Joseph E. LeDoux
in Split brain
Joseph E. LeDoux, American neuroscientist. As Michael Gazzaniga's doctoral student in the 1970s he worked on the split-brain patients, above all the patient P.S., and co-authored The Integrated Mind (1978). He later became one of the best-known neuroscientists of fear and the amygdala, and is now a professor at New York University and director of the Emotional Brain Institute.
Stake§
The ordinary stake of a doctoral collaborator on work that launched a career — here, a career he then redirected from human split-brain studies, where the techniques were limited, to the rodent fear circuitry that made his name.
LeDoux's contribution to this topic is his early co-authorship of the interpreter work with Gazzaniga. The demonstrations on patient P.S. — the speaking hemisphere inventing a reason for what the mute hemisphere had prompted the left hand to do — are the experiments behind the interpreter idea, and Gazzaniga's own retrospective dates the concept to their 1978 book. LeDoux then left the human work for the neuroscience of fear, but the early split-brain studies are where the narrating, explaining hemisphere was first caught at it.