2/2/2024 0 Comments Cat dog rat layers of fear![]() That was a rather precise and arcane interest for a clinical-psychologist-in-training during the 1960s. The head of the lab was a psychologist, Arnold Trehub, who pretty much asked me, what do you want to do with your life? And I said, what I’m really interested in is brain stimulation and reward. In my first year, I had the great fortune of becoming a Veterans Administration trainee and got a job in the electroencephalography (EEG) lab where they analyzed brain waves, mostly to diagnose seizure patients. at the University of Massachusetts, starting in the clinical program. How did you get started in those early years? After that I decided to get into the field. You really got to know a lot about the people. Everyone who worked there had free access to the patient files, which were thorough in relating the life history of individuals. Others were very disturbed and would wander all night unless they were put into restraints. I came in when it was dark and people were starting to settle down and go to bed. Putting myself through college at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964, I did night work on the side and ended up a night orderly in the psychiatric hospital. Your interest in emotion was sparked by an odd job you had in college. His new book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion, will be published in July. Panksepp recently sat down with DISCOVER executive editor Pamela Weintraub at the magazine’s offices in New York City to explain his iconoclastic take on emotion. His first therapeutic effort will use deep brain stimulation in the ancient neural networks he has charted to counteract depression. But Panksepp says his real goal is pushing cures up from below. Those findings may show how talk therapy can filter down from the cortex to alter the recesses of the mind. Panksepp’s work has led him to conclude that basic emotion emerges not from the cerebral cortex, associated with complex thought in humans, but from deep, ancient brain structures, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus. He spells them in all caps because they are so fundamental, he says, that they have similar functions across species, from people to cats to, yes, rats. Since the 1960s, first at Bowling Green State University and later at Washington State University, Panksepp has charted seven networks of emotion in the brain: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. ![]() Panksepp’s interspecies game-playing garnered amused media coverage, but the news also stirred up old controversies about human and animal emotions. ![]() Jaak Panksepp has taken on many unusual roles in his storied career, but none so memorable as rat tickler: He learned how to stimulate the animals to elicit high-frequency chirps that he identified as laughter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |