Joseph LeDoux's heavy mental

The neuroscientist explains how music, emotion and memory shape our identities -- and why he has donned a Stratocaster to keep the brain rollin' all night long.

By Jonathan Cott and Karen Rester

Read more: Music, Brains, Life, Atoms and Eden

July 25, 2007 | In May at Madison Square Garden, an unknown, unsigned rock band began to play. It was only its fourth show since forming in the fall of 2006. Granted, its last show had sold out, but that was in the basement of the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York, which holds about 30 people. The Amygdaloids were staring at a crowd of 10,000, a big leap for a band that had yet to release, well, anything. Then something phenomenal happened. In the midst of its signature song, "All in a Nut," an inspired kid in the audience began leaping out of his seat, igniting a wave that went around the entire 200,000-square-foot arena. The band members were stunned; they had never seen anything like it.

All right, the occasion wasn't a concert but a graduation ceremony for 10,000 students in the New York University College of Arts and Science. Still, this was no ordinary club band hired to entertain the students. The Amygdaloids are made up of four scientists from NYU whose chief singer and songwriter is Joseph LeDoux. Earlier in the evening, LeDeoux had given the faculty address. Although one must ask what kind of neuroscience professor invokes Tennessee Williams and surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel to send a graduating class out into the world, then picks up his white Stratocaster and launches into a rock ballad about the amygdala, that almond-shaped "nut" in the brain that processes primitive emotions like fear, love, hate and anger: "Why do we feel so afraid/ Don't have to look very far/ Don't get stuck in a rut/ Don't have to look very hard/ It's all in a nut, in your brain."

A much-lauded pioneer in his field, the 58-year-old LeDoux, who is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU's Center for Neural Science as well as director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety, is perhaps used to being greeted by scientists, students and brain buffs alike with, as the New York Times put it, "enthusiasm usually reserved for rock stars."

Back in the '70s, when neuroscientists considered emotion too subjective for serious research, LeDoux made it the focus of his work, tracing the pathway in a rat's brain that leads to the fear response. The implications of this finding launched his career. His two highly praised books, "The Emotional Brain" and "Synaptic Self," look to the amygdala and to the brain's synapses, respectively, to understand how neural processes shape who we are, what we think, feel and remember. More specifically, LeDoux asks how the brain creates and remembers emotion, whether synaptic changes determine mental illness and how traumatic memories can be controlled and even erased.

Which prompts the question: What is LeDoux doing with a Stratocaster, anyway? Salon recently sat down with LeDoux in his NYU office, where he spoke to us as enthusiastically about the Amygdaloids and his love of music as he did about the amygdala itself and the extraordinary ways memory and emotion shape our identities.

What got you into using music to convey your ideas about the brain?

To be perfectly honest, I just love music, and when we wrote our first song, "Mind Body Problem," last November, I thought this could be our genre, especially after Newsday dubbed us "heavy mental." I think using music to teach students about the brain has a lot of potential. But right now we're just having a lot of fun playing.

How did all of you scientists find time to leave your labs and start jamming together?

Tyler Volk and I met because we both wrote science books for lay readers. Over dinner we discovered we both played guitar, so we started jamming together, mostly playing '60s classic rock and rock blues. We'd get together every month or so at one of our places for a couple of hours of guitar and then go to dinner, where the discussion often drifted into fantasies about having a band between discussions of the self and consciousness. When the holidays came around in 2005, we played some of our favorites at my lab party, like "Crossroads," "All Along the Watchtower" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." After the party, Daniela Schiller, a postdoc who works with me, came up and said she plays drums and would love to jam with us. In the summer of 2006, I got an invitation to speak at a science event at a bar in Brooklyn [the Secret Science Club]. They said there would some entertainment afterward and I volunteered the three of us. At that point we felt we needed a bass player. It turned out that Daniela's research assistant, Nina Curely, had been taking bass lessons, so we invited her to join us. We practiced a few times and on November 1st the Amygdaloids had their first show. We're excited that our first CD will be released in the fall of 2007. [Listen to four songs here.]

What's the earliest rock 'n' roll song that you remember?

In my faculty address for NYU, I said I often think about the past in terms of the songs I was listening to at the time; it's how I categorize my life episodes. The earliest song I remember is "Love Me Tender."

How old were you at the time?

I was probably 7. There was a little diner a block from my parents' butcher store. I was in love with the waitress and she was in love with this tough guy who wore a leather jacket and rode a motorcycle in our town. And she used to sing "Love Me Tender" all the time. I went there every day and ordered a Coke and sort of stared at her.

After college you had a brief stint in a group called Cerebellum and the Medullas. What made you choose such a brainy name?

I liked the name. I remembered it from high school biology.

You weren't studying neuroscience at the time?

No, I was doing marketing. I didn't know anything about the brain. That was just out of the blue.

Daniel Levitin, who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University, and who is the author of the book "This Is Your Brain on Music," has a rock group called the Diminished Faculties, composed entirely of professors and students at McGill. What is it with you neuroscientists and rock 'n' roll?

I don't know; they're coming out of the woodworks. We accidentally received an e-mail from someone in that group. It was after an article about us appeared in the New York Times. The e-mail said something like, "All right, we gotta get going. Look at what these guys are doing! We need to invite them up here and show them who's boss."

Most memories degrade and distort with time; why are music memories so sharply encoded?

I know from my own experience that it's a very powerful way to remember things. I've found that in the short time we've been playing music we can convey the gist of a concept with a three-minute song that we'd need a chapter for in a book and many, many hours of painstaking work to get across. Then people read it and they forget everything. But you can just sing the line, "An emotional brain is a hard thing to tame," which captures the essence of the concept, and people remember it.

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