Schwitzgebel, who is generous as well as rigorous, specifically warns against taking his study as evidence that studying ethics necessarily means you are a bad person. He only means to suggest that we look into it.

Of course, for a great mischief maker to really shine, he must have a foil, and in “Describing Inner Experience?” the role is taken by Russell T. Hurlburt. Hurlburt is not only a psychologist, he is also an inventor, and he has developed a tool to allow us to capture our thoughts in their most raw and immediate form; fresh off the brain, so to speak. The device is a beeper that goes off at random intervals. At every beep, the subject of the experiment makes a note of whatever was passing through the mind at the moment just before being startled into self-awareness. As soon as possible — preferably within 24 hours — Hurlburt conducts a gentle but thorough interview, drawing out the details of these reports.

Hurlburt has shown that there is tremendous variety in the type of thinking that people typically do. While folklore has it that we think by means of an “inner voice” that comments upon the world, it turns out that some people have very few words in their thoughts. Instead, their inner experience might mainly consist of images; for others, consciousness is dominated by bodily sensations. The “stuff” of consciousness is far from uniform.

In the book’s early chapters, which are academic but accessible, the philosopher and the psychologist declare their positions in advance, outlining them in some detail. In explaining his view that accurate descriptions of inner experience are neither impossible nor trivially easy, Hurlburt shows himself to be a watchful, experienced man, with a certain patient imperturbability. He is a collector of data, and the effect of his work is cumulative. A professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hurlburt has been publishing the results of his research for nearly 30 years.

One fears, however, that he will be no match for Schwitzgebel, who is not the type of person to be deterred from doubting by academic respect. In fact, on his philosophical blog, the Splintered Mind, he argues that politeness is a major cause of error: “When we’re asked questions about our ‘inner lives’ (‘a penny for your thoughts’) or when we report on our dreams, our imagery, etc., we almost never get corrective feedback. On the contrary, we get an interested audience who assumes that what we’re saying is true. No one ever scolds us for getting it wrong about our experience. This makes us cavalier…”

Schwitzgebel has no such inhibitions. One of his techniques is to invite victims to imagine a simple scene — their house, for instance, or the breakfast table where they ate that morning. Then he asks some hard questions: How stable is the image? Does it fluctuate as you think different aspects of the scene, as your attention waxes and wanes, or does it stay relatively constant? Does it have a focal center and a periphery, or is everything equally present all at once? How detailed is it?

Schwitzgebel boasts that with some rather basic interrogation techniques, he can impugn almost any person’s credibility as a self-witness. This is entirely believable. Attend to your own mental experience, at this moment, if you’d like to feel the effect for yourself.

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Before seeing what happens when the cross-examination of their unsuspecting volunteer begins, it’s worth asking whether anything is truly at stake, beyond a demonstration of Schwitzgebel’s skill in doubting. In fact, there is. The reliability of introspection is a hot topic in the study of consciousness, and consciousness is a hot topic in science.

In 1950, only five scientific articles in the biomedical literature used the word “consciousness,” according to a review by the eminent psychologist Bernard Baars. In 2000, there were 1,400. What happened in the interval was the advent of cognitive neuroscience, which combined psychological experimentation with new tools to measure activity in the brain. For the first time, consciousness seemed to become accessible to science. This is true in the most literal sense; the link in this sentence is to a commercially available consciousness monitor for judging the depth of anesthesia.

The classic account of the implications of neuroscience for philosophy is Daniel Dennett’s 1991 book “Consciousness Explained,” in which he argues that humans are complex machines, without any extra something — soul, mind, spirit or will — that does not have its basis in our biological components. Dennett’s philosophy is summed up by a beautiful motto he later acquired from the Italian philosopher Giulio Giorello: “Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots!”

Dennett did not convince everybody right away. His opponents pointed out that to explain something is not the same as to experience it. Consciousness is not outward behavior, but an inner fact. If we built an automaton that imitated humans, it would still not be conscious, as long as nothing within it had been programmed for consciousness. And since consciousness is inward and subjective, how could we possibly learn to create such a program, or be certain it worked?

Well, the cognitive neuroscientists continued their research undaunted, and their skill at examining consciousness grew. There are now countless experiments showing how aspects of consciousness can be measured, manipulated and predicted. Even some psychoanalysts — surely the most subjectively oriented of psychologists — have gotten into the act, examining how different types of self-awareness correlate with the biological activity in specific regions of the brain. As the results piled up, the debate over the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness has come to seem increasingly old-fashioned, one of those entangling byways in the history of philosophy that future generations will treat as mere scholasticism.

Enter Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel. Although neither argues on behalf of a non-biological soul, they both find consciousness deeply mysterious. They don’t quarrel with the idea that science could explain our inner states, but they wonder what, exactly, these inner states might be. When we say we are conscious, what do we mean? Consciousness seems ineffable when we look at it directly, and equally ineffable when we glance away. Hurlburt has devoted his life to catching bits of consciousness, snagging them with his beeps as they flit by. But Schwitzgebel says, just look more closely and you’ll notice: They’re already gone.

At the beginning of the book’s central section, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel meet their volunteer. Her pseudonym is Melanie. She is in her 20s, and she has an interest in psychology but no experience in these debates. Hurlburt explains the rules to her: She will simply tell them what was on her mind just before each beep, and they will try to figure out if her reports are accurate.

Hurlburt handles the direct questioning, then turns her over to Schwitzgebel for cross-examination. They have six sessions, each about an hour long. And over the course of these sessions, something unexpected happens, a novelistic twist that is subtle, hilarious and hard to describe. A battle for interpretive credibility emerges, as the doubt Schwitzgebel casts upon Melanie’s self-understanding rebounds upon himself.

Typically, in these sessions Melanie makes a report, and Hurlburt helps her flesh it out. Hurlburt does not trust everything his subjects say about their thoughts. His focus is on clarifying their language, focusing their attention upon the proper moment just before the beep, and warning them against false generalizations that might distort the inner view. Schwitzgebel’s attacks are quite different.

In one of their sessions, Melanie reports that she was reading a book when the beep went off, and visualizing a scene. She had a picture in her mind of a woman and soldier talking by the side of the road. She reports that the picture was somewhat incomplete — she couldn’t say anything, for instance, about how his legs were positioned.

“How can you be visually imagining some legs without imagining some particular way in which they’re positioned?” asks Schwitzgebel. Melanie tells them that she just wasn’t concentrating on this part of the image.

Schwitzgebel asks her if the feet she didn’t see were occluded by a bush. “No,” Melanie replies. And in the middle of his questions, she laughs. Schwitzgebel’s expert process of interrogation is supposed to reduce Melanie’s confidence, and as the sessions go on she indeed becomes more skeptical — of Schwitzgebel.

“I hope my skepticism isn’t too dispiriting or discouraging, or something like that,” Schwitzgebel remarks in a later session.

“Nope,” says Melanie, cheerfully.

“You seem to have a skin of Teflon about it, so that’s good.”

Then Hurlburt piles on. “She doesn’t believe a word you’re saying, Eric!”

Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt have put the audiotapes of their sessions online. I have listened to them. Schwitzgebel doubts Melanie. She doubts him right back. She laughs, is skeptical, tells him she’s not sure what he means. His questions, sensible in form and structure, often seem ridiculous by the time they are spoken out loud. It is not that Melanie is incorrigible. She is perfectly willing to doubt. It is just that she is a participant as well as a subject here. She can’t help collaborating in examining her mind.

Often, Melanie reports that at the beep she was not only having an inner experience — of words, or an image, or a bodily sensation — but also that she was aware of having this experience. She is simultaneously feeling or thinking, and noticing her feelings or thoughts. Schwitzgebel is skeptical of these multiple levels of experience. He guesses that by interrogating Melanie about how self-analytical she is, they have increased her curiosity on this topic, and damaged her naiveté.

In a side discussion with Hurlburt, Schwitzgebel remarks: “If she is wondering now whether she is generally self-analytical, that may itself create a presently occurring self-analyticity that seems to confirm her theory.”

Is Melanie giving herself extra self-awareness, after the fact? Maybe she is. But the “tuning up” of self-reflection under conditions of random beeping is only a problem for those seeking purity in introspective report. For the rest of us it is a chief interest of Hurlburt’s method. The random beep is a call to self-awareness. And self-awareness, for the lay reader, is not an artifact but a goal.

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There is a famous poem by Chao-pien quoted in D.T. Suzuki’s “Essays in Zen Buddhism”:

Devoid of thought, I sat quietly by the desk in my official room, With my fountain-mind undisturbed, as serene as water; A sudden crash of thunder, the mind doors burst open, And lo, there sits the old man in all his homeliness.

The discipline of Zen is somewhat foreign to our sensibility now, but perhaps Hurlburt’s lowly beeper, accompanied by an uninhibited skepticism and taste for the comic, can perform some of the same work as the old style of ritual contemplation. Melanie, who begins as the subject of these experiments, promotes herself to co-investigator. If, in reading these conversations, you can be seduced into following along, you will naturally become a co-investigator, too, suddenly aware both of the unexpected contents of your mind, and of how much of yourself is not really there.

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.

It’s very hard to erase memories of a piece of music, isn’t it, unless a person suffers something like retrograde memory loss. Then I suspect the person wouldn’t remember the songs from the period he or she has lost.

It would be interesting to hook that person up to some kind of physiological machine and see if they had autonomic responses to those songs even though they don’t consciously remember them. There’s a chance that they’re in your brain implicitly but you just can’t access them.

Neuroscientist Steven Pinker called music “auditory cheesecake,” meaning music is pleasurable but of no evolutionary importance. If music isn’t necessary for human survival, why has it appeared in every culture we know about?

There’s a lot of important rhythmic activity in nature, whether it’s the circadian rhythm of the daily cycle, the seasonal rhythm, the monthly rhythms. Just look at the human body. I mean, so much of what a body does is based on rhythm. Take the heart rhythms, the brain rhythms. Music is one expression of biological rhythm. That’s why pleasing music has a kind of symmetry and rhythm to it that discordant music doesn’t. I’m not sure he’s right about music not having evolutionary importance.

Maybe the secret to music’s power — its ability to trigger memory and emotion in the listener — is the fact that emotion and memory are what inspire it.

Yes, absolutely. Love songs, hate songs, blues. It’s all about those big experiences in life. When words matter it’s because the listener can relate to either the pain or the joy with the singer. So I think that’s true. A lot of what inspires music is emotion and your memory of those emotions and your anticipation about future emotions.

Could there be something like mirror neurons at play, which fire both when a person observes an action and when they perform the action themselves.

That’s an interesting idea. I think that’s probably true, especially at a concert. You’re watching the musician on stage and your brain is locking in with what he or she is doing, and so I think there is probably a lot of mirroring going on.

So if a musician’s neural pattern is transferred to the listener’s brain, perhaps the reason it’s so strongly encoded is that by listening to it repeatedly the pathway becomes stronger and stronger, just as with a memory that you recall repeatedly.

I think it’s more than repetition. I can imagine at a concert where you’ve got the musician up onstage, and there’s a lot of intensity and the music is loud and driving and the crowd is swaying and the guy is dancing around onstage. There’s a lot of stuff going on. Emotional upheaval like that is very good at storing memories. There’s a very famous study from Columbia in the ’60s, where they took people and gave them a shot of adrenaline, which revved them up, and then put them into a room of sad people, happy people or neutral people. If you had the injection you came out feeling the mood of the room you were in. Revving you up like that and putting you into a particular context creates emotions that are appropriate to that context. Your memories will automatically be stored more strongly because of the emotional arousal.

Researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute took PET scans of musicians’ brains while they listened to pieces of music that “turned them on.” Music activated similar neural systems of reward and emotion as those stimulated by sex, food and addictive drugs. It’s amazing that all of these things press the same button — drugs, sex, music.

But it has to be music that you like; it’s a reward. There are certain things in the world that are rewarding, like food and sex, and then there are things we attach to those rewards through experiences that can become rewards in themselves — what we call conditioned or learned rewards. If you have a positive experience and a song is playing, then that positive experience attaches to that song and the song itself becomes a reward.

You write about how our brain synapses change through experience, what is called synaptic plasticity. And, indeed, research continues to demonstrate how amazingly plastic the brain is. Even as our cognitive abilities like memory degenerate over time, we can strengthen them through brain exercises. What do you envision happening in the future as scientists learn how to more expertly manipulate this plasticity?

We manipulate plasticity all the time. Each time you go to a nice restaurant for dinner to celebrate a special occasion, a birthday or anniversary, you are creating a situation in which the memory of the event will not be ordinary and fleeting. Much of psychotherapy is about plasticity — getting patients to learn new ways to cope with challenges. But then there’s also drugs. Lots of companies are working on memory enhancers, mainly to be used to help people with memory disorders. But drugs already exist that can enhance memory formation, and these are being used to help people with phobias learn fear reduction through exposure to fear-arousing stimuli. There are much-publicized debates about this coming out of the new field of neuroethics, about drugs that enhance learning and memory, since obviously such drugs might also be used to improve “normal” memory.

Speaking of memory, what did you think of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”?

I’ve said they ripped off our research.

Really?

I didn’t really mean that in a negative way. We published a study in 2000 on this exact topic, which started this whole memory-erasure field. The film, which came out in 2004, described exactly what we were doing. We would activate a memory and then zap it. We were zapping it with a chemical, a shot of anisomycin; they zapped it with a machine.

Did they ever contact you?

Someone ran into Michel Gondry [the film's director] and asked him whether he was aware of the similarity to our study and he said that it had influenced him. I mean, our work is out there, it’s in the world.

You pointed out one way of reconciling science and faith in “Synaptic Self,” writing that “a spiritual view of the self doesn’t have to be completely incompatible with a biological one,” because even the nonmaterial soul depends on brain functions. Can you elaborate on this? What are the implications of this for you personally?

The idea that a spiritual view is not incompatible with a synaptic view of the self was important to me when I wrote “Synaptic Self” because I wanted to reassure anyone who got to that point in the book, who might be having reservations for reasons of faith, that they should read on. That is, I wasn’t using brain research to try to dismantle faith. I had something more inclusive in mind. Personally, I’m somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic, so it wasn’t about a deep internal struggle. But do I really know this? Probably not. Many of our motivations are unconscious. Given that I was quite religious as a young boy, maybe I do have some deeply internalized struggle going on.

You’ve said the implicit or unconscious aspects of the self play an essential role in shaping who we are and explaining why we do what we do. You’ve also said, “An understanding of the mystery of personality crucially depends on figuring out the unconscious functions of the brain.” How is personality shaped at the unconscious level? What’s something that really surprised you about this process?

I’ve long believed that much of who we are is due to unconscious processes. This goes back to my Ph.D. thesis work in spilt-brain patients, done with my advisor, Mike Gazzaniga. In these patients, the two sides of the brain are separated to control epilepsy. From the point of view of each side, behaviors produced by the other side are behaviors that are unconsciously produced. So we did lots of work trying to understand how the left hemisphere, which has language and can be communicated with, dealt with behaviors produced by the right hemisphere. The surprising thing was how seamlessly the left hemisphere adopted these behaviors as its own, as if it had produced them.

This led Gazzaniga and me to propose that much of human behavior is like this — produced by unconscious systems. Consciousness then makes sense of it all by telling a story. Gazzaniga went on to pursue the nature of interpreter functions of consciousness and turned to trying to understand the unconscious control of emotional behavior. That’s how I got interested in the unconscious aspects of mind. If you think about it, the enduring features of mind and behavior that define our personality are not things we consciously control. We are simply that way, and it can be hard to change those things because they are unconsciously controlled.

You’ve said the big question that brain research should be asking is: What makes us who we are? As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition that were once considered to be strictly human, Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force. Do you agree? If so, how does this affect your approach to “the big brain question”?

I don’t buy this. Sure, animals have emotional behavior and can solve problems using cognitive capacities. However, a key thing about human cognition is the way language shapes it. Language allows us to classify and categorize the world instantaneously on the basis of words. A single word can imply so much — think of how much information is carried by the contrast between the words America and Islam. And syntax allows us to rapidly conceptualize who is doing what to whom and to convey this to others. Also, the areas of the brain most involved in human cognition are in the prefrontal cortex, which has areas that are more elaborate in humans than other primates and nonexistent in other mammals. I do agree that much of the human brain can be understood in terms of animal brains — very basic emotions like fear are a good example. But when it comes to higher cognition I believe the human brain stands out.

You and others have indicated that solving the origin of the self is a binding problem. You explain that there are a number of brain systems running in parallel and these systems bind together to give rise to what we perceive as the self, as a “coherent personality.” How does this binding happen? And is the self really just an unexpected byproduct of synaptic plasticity? In other words, are the things humans value most in the world — thought, creativity, beliefs, love, happiness, family — are these just the happy accidents of an evolving brain?

The fact is that there are many different systems in the brain — perceptual, emotional, motivational, cognitive and so on. And within each of these broad categories there are lots of divisions. All of these run in parallel. Neuroscience has learned a tremendous amount about how systems and brain areas work. But our self, our personality, is not just the sum total of our brain systems. Our self can be thought of as a particular configuration of functional activity occurring in many systems at once. These configurations are determined by our genetically based wiring and by the experiences we have as we go through life. When it comes to mental life and behavior, nature and nurture are not two different things but two ways of doing the same thing: wiring our synapses.

For example, each emotional experience you have will subtly change the wiring in many systems. If you have lots of fearful, stressful experiences, synapses in these various systems will be wired with a fear bias. Lots of positive experiences will have different biasing effects. These biases may be especially important in early life when the brain’s wiring is up for grabs. Once developed, the biases will make one susceptive to certain kinds of thoughts or feelings, or make one seek out certain kinds of experiences. It is well known that people with phobias are especially sensitive to environmental stimuli that are related to their fears, and depressed people seize on negative information.

I don’t think that the things we cherish are accidents of an evolving brain, as you put it in the question, but instead are a consequence of the way genes and experiences wire our brains. The good news is that each experience rewires the brain. We have the capacity to change, but the more we change earlier, the easier it may be to shift the bias. The subtitle of “Synaptic Self” is: “How Our Brains Become Who We Are.” This was meant as a way of emphasizing the importance of learning, since there has been a big emphasis lately in neuroscience on genes. The world will be a better place if we adhere to the idea that change is possible. I wish “The Sopranos” hadn’t ended so fatalistically.

In “Synaptic Self” you’ve come up with some interesting ways of thinking about consciousness. What do you think are the key brain mechanisms that underlie consciousness? And how close are we to the final answer?

Consciousness is important and immensely interesting. Lots of progress has been made conceptually and empirically. My own view, which is shared by many, is that it has something to do with the unique human capacity for language and also with the newly evolved prefrontal cortex and its capacity for working memory. These ideas are described in my books, so I won’t go into detail here. The key thing for me is that even if we solved the problem of consciousness we wouldn’t understand how our brains make us who we are. We wouldn’t know why people develop mental disorders or start wars. We wouldn’t know about the fundamental motives that drive human behavior. Even very complex motives like the desire to succeed or to obtain power are not simple reflections of consciousness. Dick Cheney probably thinks he’s a good guy.

Where is your work headed?

One big question is how the brain controls not just emotional reactions but actions. For instance, with the fear response you can’t stay frozen in fear. Eventually you have to take action — fight back, run away. This transition from reaction to action is a key to the brain mechanisms, underlying something that therapists have known for a while — that active coping strategies are more beneficial than passive coping. I’m also very intrigued with the problem of emotional development, with the idea that we build up emotional biases through experience and that early life is especially important. If true, it would mean that we should be teaching kids ways to control stress at an early age, maybe even as part of their educational training. Because of my belief in the importance of early emotions, I’ve made emotional development the main focus of the new Emotional Brain Institute I’ve started.

What will the institute be dealing with?

Together with Harold Koplewicz, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU, and the support of NYU’s administration, this institute will be dedicated to the study of emotions, especially fear and anxiety, in young brains — in both animals and children. We want to start teaching kids how to regulate their emotions. I also want to make emotion a university-wide integrative topic at NYU that can unify the arts and humanities (literature, history, visual and performing arts) and the applied disciplines (business, law) with the sciences. These are big goals for the Emotional Brain Institute, but I think we can do it.