original talk with my first guest, Dr jud Bruger, who you know, has really approached looking at anxiety and panic as a habit, and so that's where it's always going to be, Like there is no

magic pill for anything, you know. Taking it back to my conversation um that I had on the episode about ketamine invasions, you know, it's like, there are things that can help us get to a point where we are maybe relaxed enough or out of the deep despair of depression enough to then do something cognitive or emotional about

our behaviors. Um but there isn't a magic pill in that sense, and so a lot of these animal studies they don't get to the heart of what somebody needs who's having um any anxiety, panic, depression, or just you know,

being alive and being having emotions about that. And so I really think it's fascinating that at the end of the day, all of our brains process the same way basically, but it's our memories and our life experience that makes the brains say, oh, I'm in this situation again, whether or not it is, you know, a lot of times again well, especially in terms of panic, we think we're in a dangerous situation where we're not, and that could

be based on our memories, you know. But so it's a little ethereal like, but I think our conversation will make sense. And he's he's so fun and so pleasant. I was so honored that he came on the show. And my favorite part is that he's in a band called the Amygdaloids, and we talked a little bit about that. But um, I hope you get a lot out of our conversation and I'll just let you enjoy my conversation

with neuroscientist Joseph le Do. Just to start off for fun, I heard you have a band called the Amygdala's and I see the guitar, Oh, the mag Deloyd's. Tell me about that band. Well, we were, you know, in UH

around two thousand five or so. I met a colleague here at n y U who had also written books for the general public, and so we had dinner together and we discovered we both have Stratocaster Fender Stratocaster guitars and that you know, like classic rock and roll, and so we got together me jam played some plastic rock

and had a good time UM. And eventually a young post doc arrived and UH and didn't I didn y U. And she came to a party, probably a Christmas party or something we were playing at UH, and she said, well, I played drums, so she joined the band. And and then November four, November first, two thousand and six. I remember the date very clear because it was a big moment in my life. We got invited. I got invited to give a lecture at something called the Secret Science

Club in Brooklyn. And this is a kind of you know, local Park Slope um group that would just be interested in science and they would have people come in and talk. And so they said, well and we'll have some entertainment. After that said I'll bring the entertainment. So right right as that was happening, the drummer Daniella Schiller Um, who had a research assistant named Nina Curly, and the guitar player was Tyler voc Well, Nina Um turned out to

be a bass player, so she joined the group. So we you know, we did our uh let me clarify. So the day right before the show happened, we were written up before anything happened in the Long Island newspaper called I forget what it's called, but anyway, it was they called it. They described our show as heavy mental, Oh my god, I love it, and so we named

our first album to that. But so we played. We had a kind of set list that was all about classic rock songs about mind and brain, like Jimmy Hendricks's Many Depression or Mother's Little Helper from the Rolling Stones nine Nervous Break, all that kind of sting. A lot of rock songs are about mind and brain and mild disorders anyway, so we had those, and then I wrote a couple of songs for the gig and the crowd really liked those, so I started writing more and more

and we ended up by our first album. We called it Heavy Mental uh, and we ended up probably with five of Nigda Lloyd's albums or so, and then I have two or three, maybe four others that I've done without the Amigna lords. So that is very cool. And do you do any originals? They're all originals. They're all originals enough to do covers. We do originals. That's great,

We'll be right back. Well, I'm going to start with tell me why, for better or for worse, you are known as the reason we know what the amygdala is. And if you can tell us what it is, and you know, as I said, be as smart as you want to be, I'll help you dumb it down if you need to. Okay, so here we go. Um Well, I got interested in the question of how the brain makes emotions in the nineties seventies when I was a

graduate student studying split brain patients. These are people knew the two halves of the brain have been separated, the connections have been separated to prevent seizures from spreading around in the brain. It was a treatment for epilepsy and people who were without any other hope of having a treatment because the medications back then weren't so hot. Well, it's not done very often anymore because the medications have improved.

The most important thing about these people is when you cut the connections between the left hemisphere in the right hemisphere, You've got language in the left hemisphere. So when you talk to the person, that's who's responded. The right hemisphere can't talk, but it can get You can put a stimulus over there by presenting it to the left side

of visual space that goes to the right hemisphere. And so the classic findings from the nineteen sixties by my mentor, who's Mike Santaga, showed that, you know, the right hemisphere could detect and respond to stimuli that you present to it, even though it couldn't talk about it. It was, you know, kind of awaken, alive and responsive, so it had some kind of sentience in a sense. But the left hemisphere seemed to be the one that was like in charge and conscious and could talk to you and tell you

about its life and all of that. So that was kind of the key flanning. So you for example, they would put an apple picture of an apple in the right hemisphere and then put the left hand into a bag, and you know, it would feel around and to pull out the apple instead of banana or you know, what to look for. It didn't. It knew what to look for on the perceptual stimulus that have been put into the right hemisphere, so left hand could pull it up.

So it was definitely awakened, responsive and all of that. But I can ask one quick thing, Uh, the reason it knew what an apple felt like was not just from the picture, but from memories that it had in life of Okay, we aren't born with knowing what apples are or anything else. You know, you gotta learn that stuff. And Stuart as a semantic memory. So anyway, this was

kind of like what the early work was on. And by the time I came along, I was at a graduate student at Stony Brook on on Long Island, that's where Mike was at the time, and we had a new group of patients and these patients were operated on at Dartmouth Medical School. So we cooked up a kind of camper trailer behind a orange punkin orange forward van and we drive it up to New England and study

these patients that were being operated on up there. And we had this one patient who seemed really, really unusual. So what we found was that in addition to being able to speak out of the left hemisphere, it could read in the right hemisphere. Couldn't talk out of the right hemisphere, but he could read. So that allowed us to put complicated questions into the right hemisphere, like who

are you? And then we had a bunch of scrabble letters out there and the left hand would come out and they spelled Paul p u h. That was his name. So that right hemisphere, even though it couldn't talk, I knew who he was. When we asked it what you want to do when you grow up, the response was, well, I want to be a race car driver. And the left hemisphere, on the other hand, would say it wanted to be a draftsman when you would talk to it. So you've got a sense of self in the right hemisphere,

you've got a vision of the future. You know, these are like the hallmarks of consciousness, self identity, and future thought. So this was the first evidence that you could have, you know, literally two minds in one brain like that, and um, it was. It was fascinating. But one of the one of the things we discovered is that when we would put a stimulus into the right hemisphere and asked the left hemisphere, why did you do that? So like if we told if we put the word stand

in the right hemisphere, the guy would stand up. So he said, why did you do that? Because left hemisphere didn't know why he stood up because only the right hemisphere saw the stimulus. He said, well, I needed to stretch. And if if we had him, you know, if we said scratch and so he's or itch or something, he could scratch his hand. He said, why did you do that? Well, I had a niche. Or if we made him laugh and he said laugh, he would la, why do you laugh?

You guys are really funny. So the left hemisphere was generating a narrative to make his behavior makes sense. Oh my god, this is incredible. Let me just recap. I just want to dumb it down. So the reason actually that the guy stood and scratched and laughed was because you told him too. But uh so let me ask you. So I knew you were going to say this, like he created the narrative. Well, if I stood, I obviously

needed to stretch. Is there anywhere in that brain that he was aware that you wrote stand Like, it's not like a lie, It's like he really thinks he had to stretch. Yes, And this, you know, this was so you know, when we see these patients at night after the day's work, we'd go to a bar and you know, have a bite to eat and have a few drinks and talk about the day's events. And you know what we came up with was, well, this isn't just like a pathology of the brain. This is what we do

all the time. Our brain is constantly generating behaviors unconsciously, and in fact, most of our behaviors controlled unconsciously. But you know, we all believe free will. So it's disturbing. It creates cognitive dissonance to think that you aren't controlling your own behavior. So if you see yourself behaving in a way that you didn't program, you know, you kind of generate a narrative to make it all makes sense.

Are if you you know, if you were having an argument with your partner and you say something really awful, well, then you justify because you know my partners being awful, so that it doesn't matter, you know. And this is what we do all the time. We renarrate our experiences. We create these narratives and renarrate constantly. And that's what having a sense of self is is a narration about who we are. And it's just a constantly moving target.

And one of the things we concluded was, well, maybe emotion systems would be the systems that are generating a lot of these unconsciously controlled behaviors. Emotion, emotion, So um, you know, I said, well that's what I want to study. When I leave your lave, I'm gonna go study emotions. And the only way to do that really was to study animals, um, not not to understand their emotions per se, but to understand these behaviors and the circuits in the

brain that might be controlling these behaviors. So, as a long way of telling you what you asked about, what I did was I adopted a procedure that was well known and well characterized from behaviorist times and psychology, where they created all kinds of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning tests to study animal behavior. While I use this Pavlovian fear conditioning task, which was you know, kind of stock in

trade of the field. UM. And the reason it seems so good is because you could take a stimulus that had no meaning for the animal or rat, give it one stimulus, one tone, for example, pair that with a mild electric shock one time, and then every time later that the red herd that stimulus, it would freeze, and blood pressure and heart rate to go up, stress hormones would be released, all the same things that would happen

in a human. So even though humans have different things that are threatening them and upsetting them, the way the brain responds is kind of similar in a rat in a human. And you were the us to do the rap thing, right, I know you're quite famous. Well, uh, I was the first to implicate the amygdala. Well, there was another guy working at the same time where there were two of us at the time, actually three, I

guess you could say. When there was it was a trio that The first Society Neuroscience meeting where I presented any and that's the big meeting for neuroscientists, UM where I presented any of this stuff on the amygdala was in I don't on nineteen eighty seven or something like the eighties, six, eight seven, And there were two other guys and because they put all the relevant posters together there Mike Davis was on this side, Bruce Calp was on this side, and we're kind of looking at each other.

I thought I was the only one doing this, you know, and so um, we kind of became friends and colleagues and competitors and all that stuff. Um, but we kind of set the tone of the field because we were all doing Pavlovian conditioning. We're all interested in the amygdala. And the reason you said, well you were, you're responsible

of putting this out in the poll. Like I wrote a book called The Emotional Brain in nine that summarized all of our work that was going all the work was being done at the time on this basically US three. And then some other people were coming in at that time. And so I got the reputation for having, um, you know, at least put this on the map in a sense.

Wasn't that I discovered the amygdala. People have known about the amygdala and you know, various things for a long time, but the circuitry how the stimulus gets there and gets out was unknown, and that's what we contributed and the emotional part two, because I know that I had read

that in the past, um, you know, like in the seventies. Um, And this is where it gets like I understand it, but it's hard to say, like emotion was being thought of like a subjective conscious experience, and like psychology is perception and memory, and you could learn a lot about the way the brain processes by doing like animal experiments, but there's more to it because we're not animal. But then there's an argument about, um, what consciousness is and

isn't and what creates it? Right? Is that kind of so let me rephrase you now, yeah, yeah, yeah, please correct the podcaster because I don't know what I'm saying, but I think I get it. Well. You know, we had this procedure called fear conditioning. So if you're if you're doing fear conditioning, that implies your conditioning the state of fear. So then the question is what is the state of fear? And all these people who had been using this procedure had a behaviorist background in one way

or another. Behaviorist, of course, eliminated all subjective experience in psychology. There was no they weren't No one was allowed to talk about consciousness for decades, from the nineteen fifteen to nineteen eighty or maybe even later. You know, it's like everything was shut down. There's just about behavior um and so fear was not a subject of experience for behaviors. It was a relationship between a dangerous stimulus and a response.

So then some behaviors said, well, in the brain, there must be something that is connecting that that stimulus in that response, and so there must be a circuit, and that circuit became a fear circuit, because fear would be

what would connect the stimulus in the response. Now, from my splip brain work, going back, the idea that I had at the very beginning and that I have had ever since, although it wasn't as clear as I could have been, is that the conscious experience of an emotion, or of any kind of conscious experience is a cognitive interpretation of the situation that we're in. It's not an innate state. But the idea that you have a fierce circuit that we've inherited from our animal ancestors, as Darwin

gave us. That gave Darwin gave us that idea. Darwin was a great biologist, but it's been said he was not so hot a psychologist, but he paved the way and made the psychology of emotion this tradition of having inherited emotions from animals. Now really all you could see in an animal, whether you're Darwin or me or anybody else,

all you can see is their behavior. So from imagine you see a dog that's been hit by a car and it's riding on the side of the road and screaming, and of course you project feelings onto that the guy. The dog is in pain. He's yes, the dog is in pain, but you're not seeing the dog's pain. All You're seeing his reflexes. You know, all this shaking and crying. Those are just innate responses. But that is not what reveals the essence of pain or fear or anything else.

It reveals It reveals these innate responses. Yea. So here's the deal. So if if the amygdala was literally a fear center, as many people have thought, and as I was introduced over the decades as having discovered the amygdala makes us feel fear, and you know, for years I just dismissed it. It doesn't matter. I'm just doing the research. But eventually it started to bother. But let's say, given

this idea that the amygdalus of fear center. Think about this, So if I present a stimulus to you subliminally, that means you don't know what the stimulus is, but it goes into your brain. And if it's a picture, say of a snake or something, it will go to your brain. Your amygdala will be activated because we can image your brain while and you're looking at this, and you see your your amygdala is activated, your heart beat is is increased, your palms are sweating, and so forth. But you don't

feel fear. You don't even know the stimulus is there. And you say, well, do you feel anything that you say no? Did you say anything? You say no. So the amygdala is responding to danger nonconsciously. There's no subjective fear in the amygdala that is connecting the stimulus to the response. So we when we're afraid, Let's say we're running from danger and running from a bear face William James idea, you're running from a bear. Um, So are you running from the bear because you're afraid or is

there some other reason? So the fact is because we expect that when we're running from a bear it's because we're afraid. That's what we come to think about, because we've been told that all our life that you know, fear is the reason we do that. Um. But really, what is going on in your brain is that there's

a stimulus that goes into your brain. It goes to the amygdala and causes the behavioral responses like freezing and so forth and running away, But it goes to your cerebral cortex, in fact, to your prefrontal cortex, and that's where you construct this cognitive interpretation of the situation. Given that you're unconsciously triggered to run away because the amygdal

is activated, just like to splip brain patient. You know you you respond automatically, and then you cognitively interpret that as, oh, I'm afraid because you have in your brain what's called schema. These are like memories, collections of memories about topics. You have a schema about who you are, everything you know about yourself, and all the good stuff you like about yourself and stuff you hate about yourself, stuff you'd rather be than who you are, blah blah blah, everything you

know about yourself. Same thing with emotions fear. You have a fear schema, everything about danger and fear and all that's bundle into that and all you need is a little piece of information like Okay, there's a snake at my feet and bound. That schema is patterned, completed, and that is presented into your conscious mind as fear. So that's why you feel fear, because you have cognitively conveyed

that information into your con is mine. So every conscious experience until the last micro second of it becoming conscious is unconscious. It's a cognitive stream of information, and sometimes that stream crosses the finish line and makes you conscious, and other times it doesn't. So I guess my question is, it doesn't mean just because you suddenly have your first conscious thought about what the stimulus represents, it doesn't mean

that's right either. Is that correct? It doesn't mean it's right, I mean, but what it means is you know, if you have that feeling, that is your feeling. Nobody can tell you you didn't have that right, it's it's your it's incorrigible. You may be wrong to have that feeling, and in some social morals you know, ethical sense of something, But if that's what you felt, that's what you felt. There's no going back on that. And do you mean feeling by sensation or do you mean emotional feeling? No

emotional feelings. So if you feel fear and your partner says, oh, you're you're not afraid, you angry, you know, or something like, um, they don't know what's what you felt? Right, maybe you should have been angry, but are jealous or you know whatever. But what you felt is what you felt. And so that's why I think this. You know this, You have this preconscious processing and that depending on how the schema are activated and and sort of pattern completed into an experience,

is what you feel. And then that can change in the microsecond again, you know, because emotions are dynamic, they don't it's not just like you're locked in. As the situation changes, you have to reevaluate and you re experience something new. The fear goes from anger to jealousy. And we'll continue the interview on the flip side of a quick message from our sponsors. So if a magdala isn't

the fear center, it's just a part of it. Well, so that the brain doesn't really have psychological centers in the first place, right, So, and anything is a product of a complex circuit that spans all kinds of brain areas. So you know, you start at the eye, and that's going to go into the brain and go to the cortex, and it's going to go to the amygdala, and then we'll go to the prefinal cortex and go all over.

And when let's say, okay, let's just take simplify, we've got a stimulus that's going to the amygdala causing you to uh, your arousal to kick in and you're gonna now have your panic attack. Is cognitively you've interpreted that

through the prefonal cortex. That's what's going on, um. But the fact that the arousal is in your brain activating circuits that amplify brain activity and attention, and your brain arousal uh through circuits that are flooding your cerebral cortex with nora ephron and seratonin and dopamine and all that. So you're you're consciously being very alert now. So there's a feedback between the behavioral output there and you know what the amygdala is doing and what the cortex is doing,

so they're not completely different. But the content of the emotion, what the emotion is not determined by that low level information from the amygdala. That's that's kind of like, Okay, you go into a restaurant in Park Slope and it's the music is too loud. Maybe more like Manhattan, but whatever, so that music is too loud. I'm in Williamsburg, so it's always too loud. It's like the New Vegas. It's

always something that's streets. It's New York's Bourbon streets. Anyway, you go into a bar restaurant and the music is too loud, and so you know you're a certain aids, so you ask the way to to turn it down, and they turn it down. It's the same annoying heavy metal song. It's just less annoying when you've turned down the volume. And so the same thing with emotions. I think that the arousal and so forth doesn't tell you what you're experiencing. It just tells you that you know

it's it's unpleased. You know it's it's too much, and so you can turn it down through meditation, you can through whatever you know, if you can get that drugs, whatever you can do, you you turn that down and then it's less annoying. It's it's less irritating to have those kinds of emotions. So, you know the problem with medications though, is that imagine how these drugs are developed.

You have a drug company that has a bunch of rats or mice, and they put them through these behavioral tests like Pablovian fear conditioning or you know, barious avoidance tests and so forth, and they find a drug that makes the animal less timid, in other words, are explored toward. And so the assumption is what we inherited fear from rats for, not rats, for from our our mammalian ancestors. Uh. And so if a rat is freezing less when it

has the drug, it's because it's less afraid or less anxious. Therefore, when we give the drug to a human, they should be less afraid, less ancious. But what you find is instead is that the person with social anxiety on the medication finds it a little easier to go to the party. They're a little less timid, little less avoidant. But when they get to the party, they're still, you know, very

kind of anxious. So if the psychiatrist had said okay, instead of saying, this is a medication that will make

you less anxious. If the psychiatrist it's a this is a medication that will um attack your symptoms of arousal and avoidance and so forth, it will be easier to go to the party and then while there, if you know that all this arousal and stuff is part of just the the underlying machinery of of your problem, you can then use that knowledge and use the medication to reduce your arouse a little bit, and use that knowledge to then go in, spend a few minutes at the party.

If it's too much, step out for a little while, if you smoke or have a smoke, or go to the bathroom, do something, get out, and then go back in and you'll be able to um. You'll find that this allows you to cope with your situation. You've been anxious all your life, You're probably always going to be somewhat anxious. But if you can bring these symptoms, these physiological and behavioral symptoms under control, it's gonna be less

of a problem for you. So when you put rats and mice through these things, what you're doing is activating their migdal and other subcortical circuits to control these behaviors. But if a drug is doing that and not changing your subjective experience. It's not doing what you want. I mean, it's not doing everything you want. Because if you don't feel subductively better at the end of therapy, it didn't

work if you're still fearful and anxious. But if you know that fear and anxiety is not the body stuff, I mean, that's part of it. It's gonna be there, like the heavy metal music when you turn the volume that it's still going to be there, but it's gonna You're gonna be better able to cope with the situation if you turn the volume down through meditation or drugs

or whatever. But the drugs can't help the kind of subjective emotional part where you show up at the party, you're having the same stimulus and you might be like, oh, why aren't I better? I thought this was supposed to

not make me hate this? So is that where the problem comes in is like they're judging their experience and what therapy isn't teaching is like you're going to still feel the same way, but you're just going to have the bandwidth two if you choose to talk to yourself differently, or is that kind of it that's exactly right, because you know, it's like you're taking anxiet idea and putting it into one package, as if there's a medication that's gonna,

you know, make that whole package better. And the medications are designed to change animal behavior, so they're not gonna necessary. How would they possibly change a subjective experience? How could you take a pill? It goes into your digestive system, it's broken down, enters your bloodstream, goes to every part of your body, miraculously finds the exact right part of the brain, and all of a sudden you're better Like that. It's impossible. God, Well, okay, so go with me here

in my terrible analogy. But I do want to talk about your I'm not gonna say dislike, but where you think neuroscience helps a little more than psychiatry with this stuff. But go with my terrible example. So I have been trying to get every guest to be on my side about this, but but I'm probably wrong, and that's why most of them haven't been. But I'll I'll tell you where I'm going in a second. But when I first first first first went to therapy, I don't know I

was to whatever. I. I had had undiagnosed panic attacks and anxiety for years and when I went what she said at the time was mind blowing. Now I found a very annoying, but I got the old your adrenaline is going your fear or whatever you want to say. She the fear the thing everything that you guys are doing to the rats, you know, stimulating them and they're freezing.

So this is an old caveman instinct. And when we were running from the blank that was chasing us, Uh, we needed that fear because that fear told us to run, and that's how we saved our lives. And that's how we evolved. Okay, And I kept being like a first I was blown away, and she's like, so we just have some old wiring and so you know, there's nothing chasing you. There's no wild board chasing you. So now you can use your brain to calm yourself down cognitive

behavior therapy. But I've always been like, Okay, I understand that a cave person probably ran from a large animal, but we don't know. We didn't talk to any of these people. They didn't leave a diary, So I'm saying, like, how are we to say, let me put it this way. I'm at the doctor and they hit my knee with

the little reflex thing, and I kicked because it's a reflex. Now, if somehow that practice goes out of style and no one does it again for a thousand years, and somebody tells the story, well, Bobby, humans used to have their knee banged on by a doctor and they kick because they were so afraid of the doctor. And it's like, no, no, there was no emotion. I kicked because it was a reflex.

So when I'm told that the cave people were running from animals because they were afraid and that I need that fear to keep me alive, I'm telling you there's not that's not right. I know that we cannot um decide that cave people ran from the emotion of fear. I feel like you're you're saying it's a it's a not a reflex, But like that amygdala says, run and

then maybe you can put the story over. And I'm running because I'm afraid, or I'm running because I need to stay alive, But you might not even be afraid, like if you're trying to save your own life. In other words, they were trying to tell me that this emotion called fear made people run, and I that's where

they lost foot set me too. So so I'm saying because I'm saying, like, you guys are telling me this is an old chemical thing for my brain, but then you're switching it up and saying in the middle of the same sentence, fear made them run. And I'm like, well,

that's not a chemical. And people would be like and they would get you know, and I I They're like, you're trying to undo this so you can hold onto your panic, And I was like, I just want you to make sense, and I keep begging people, won't anyone. I'm so done with this caveman thing. It's not accurate and I don't have the reasons for it because I'm just a comedian with a podcast. But if you call bullshit, tell me why in your smart way, because I don't know how to say it. Well, I don't know if

I'm smart, but here's my way. Well, so no more about it than me. I'll tell you that. Um. So this goes back to why do we run? Because a stimulus activates these circuits in the brain at a very low level that control these automatic responses. So what the amygdala has are in age circuits that detect and respond to danger. So that will trigger you know, fleeing, freezing so called you flights, light, that kind of stuff. But that's not the fear. Fear is the cognitive interpretation of

the situation. And you know, it's the cave men, you know, cave men, cave people were people, they were humans, so they had some kind of conscious awareness, you know, and so in parallel they were afraid. But the story develops out of their folk psychology that the reason we rans because we were afraid, and that's what gets passed on through the millennia too down to us. We're told that

the reason we run from dangerous because we're afraid. But if you look at the research on fear and behavior responses, there's a whole research on what's called discordance, which means that behavioral and physiological responses don't necessarily line up with how afraid you are. You could be very afraid psychologically consciously and you're flatlining, or you can be highly highly aroused and not afraid at all. You know, so you can't use you know, you can't just measure heart rate

in someone and say that's fear, that's wrong. You have to Yeah. We wrote this paper recently called putting the Mental back in the Mental Disorders, and the purpose of that was that psychiatry since the nineteen forties and fifties UM has been on this road to its objectifying everything. It started as a response a way of putting Freud in the rear view mirror that you know, okay, you've got.

Freud was, you know, did some weird stuff kids and had all these ideas that with some of them were kind of crazy, and so they said, we don't want any part of this. So instead of just saying okay, well there were some bad parts of Freud because he was all about the subjective mind, they got rid of the entire subjective mind. Behavior is we measure anxiety as a behavioral response or physiological response, and so the drug

companies brought in medications to do that. Behavioral therapy came along as well, which is that you know it's you can use Pablovian extinction to reduce UM fear because fear is a condition behavioral response UM. And then cognitive behavior therapy came along to add a cognitive component, but it quickly became over the decades, became less and less cognitive and more and more about metrics. You know, as the insurance companies took over the whole field, you had to

have objective measurements, objective metrics. You could check off five boxes on a list of twenty and say, well that's anxiety. But you could have PTSD. Let's say there's twenty items you can check. If you have three or four, then I don't remember what it is. But let's say there's four. You have to have four to be have PTSD, but you can have about a thousand combinations of four to make PTSD. So PTSD is a you know, just a name, an invention. It's not a thing. None of these psychological

conditions are things. They're collections of symptoms that we categorize in a certain way, and we assume that there's a brain center for those categorizations, which is crazy. There's no brain center for anxiety. Anxiety is a state of mind that we can scoct on the basis of all the situational of information we have at hand. I make so much sense because you know, when I go on stage to perform a lot of times I will feel my heart racing. I notice, I shall breathing. I literally couldn't

be less afraid on stage. I should be, but I'm not. I mean, most normal people don't like getting up in front of people. I literally don't care. To Montorval, I'm I if you measured my heart read the same way you do if you Here's how I know I'm afraid, in other words, is I don't want to do it, and I'm standing there like I can't. I can't. I can't, I can't, I can't me on stage. I'm like, oh, I feel all these things. Okay, I'm getting out there.

And that's how I know that what I'm feeling isn't fear. It's just I don't know what, maybe excitement or something. Um, I don't even care, Like my brain doesn't even go cognitive in that moment. I don't even I'm not even interested in figuring it out because one thing I know is I'm not afraid. So if I'm not afraid, I'm basically not interested. Um, because if I'm afraid, I have to do something about it. If I'm not, then I'm

just gonna go do the show. But when I'm afraid, like you try to get me on a roller coaster, or try to get me to bungee jump. I will stand there. I'll never do it, but I will feel the same physical symptoms. But but my one thing will be I'm frozen, I can't, I can't. Or if I'm having a panic attack on a mall, i will run as though something is chasing me and the fear. If you stopped me right then I'd say, yes, I'm afraid. I'm afraid I'm dying and I need to be around people.

I need to get close to the hospital or something. And uh, but I understand now that that so that could be categorized as anxiety because not because hopefully I'm getting this right, it's anxiety, not because I have this special disorder where my um sensations start going, my adrenaline starts pumping. That's not the anxiety. The anxiety is what I tell myself, you're dying, so you must run. But so people with anxiety disorders, the diagnosis is in is

in the head of what we think. But it's not like, oh, if you get that like racing hard a lot of times, if you go on stage, you have anxiety. Anxiety is on a physical diagnosis in any way right, even though people talk about it though like it is, well that's I mean, that's just my opinion. So um, other people have a different opinion on all this stuff. I go back and forth. I I changed my mind every day.

I'm like, I just love to think about it. So the thing is that, certainly when you're anxious, there can be a lot of physiological symptomatology that goes with it, but you can also be anxious without that, So it's not the defining feature. The defining feature of an anxious state of mind is the state of mind itself. Now the good news and that is if it's all in our minds, that means it's changeable without you too much

other stuff. So, you know, I think that the way to do it is you have to take a three step approach. So first you need to retain them one and one way that you might be able to do that, And this would only work for like, you know, phobias and stuff where you have a specific stimulus, is you present the stimulus subliminally to the person. Let's say you're spider phobics. Spider phobics don't like cognitive behavior therapy because

they have to be exposed to the spiders. But if you subliminally present that spider to their amygdala, you will You can extinguish the amygdala. You can weaken the amygdalas response by repeating the spider over and over again without the conscious mind having to deal with it and freak out about seeing this the spik How do you do that? Present brief flashes like super fast. You don't know it's their subliminal stimulation, and so you I don't know if

this will work. This is an idea, but you just flash and flash and flash, and the person doesn't know it's there, and so your heart begins to tame the heart rate and so forth. And then once you've prepared the amygdala that way, you can now turn to the hippo campus and memories. So um, you've got in addition to implicit memories controlled by the amygdala. You know, you see the spider in your heart will beat. You can

weaken that through the extinction subconscious, extinction sublimeral. But now you can you've prepared the rest of the brain to deal with the information. So through the hippo campus you now can change memories about spiders and things you know about spiders and things that your relationship to spiders and all of that. So now you've prepared two parts of the brain in a way that you can do regular al talk therapy without having all the baggage that would

get in the way of it. Interesting, So you're not opposed to talk therapy, And how else are you going to change the mind? I don't know. Well, I think that you're saying though, that like there there should be a nice understanding of neuroscience, like maybe if people read books on their own, you know, to understand the brain, um so that it's less like special to them. Is that makes sense. I think I'm one of the only

neuroscientists who has these particular beliefs about that. It's all that. Ultimately, it's about the subjective experience, you know, the subjects. Neuroscientists don't like all the subjective stuff because neuroscience is an output of behaviorism. It's it's cold in a way. It's kind of like it's because we've you know, all of the people that were trained were trained by behaviors, and so that became the way that the field was was created and all the methods we use, our behaviorist methods.

But it you know, It took me a long time to come around to this that if the only way to ultimately change mental experiences through mental interactions. You know, you've got to have that sort of one on one relationship, But you can't do that until you get some of the other stuff out of the way. Neuroscience is important because it can help us with the tools that get some of that stuff out of the way, but ultimately we've got to deal with it psychologically. So are there's

a dumb question, but are our emotions real? Does that make sense? Like? Can we can we just um narrow everything down to like it's just the brain doing a thing, and the brain is meant to keep us alive, not keep us happy. You know, all the talking points, our emotions, emotions are real, I mean they there. Every thought you have is real to you, and that's where that's where our reality is. Our conscious minds create reality and that if that's my reality, then that's where we have to,

you know, work on changing it. But all of that other stuff has to be dealt with and tame before you can really deal with that, because otherwise it will keep getting in the way. You know, if you let's say you you just talk therapy. You just change, um, you know, the person's relationship to all of this. Well, every time the spider comes along, it's going to reactivate the whole stuff that that you've kind of like talked about.

So you've got to get rid of that underlying stuff so that you're now ready to talk about it and can support a persistence in the future. Um that doesn't involve all that stuff. You've got to shape the mind and allow it to do what it can do, but you've got to get rid of you've got to control the other stuff to allow that to happen. Anxiety bites will be right back after a quick little message from

one of our sponsors. So going back to the person that was having the split brain Uh experience, I'm so obsessed with this. So back to the guy who you held up a sign that said stand, and he stood and then said, well I stood because I just sort I flashed it through these subliminal presentations. Oh, I'm sorry, I don't think I quite understood at the beginning it

was subliminal. Okay, Well it was actually it was you know it was it was not that short, so it was three hundred milliseconds rather than thirty milliseconds for subliminal, but it was going to his right hemisphere, which couldn't talk and couldn't communicate with the left hemisphere, so it was subliminal to the left hemisphere. I understand. Okay, that makes total sense. So in that sense though, um, is

he having an emotion that makes sense? Like or is that person able to have emotions if their two sides aren't connected. Yes, they are, So the left hemisphere had a rich emotional life, um that he could talk about. It's much harder to probe the the right hemisphere because there's only one patient of all the patients that I'm aware of, that could read in the right hemisphere like this, got it, And so it was only one that we could test this. So it might all be bogus because

it's all based on one patient. But the importance of it to me was that it stimulated my thought process is about how cognition, cognitive interpretations of situations are the basis of our narratives, and the narratives are who we are ultimately. I love that because yeah, I mean you just you know, I know that they're us have to keep it simple, and they just want to assure you

that you're normal. But like all this talk of like, well they did the study on animals, and I'm like, I know, I'm not the animals, So what am I supposed to do with these thoughts? And you know, and then the thoughts feedback into the body and then it's like that loop of like fear and adrenaline. The animal behavior studies and physiology studies are crucial to the development of medications that can change behavior in physiology, but they

can't change subjective experience. So in my last question, I'll I'll leave you with this thought. I have a thought to leave you with. I. First of all, I mean, this is everyone out there, this is scratching the surface. And I know you have a book called Anxious, but your most recent book, um, is called The Deep History of Ourselves, the four billion year story of how we got conscious brains? And um, what I want to ask you about that is, is there another word? Does conscious

mean anything more than what we were talking about? Like a thought that is obvious to you. It's not your subconscious you know you're thinking it is it? Conscious has nothing to It's not an emotion. It's not emotion, right, Well, your emotions are conscious states that's true, right, but uh, but scientifically, when you say conscious, you're not like secretly saying emotion. You're just saying any state you're aware of. Yes, So you know this is this goes back to the

mind body problem. And you know how um, the idea of a soul that is, I've been thinking soul this whole time. Go ahead, Yeah, the soul was they cart called the mind the soul. But he also is responsible for kind of introducing consciousness into philosophy, and the conscious soul was how we chose our actions. Uh, and you know, he was a Catholic and so he wanted to he said that we choose our actions m consciously and that's

what you know, either gets us into heaven or hell. Um. So the soul and the mind we're kind of the same thing at some point in philosophy. And eventually, you know, the idea of a physical basis for the mind, which is still kind of hard for some people to accept. But you know, I'm a materialist. I think the mind is a physical part of the neurons and so forth.

It's you know, it's a different set of neurons. You've got neurons and that are that are going to make you conscious, but you've got neurons that are also going to control your behavior unconsciously. Um, they're just two different kinds of of neural activity. Um. You know, like John Locke said that, how do I know I'm the same person today as I was, you know, and when I was a kid? It's because you have memories that ties you across time, tie you across time. And so there

are three kinds of consciousness that are important. And I get this from the psychologists Endel Tolving, who I think was the you know, the smartest psychologist since William James. He's that we have something called automoetic consciousness, which is our ability to know this John Lock kind of thing, our ability to know who we are, that we had a beginning, we will have an end. No other animal knows that it had a beginning and an end. It's

just in the moment, right. But we can reflect on our past and our future, and that capacity depends on our prefinal cortex. Now, the second kind of consciousness is called noetic consciousness, knowledge of factual actual you know, factual and conceptual information about the world. Probably most mammals, all mammals probably have this kind of semantic knowledge. It's nonverbal semantic,

but it's semantic um. And then there's another kind of consciousness that's also shared by all mammals, called a noetic and this was the puzzling one, but in a nutshell, what it is, I think, is the sense that your mental states and body states are yours, without any content, it's just there. The reason we know this is because there are people who lose this connection to their mental and body states. They don't believe that they're theirs. They

don't have that's that sense anymore. It's terrible. So what the what this a nootic consciousness does is allows your mental states to feel right. And that's not something you ever acknowledge that it feels right, only apparent when it doesn't feel right. So in these people who don't have it, then it becomes apparent that we're always feeling right, are feeling wrong if if we do something that's not quite right,

we have a twinge of that wasn't you know? It's not it's not always about morals, but it's all about is it what we expect that we should think and feel? And so these three kinds of consciousness, you know, the lowest kind anoetic is said to only to be what lower mammals will have as their main way of interacting within mark they know what, you know, there's a mate or there's food. Uh and then because it feels right, but they don't have content of that feeling of rightness,

so they don't know that, oh, there's my girl. You know, it's like it feels right, so then we're gonna do the thing, you know, and then they no. Eddache is something that in the most sophisticated sense, it's probably something that primates brought in more of a kind of knowledge of the world in a more sophisticated kind of way, made possible by prefinal cortex, because the kind of prefinal cortex that lower mammals have is very different from the

kind that that primates have. And then automo edic again requires another kind of consciousness that's probably due to this region in the prefinal cortex that only humans have. It's a small little piece but allows you to subjectively know your experiences. So I think that's the way to think about the about what you know, what consciousness is doing

in different animals. But there is still I think now again I can't prove this, uh A soul, even though it may die with the brain, because I in other words, like I'm probably just saying an individual or subjective set of feelings. But in music where they say like it's all about the notes you don't hear are jazz, I guess I feel like in this whole conversation there's been a blank space of a thing we're not saying. It's like, you know what you're talking about, subjective emotions, conscious, it's

different for each person. We're not rats. I feel what's been missing is like I keep wanting to say the word soul, and when I asked about the the guy with the split brain, I'm thinking I'm saying emotions, but like I'm also kind of thinking soul, like there's a soul to us, like you can feel it, you vibe with certain people. I know it's all chemicals, but I like to use the word even though I don't think it lives on. Is there room for that in neuroscience?

Well so, I think there's room for what you're talking about, But I wouldn't call it a soul because you know, I'm really strict on the language because we get so you take a word like fear and all of a sudden, you're saying, well, if this is this part detects part of the brand, detect and response to danger. It's a fear center. It acquires all the subjective baggage of fear. And I think you have the same problem with soul.

But this, a noetic consciousness is what you're talking about, this low level kind of awareness of who you are without ever having to say it, and you feel right about yourself, not in a moral or good or bad sense, but that it's just you. When things break from that a noetic state of rightness, then you have to come

to terms with it, you know. So you get a twinge of a noetic wrongness, and all of a sudden you have cognitive dissonance, and so you have to cognitively reinterpret your situation because it felt wrong, not and again not in a moral or just it didn't feel like what you know, really expect. So last I wanted to ask you this, um, Do you think this is a philosophy question for the neuroscientist? You know, I know all

humans experience all the ranges of feelings, including anxiety. Do you think a neuroscientist is a highly sensitive person who wants to study the brain. We all want control, but you guys want the most control. You want to slay the dragon. You want to win at chess, you want to beat the computer and be like, you can't surprise me. Brain, most complicated thing on planet Earth. I just conquered you. Is there any kind of do you guys have control issues?

Do you think? Why are you neuroscientists? So you know, I don't think you can put it all into a machine or I haven't need that, because you know, our conscious minds are the product of this four billion year evolutionary history, and you would have to recreate all the little steps to get it all right, because it's not just about having a let's say, okay, we know the circuit for I to know it the consciousness, and it's got like, you know, fifteen million neurons and they're connected

this way. But it's not just about the connections. It's about all of the hidden molecular and genetic changes that took place over that four billion years. That and in the process, all this behavioral feedback from all of that four billion years of acting and responding. So it's not just about you know, putting a model of the circuit in the computer and all of a sudden, it's conscious.

You gotta have that. You've got that long history of evolution that makes it makes this crazy thing we call consciousness. So here's my my thing for you. Um. You know you have your program here is called Anxiety Bites. Um. So we the Amictaloids, had a song that we played a lot that a lot of people like, and and it's called Anxious, And in it we have this line it sucks to be anxious, So it's like anxiety Bites, but anxiety sucks too. So oh I love it. Yeah,

oh my god, we should play it. Can we play it at the end of the episode. Do we owe your royalties? Okay? Good? Oh my god, this is so exciting. Oh my god. This is our first music experience on Anxiety Bites. I love that. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Joseph lad as much as I did. I don't know if we got the rights to play his band's song, Anxious by the Amygdaloid. So, um, even though it's his song, there's still all these kind of rights things.

And so if you just heard five seconds of a song that was Anxious by the Magdelades, if you didn't, then you didn't hear it. But you can check out his band by going to the link in the show notes. And I'm still cracking up the I have this like renowned neuroscientist on and I'm like, okay, but guys, we

really got to plug his band right now. Um. Here are the takeaways from my chat with Joseph lad Split brain therapy UM used to be a treatment for epilepsy, but they used it as an experiment working with people's memory and emotion. When separated from the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere of the brain can respond to stimuli even though it can't talk about it, and the left hemisphere of the brain, when separated from the right hemisphere, can

be conscious and can talk about what it's experiencing. Our brain creates narratives about who we are, and that's what having a sense of self is a narration about who we are. Our emotions cannot be fully understood just by studying reactions that animals have to stimulus. The conscious experience is a cognitive and reputation of the situation we are in. It's not in innate state. Darwin gave us the idea that we have a fear circuit inserted from animal ancestors.

He was a great biologist, but admittedly not a great psychologist. The tradition of thinking that we inherited emotions from animals is faulty because you can see an animal in pain and they are responding to stimuli, maybe about making noises or yelping or limping. But we as humans project our ability to have feelings about the stimuli onto what the animal is experiencing, and we are not correct about that. The amygdala can be activated when we are presented with

a stimulus. It can cause an increased heartbeat, but that can be a non conscious response. The notion that we run from a bear because we're afraid is not necessarily scientifically proven. It could be just because the amygdala is stimulated, which causes a behavioral bonds. Once the stimulus goes to your cerebral cortex, that's where you construct a cognitive interpretation of the situation. We feel fear because we have cognitively

conveyed that information to our conscious mind. Medication can help with some aspects of anxiety, but it would be impossible for one pill to treat the subjective personal experience of millions of people with anxiety. Our conscious minds create our reality, but that does not mean that our reality is made up. Our emotions are absolutely real as we experience them. Alrighty um, I will say, as we wrap up season one of Anxiety Bites, we just have a few more episodes left,

and you certainly can send an email. I don't know if I'll be able to read on air before we wrap up your butt. Anxiety Bites weekly at gmail dot com. You can talk about the episodes you've heard, share them on social media. I always do these fun and cool audio gram clips. You can find them. They are my pinned tweets on Twitter and my handle is at Jen Kirkman j E n k I r K m A N and that is also my handle on Instagram. And again, all of this information is right in the show notes

and you can click right on it. Thanks again for listening and remember Anxiety Bites, but you're in control. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.