“Music means life to me.”

“Every time I’m asked to give a lecture, I’m asked to bring The Amygdaloids.”

“The Amygdaloids” are not some rare disease, but rather a group of people with a shared interest in neuroscience and music: a band, so to speak. At their forefront is Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscience professor who’s been with NYU for over thirty years and contributed significantly to the founding of its neural science department.

LeDoux’s first interactions with music stem all the way back to his hometown in southern Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country. Here, he was introduced to the world of performative music by an unlikely mentor: the nuns from his school.

“I was a very shy kid, so the nuns adopted me ’cause I wasn’t talking — they had me making rosaries after school and such,” LeDoux said. “At one point they wanted me to audition for the choir. I said ‘I can’t sing,’ and so they made me sing in front of everybody — I was so off pitch and it was so embarrassing and I never sang again after that.”

After attending a magic show forbidden by the nuns for its “demonic nature,” LeDoux was suspended, severing his ties to the nuns and pushing him to explore other avenues of the music world. LeDoux directed his attention to more mainstream media, developing a love for pop music thanks to his transistor radio and becoming a disc jockey for his high school radio station. At the age of 15, he was given his first guitar and joined his first band, The Countdowns, with some of his high school friends.

At the end of high school, however, LeDoux’s mother gave him an ultimatum: Either go to community college or go to Louisiana State University to become a banker. LeDoux, who “had no ambition except to get out of that small town,” was off to LSU, leaving most, but not all, of his musical passion behind.

Despite the fact that he wasn’t playing it, he brought his Sears catalog guitar and his Fender amp everywhere he moved. Even when his trajectory in undergrad changed with a single psychology class and he began pursuing neuroscience, his life remained balanced by the static presence of his guitar and amp.

“From Louisiana to Stony Brook, to Manhattan, to Brooklyn — wherever I was going, those things came,” LeDoux said. “And at some point it came back to me and I started doing it again.”

His reintroduction to the world of music was partially facilitated by his new position at NYU dedicated to building the newly created neural science department. It was here that he met future Amygdaloid bandmate Dr. Tyler Volk, and the two of them began crafting rough versions of some of the band’s earliest works. After being invited to attend a night of science and music at a bar in Brooklyn, LeDoux offered to perform, and The Amygdaloids began to fall into place. To expand his roster, LeDoux enlisted the help of Daniela Schiller, a postdoctoral student who’d played drums for the two once before. From there, Schiller brought in one of her lab assistants, Nina Curly, who knew how to play the bass.

“From then on we were The Amygdaloids,” LeDoux said.

After that first night of music, heads began to turn. Their next gig earned the band a feature in The New York Times, propelling them into national fame and earning them an invitation to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Around this time, in 2007, LeDoux was asked to deliver the faculty address during graduation, which was being held at Madison Square Garden. The Amygdaloids were also asked to send the students out, their performance met with great excitement and audience participation. From then on, the band, recognizing their own success, would commit more attention to the group.

“We created our own genre called ‘heavy mental,’ all about mind and brain and mental disorders,” LeDoux said. “All I had to do was find a word like ‘mind’ that would be in some aspect of psychology, like the mind-body problem — that was one of my first songs. Just take something like that lyric and use it as a starting point.”

While all of this was transpiring, LeDoux was making a name for himself in the developing field of neuroscience. For the majority of his career, LeDoux was committed to studying emotion in the brain, a controversial topic among researchers at the time for its lack of scientific rigor. This did not stop LeDoux as he continued along this path, eventually discovering the relationship between the amygdala and the auditory system, suggesting its involvement in the formulation of human emotion. This finding stirred great debate within the scientific community as public interest in the amygdala grew to a new height.

Riding this wave, he published two books discussing his research into the amygdala and its peripheral concepts, “The Emotional Brain” in 1996 and “Synaptic Self” in 2002, further popularizing the idea of the amygdala as responsible for emotion among the public.

As his research and part-time gig as a musician flourished, however, uncertainty grew. The further he researched the topic, the more he began to reconsider the initial warning of the lack of nuance and rigor tied to studying emotion. As time passed, LeDoux found that the public was misinterpreting his work, falsely believing that emotion is created in the amygdala and that animals can perceive emotions like fear in the same way that we do. This mistake was rapidly entering the wider consciousness, misleading the public and serving as the basis for new, misguided research in the field of neuroscience. It had to stop.

“In 2012, I had this kind of imperceptible itch I needed to scratch, and it kind of just came out,” LeDoux said. “I said ‘we’re not studying fear.’ Fear is an experience, it’s not just a bunch of behaviors.”

In a series of articles titled “Rethinking the emotional brain” and “Coming to terms with fear,” LeDoux publicly clarified the meaning and application of his work, rectifying his past error and losing his grant in the process.

“I feel some guilt for having put the idea of the amygdala and fear on the map, not just on the minds of the public, but also in the minds of the people who come into the field, and other people who have been in the field for a long time,” LeDoux said. “All our grants were based on [National Institutes of Health] funding because we were going to solve the problem of fear and anxiety in rats.”

Since then, LeDoux has worked to reverse this misconstrued narrative that he initially popularized, publishing his two most recent books: “The Deep History of Ourselves” in 2019 and “The Four Realms of Existence” in 2023. Additionally, he used The Amygdaloids to complement his platform, delivering lectures and performing for audiences all over the world.

While reflecting on his life, the convergence of neuroscience and music emerges as a common thread. Whether he realized it back then or not, the magic show that got him suspended, the pop music he’d listen to on his transistor radio and the environment of Cajun country influenced his own psychology and the musical path he would chart.