Episode Transcript: #1344 - Joseph LeDoux
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Here we go. Joe, thank you. Thank you for being here. Really appreciate it, man.
It's a pleasure to be here.
This is a fascinating subject. I've been really looking forward to talking to you,
because the conscious mind and how we evolved our conscious mind, how we have our conscious mind,
I mean, that is one of the more unique things about being a person.
It is.
How did it happen?
Well, it's only a four billion year story. It's the subtitle of the book.
We have some time.
So shall I tell you how I got into it and how I ended up thinking about that problem?
So I've been working on how the brain detects and responds to danger for most of my scientific career.
A little bit before that, I'd actually studied consciousness and these people who have their
brain split apart to control epilepsy called split brain patients.
So I got interested in consciousness and also in how behaviors that might be produced
non-consciously affect what we know about ourselves.
So we see ourselves doing something and then we kind of consciously build that into our
narrative of what we are. But a lot of what we do, we do non-consciously.
And when we interpret it, that kind of solidifies the fact that you have a non-conscious system
that's controlling your behavior when, in fact, you didn't do it, but that system did.
So you got to make sense of it and generate an explanation and narrative.