My Fifty Years Thinking about Emotional Consciousness in the Brain

Abstract

This piece provides an overview of my fifty-year career as a neuroscientist. I spent much of this time trying to understand what emotions are and how they relate to human behavior and consciousness. I am pleased that my work on the amygdala helped bring emotion into the field. But late in the game I changed my views about the amygdala and emotions, causing some unrest in the field. Note that this is a personal, not an encyclopedic, overview of the neuroscience of emotion. In other words, this is my story about emotions and the brain, especially in relation to emotional consciousness.