How Do We Get Highly Strung?

The lead guitarist of the Patti Smith Band meets with a leading expert on how fear is registered in the brain to talk (and play) music, nerves, and other matter. Director of the multi-institutional Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety in New York City, LeDoux is also singer and guitarist of the “heavy mental” band The Amygdaloids.
Born on December 27, 1946, in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan, New York; Lenny Kaye has led a successfully long career as a musician, writer, and record producer. He has been a guitarist for poet-rocker Patti Smith since her band’s inception more than thirty years ago, performing on albums such as Horses (1975), Radio Ethiopia (1976), Easter (1978), and Wave (1979). His seminal anthology of sixties’ garage-rock, Nuggets, has long been regarded as defining a genre. He is the co-author of Waylon, the life story of Waylon Jennings. In 2004 Villard/Random House published You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon, an impressionistic study of the romantic singers of the 1930’s.
Following the PSG’s final performance in September of 1979, Lenny joined the Jim Carroll Band, as well as fronting his own Lenny Kaye Connection. He co-produced Suzanne Vega’s first two albums, including her 1987 hit single, “Luka,” which was nominated for a Grammy as Record of the Year. He has been nominated three times for Grammy awards in the liner notes category for boxed sets on the sixties folk revival (Bleecker and MacDougal), white blues (Crossroads), and progressive rock (Elektrock); and has co-authored a comprehensive hall of fame with David Dalton (Rock 100).
Joseph LeDoux is a University Professor, Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University.He is also Director of the Emotional Brain Institute of New York University and of the Nathan Kline Institute. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of memory and emotion. He is the winner of numerous scientific awards and honors, and is author of The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self. His alter ego is as a singer and writer in The Amygdaloids, a garage/folk/country/blues rock band that plays original songs about mind and brain and mental disorders. Through these neuroscience theme tales about love and life, he tries to stimulate popular interest in how the brain works, using music rather than books as a communication medium.
The New York Times Community Affairs Department is a media sponsor for this event.
BRAINWAVE is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.