The Amygdaloids

Joseph LeDoux helped make the amygdala famous - his seminal studies of fear conditioning illuminated, among other things, the importance of unconscious processing - so it's only fitting that he would be part of a rock band called The Amygdaloids.

Imagine Jefferson Airplane, with perhaps a dash of the Eagles and a lot of a neuroscientific puns, and you've got a pretty good idea of what The Amygdaloids sound like. "All in a Nut," for example, begins with a slightly psychedelic guitar solo and a plaintive question: "Why do we feel so afraid?/Don't have to look very far/Don't get stuck in a rut/It's all in a nut/In your brain." (The amygdala looks like an almond, and its name is derived from the Greek word for almond.)

Other signature tracks include "Memory Pill," "A Trace," and, my personal favorite, "Mind Body Problem". You can preview them all here. If I were a high school biology teacher, I'd make sure all my students had these tracks on their iPod.

To learn more about The Amygdaloids, check out their homepage, or watch this video, or buy their new CD.

More like this

This Friday is a holiday (in America, at least) and what's better on a holiday than a rerun? Yay for reruns. So, I've written about the Amygdaloids before, but here's an introduction video in case you didn't see it (or want to enjoy it again). Also, this band of rockin' cognitive scientists has a…
The Amygdaloids at the 92d Y, 4/3/08. Music starts at about 3m. LeDoux's the guitarist who is NOT singing. (Maybe it scares him?) A few months back I gave a heads-up that NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux and his band, t the Amygdaloids, were playing in NYC. Well, the virus has spread! At Rock-It…
For those in or near NYC, a notable event: Fear researcher Joseph LeDoux, whom I profiled a while back in Scientific American Mind, will lecture about fear -- and then, fearlessly, play with his R&R band, 'The Amygdaloids.' (The amygdala is the brain's fear center.) I can't make it, much to my…
The new issue of Current Biology has a freely available primer on the amygdala by Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University. The amgdala is a small, almond shaped structure found on the medial surface of the temporal lobe, just anterior to the hippocampus. Functionally…

Sounds interesting! You may also want to check out this band, www.system-crash.com, founded years ago by a University professor to deal with topics of human-computer interaction in a "Rage Against The Machine" style.

The song "Republic Of Fear" deals with a hypothetical country whose only export is fear, which can be measured and priced like barrels of oil. http://system-crash.com/mp3/07-System%20Crash%20_%20Republic%20of%20Fea…

Another song equates cancer cells with political conspiracy and revolution, starting with the strains of L'Internationale
http://system-crash.com/mp3/04-System%20Crash%20_%20Conspiracy.mp3