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66Against HappinessColumbia University Press. 2023.The “happiness agenda” is a worldwide movement that claims that happiness is the highest good, happiness can be measured, and public policy should promote happiness. Against Happiness is a thorough and powerful critique of this program, revealing the flaws of its concept of happiness and advocating a renewed focus on equality and justice. Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, this book provides both theoretical and empirical analysis of the limitations of the happiness agenda. The aut…Read more
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17Stereotaxic mapping of brainstem areas critical for the expression of the rodent’s preference for the darkBulletin of the Psychonomic Society 8 (6): 472-474. 1976.
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18Common brain regions essential for the expression of learned and instinctive visual habits in the albino ratBulletin of the Psychonomic Society 4 (2): 78-80. 1974.
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19A stereotaxic map of brainstem areas critical for locomotor responses in a novel environmentBulletin of the Psychonomic Society 6 (3): 327-328. 1975.
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15Brightness discrimination loss after lesions of the corpus striatum in the white ratBulletin of the Psychonomic Society 3 (4): 293-295. 1974.
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18Deep history and beyond: a reply to commentatorsPhilosophical Psychology 36 (4): 756-766. 2023.The commentaries by Ren, de Carvalho, Gabriel, Reber and Baluška raise interesting and timely questions about the views I expressed in The Deep History of Ourselves. I begin my response with an Overview of my perspective, and how it has changed in the three years since publication. This is important since some of the commentators’ concerns may be assuaged by some of these points. Other specific issues raised by each commentator are addressed separately. I greatly appreciate the time and effort t…Read more
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28The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious BrainsPhilosophical Psychology 36 (4): 704-715. 2023.The essence of who we are depends on our brains. They enable us to think, to feel joy and sorrow, communicate through speech, reflect on the moments of our lives, and to anticipate, plan for, and worry about our imagined futures. Although some of our abilities are comparatively new, key features of our behavior have deep roots that can be traced to the beginning of life. By following the story of behavior, step-by-step, over its roughly four-billion-year trajectory, we come to understand both ho…Read more
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12Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evol…Read more
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2632The mnemonic basis of subjective experienceNature Reviews Psychology. 2022.Conscious experiences involve subjective qualities, such as colours, sounds, smells and emotions. In this Perspective, we argue that these subjective qualities can be understood in terms of their similarity to other experiences. This account highlights the role of memory in conscious experience, even for simple percepts. How an experience feels depends on implicit memory of the relationships between different perceptual representations within the brain. With more complex experiences such as emot…Read more
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38A little history goes a long way toward understanding why we study consciousness the way we do todayProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 1. 2020.Consciousness is currently a thriving area of research in psychology and neuroscience. While this is often attributed to events that took place in the early 1990s, consciousness studies today are a continuation of research that started in the late 19th century and that continued throughout the 20th century. From the beginning, the effort built on studies of animals to reveal basic principles of brain organization and function, and of human patients to gain clues about consciousness itself. Parti…Read more
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703Higher-Order Memory Schema and Conscious ExperienceCognitive Neuropsychology 37 (3-4): 213-215. 2020.In the interesting and thought-provoking article Grazziano and colleagues argue for their Attention Schema Theory (AST) of consciousness. They present AST as a unification of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Illusionism, and the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory. We argue it is a mistake to equate 'subjective experience,' ad related terms, with dualism. They simply denote experience. Also, as presented, AST does not accurately capture the essence of HOT for two reasons. HOT is presented as a versi…Read more
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1639Understanding the Higher-Order Approach to ConsciousnessTrends in Cognitive Sciences 23 (9): 754-768. 2019.Critics have often misunderstood the higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models (e.g. first-order local recurrency theories). For example, HOT has been criti…Read more
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17Comment: What’s Basic About the Brain Mechanisms of Emotion?Emotion Review 6 (4): 318-320. 2014.While it is common to think that neuroscientists are proponents of basic emotions theory, this is not necessarily the case. My ideas, for example are more aligned with cognitive than basic emotions theories.
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The neurobiology of emotion.[Chap. 15]In David A. Oakley (ed.), Mind and Brain, Methuen. pp. 301--354. 1986.
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Cognitive neuroscience: Final considerationsIn David A. Oakley (ed.), Mind and Brain, Methuen. pp. 368--378. 1986.
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3Learning and memory: Basic mechanismsIn M. J. Zigmond & F. E. Bloom (eds.), Fundamental Neuroscience, . 1999.
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64A divided mind: Observations of the conscious properties of the separated hemispheresAnnals of Neurology 2 417-21. 1977.
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Beyond commissurotomy: Clues to consciousnessIn Michael S. Gazzaniga (ed.), Handbook of Behavioral Neurobiology, , Volume 2. 1979.
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119Language, praxis, and the right hemisphere: Clues to some mechanisms of consciousnessNeurology 27 1144-1147. 1977.
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16Emotional plasticityIn J. Wixted & H. Pashler (eds.), Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Wiley. 2002.
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55The brain and the split brain: A duel with duality as a model of mindBehavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (1): 109-110. 1981.
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Emotions: How I've Looked for Them in the BrainIn Robert J. Russell (ed.), Neuroscience and the person: scientific perspectives on divine action, Center For Theology and the Natural Sciences. pp. 41--56. 2002.
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Emotions-A View through the BrainIn Robert J. Russell (ed.), Neuroscience and the person: scientific perspectives on divine action, Center For Theology and the Natural Sciences. pp. 101--118. 2002.
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29Emotional circuits and computational neuroscienceIn M. Arbib (ed.), The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, Mit Press. pp. 2. 2002.
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32Cognition versus emotion, again-this time in the brain: a response to Parrott and SchulkinCognition and Emotion 7 (1): 61-64. 1993.