Joseph LeDoux: Neuroscientist and Expert on Fear and Anxiety, Tues. 9/27

Casey Schwartz reviews Joseph LeDoux's new book, Anxious, in New York magazine.

"If this is the age of anxiety, LeDoux is our Lewis and our Clark: It was LeDoux who laid down the first map of what is called the brain’s 'fear circuit,' the regions — centered on the amygdala and its adjacent structures — that together give rise to our ability to respond to threats and danger. But with his new book, he wants to redraw that map...."

LeDoux visits Albany next week. More about his visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ledoux_joseph16.html#.V-QMe01kDs0


More from Schwartz's review in New York:  http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/07/everybody-misunderstanding-fear-and-anxiety.html

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Fiction Without Formula-- E. L. Doctorow

Here are some recent reviews of Andrew's Brain (2014) by E. L. Doctorow, who visits us tomorrow.

More about the visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/doctorow_el14.html

Review in the Washington Post, "E.L. Doctorow moves to fiction without formula in ‘Andrew’s Brain’":  http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/el-doctorow-moves-to-fiction-without-formula-in-andrews-brain/2014/01/13/a9e07e40-7c69-11e3-9556-4a4bf7bcbd84_story.html

Review in the Australian, "Mind games from EL Doctorow, a master storyteller":  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/mind-games-from-el-doctorow-a-master-storyteller/story-fn9n8gph-1226826888921

Review in th National of the United Arab Emirates:  http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/the-review/el-doctorows-new-novel-has-a-portnoys-complaint-flavour#full

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Trapped Inside the Human Brain-- E. L. Doctorow



E. L. Doctorow, one of the towering American novelists of the last 50 years, will visit the Writers Institute next week, to present his new novel, Andrew's Brain (2014), about the human mind and its puzzlements.

More about the visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/doctorow_el14.html

Terrence Rafferty reviewed the novel on the front page of the New York Times Book Review:

"The sense of being trapped in your own consciousness is, of course, an occupational hazard for writers, but it’s not a problem you’d expect Doctorow to worry himself much about. His fiction has always seemed driven by intense curiosity about the world outside him, about the people of other times and how they lived. So it’s odd that in the past few years he has seemed so interested in characters like the Coll­yers and Andrew, who prefer to look inward and shun the wider view. They’re exotic specimens, baffled and lonely and pacing in their cages. It’s touching that Doctorow should want to study them, and although they’re essentially comic figures, he’s strangely solicitous of them; he respects the narrow space they find themselves living in."

More in the NY Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/books/review/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow.html

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Eric Kandel, Writer and Scientist, Leads Breakthrough Study on Memory

Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine who visited the Writers Institute in 2006, is the lead researcher of a new study on memory in the brain (with new implications for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease). The study is receiving widespread media coverage, and widespread attention in the neuroscience community.

The 84-year-old laureate came to the New York State Writers Institute to present his memoir, In Search of Memory, about his boyhood as a member of a Jewish family in Nazi Germany and his remarkable career at the leading edge of neuroscience.

More on the new study:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57600507/scientists-find-clue-to-reasons-for-age-related-memory-loss/

More on Kandel's visit to Albany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kandel_eric.html

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Your Brain on Fiction

The New York Times has an interesting op-ed piece by Annie Murphy Paul about the neurological experience of reading fiction:

"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings." More.

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Eric Kandel on Erasing Memories

Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Eric Kandel, who visited the Writers Institute in 2006, is featured in a New York Times interview today.

He talks, among other things, about his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna and about the prospect for using new developments in neuroscience to erase unpleasant memories:

"I have no difficulty about enhancing memory. Removing memory is more complicated. If it’s to reduce the impact of a particular trauma, I have no difficulty with that, but there are other ways to deal with it — cognitive behavior therapy, exposure therapy, drugs. To go into your head and pluck out a memory of an unfortunate love experience, that’s a bad idea. You know, in the end, we are who we are. We’re all part of what we’ve experienced. Would I have liked to have had the Viennese experience removed from me? No! And it was horrible. But it shapes you."

More.

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This Is Your Brain on Sports

"What your eyes see, your brain plays — as best it can, which is, of course, as variable as our actual playing and living." More.

In honor of Superbowl weekend, and in honor of the UAlbany home team, the New York Giants, we offer you a recent article in Grantland on the neuroscience of watching sports by Le Anne Schreiber, former New York Times sports editor (the first woman to hold that position) and former ESPN ombudsman.

A friend of the Institute and upstate resident, Schreiber has twice participated in the Visiting Writers Series, has served as Visiting Writer in the UAlbany English Department, and is the past instructor of a Writers Institute Community Writing Workshop in nonfiction.

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