CORBIS, MAXINE HALL
Fifteen years after writing the influential book The Emotional Brain (1996), on the neurobiology of emotion, New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux is rethinking his approach. “I’m not even using the word emotion anymore,” he says.
LeDoux and some of his contemporaries have instead shifted to studying the neurophysiology behind behaviors that are central to an organism’s or species’ existence. “I think it’s wrong to study joy or pleasure,” says LeDoux. “Those are abstractions of things that are happening at a much more basic level.” He’s more interested in asking questions like, “What’s in the brain that’s keeping the rat alive?” LeDoux argues that survival instincts—such as the desire for food or sex—are strongly conserved across species. Humans alone have abstracted these desires into words ...
