Anxious

May 11, 2015
Drawing on years of research, neuroscientist LeDoux (Synaptic Self) delves into the subject of anxiety and fear, depicting both emotions as cognitive constructs. Consciousness is key to his framework, which presupposes that to be either fearful or anxious about something is to be aware of it. Animals come up frequently as points of both comparison and departure from our experience as conscious humans. The intended audience is never explicitly stated but seems to be scientists and scientifically knowledgeable layreaders, though all the information is fairly comprehensible and made even more so through illustrations. It’s unclear to what degree LeDoux’s theories can be generalized to more practical applications: his sustained focus on animal emotions means that discussions of the countless people who suffer from anxiety disorders are relegated to the later chapters. This book’s sheer heft might be anxiety-provoking in its own right for some readers, but for the interested and informed it will open up new worlds of thinking and feeling. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman.

May 15, 2015
This is no self-help book but rather a rigorous scientific analysis of brain function, heavy on research and theory. LeDoux (Neuroscience/New York Univ.; The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, 2002, etc.), who directs the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU and at the Nathan Kline Institute, explains that anxiety is fear in the absence of obvious danger. Modern humans face few deadly perils but "more than make up for their absence with our brain's capacity to anticipate threats including some that may never happen." The author stresses that fear is the end product of brain structures that generate no feelings by themselves but detect danger and orchestrate defensive responses that ensure the organism's survival. Technical advances have given neuroscientists precise tools to investigate these structures, and psychologists have been active in the process as well. The result is a torrent of findings from neuroscientific laboratories that often conflict with psychological theories. LeDoux recounts them in often painful detail and tries, sometimes successfully, to reconcile them. In the final chapters, the author claims to offer new ways to cope. He mentions experimental, mind-altering drugs and describes how various brain structures respond to psychotherapy, and he seems particularly intrigued by the benefits of meditation. However, LeDoux is a scientist (more than 100 pages of notes and bibliography attest to his research), not a media celebrity a la Drs. Phil, Oz, and Weil, so sufferers will find no cheerful advice on banishing worry but plenty of sensible if discouraging qualifiers: "additional research will be necessary," "not all studies have found this effect," "this has a promising potential...." Not turgid enough for academia or lucid enough to be quality popular science, the book is a dense, detailed, often stimulating review of how the brain processes external threats.

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July 1, 2015
Life is dangerous, and professor of neuroscience LeDoux is an expert on the way the brain gathers, stores, and processes data about danger. He acknowledges, Anxiety is a normal part of lifethere's always something to worry about. But when typical fretting becomes excessive or disruptive, it morphs into an anxiety disorder. LeDoux insists, Fear and anxiety are not biologically wired. They do not erupt from a brain circuit in a prepackaged way as a fully formed conscious experience. To make sense of the bewildering science of worry, he enlists Freud and Darwin, Descartes and Kierkegaard. Researchpast and presentis reviewed. The amygdala, Pavlovian conditioning, an anxious gene, psychotherapy, anxiolytic medications, and the freeze-fight-flight response all receive attention. Some of the questions LeDoux tackles entail both philosophical and physiological explanations: What is the nature of consciousness? How do emotions originate in the brain? Do animals possess conscious feelings? Should painful memories ever be targeted for deletion? There is a wealth of information here, although LeDoux's overly technical writing style impedes the flow of this brainy book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)