Guest Presenter: Dr. Luiz Pessoa (Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and Director of Maryland Neuroimaging Center)

Talk Title: The entangled brain: the integration of emotion, motivation, and cognition

Abstract: Research on the “emotional brain” often focuses on particular structures, such as the amygdala and the ventral striatum. In this presentation, I will discuss research that embraces a distributed view of both emotion- and motivation-related processing, as well as efforts to unravel the impact of emotion and motivation across large-scale cortical-subcortical brain networks. In the framework presented, emotion and motivation have broad effects on brain and behavior, leading to the idea of the “entangled brain” where brain parts dynamically assemble into coalitions that support complex cognitive-emotional behaviors. According to this view, it is argued that decomposing brain and behavior in terms of standard mental categories (perception, cognition, emotion, etc.) is counterproductive.