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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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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Why Violence Has Declined

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) is being discussed everywhere.

Pinker visited the Institute to talk about his book How the Mind Works in 1997.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

In his latest book The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that the world has never been a safer place to live in. Looking back at the history of violence from prehistoric times up the present day, Pinker says it became far more beneficial for human beings to be less violent.... More.

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