Joseph LeDoux: His research is focused on understanding the biological mechanisms of emotional memory. More so in how or memories store, form and retrieve fear. The lab that he works out of at NYU focuses their studies on animal research to get a better grasp or understanding on anxiety and the pathological fear in humans. He believes that the amygdala is an essential part of the brain that forms fear. Depending on what we've experienced in our lives, one situation may bring feelings and emtions from something similar earlier in our lifetime. From what I understand, the amygdala is essential for these feelings to happen. This is because it is "hard wired" to respond to this that are or have been dangerous to people. It's wired to motor and sensory systems of the brain. It's all connected somehow, it's very interesting actually.
So what?
The way this effects education is probably not something I think that crossed my mind right away. By thinking about it though, if we can understand better how the human mind works, what makes it tick, you very well might be able to get through to a student that you may have not been able to get to before. Understanding how a person's emotions work would obviously also help us better understand our students.
Now what?
I feel that this might be able to help me in my classroom more than I would think. It would help me be a little bit more sensitive to my students needs and how to help them. One of my students might have some emotional problems or fears that need to addressed. Though, to be able to first help them, you need to know how fear, or emotional feelings work. LeDoux is doing this, he is going in there and finding out more everyday on how this work. We can apply his research in the educational classroom to better help our students that do have emotional issues.
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