Keynote Speaker

Thursday, April 12
5:30 pm

David Spiegel, MD

Jack, Lulu & Sam Willson Professor, School of Medicine 
Associate Chair, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Director, Center on Stress and Health
Medical Director, Center for Integrative Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

"Tranceforming" Mind and Body

The advance of medical and other technology has
not relieved us of stress, but rather presents it in new forms. This has spawned renewed interest in resilience, the abilities that help us manage inevitable stressors.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that psychotherapeutic techniques such as group therapy and hypnosis reduce distress, pain, and social isolation, and may even improve survival time. Therapeutic domains include building new networks of social support, encouraging the expression of emotion related to the stress of illness, detoxifying fears of dying and death, restructuring life priorities, improving relationships with family and friends, and clarifying communication with physicians.

In addition, evidence that specific stress-management techniques such as training in self-hypnosis can effectively alter perception of pain and anxiety will be reviewed. How could living better at the end of life help cancer patients live longer? Techniques such as hypnosis work by altering the function of specific parts of the brain involved in perceptual processing. The role of the endocrine, immune, and autonomic nervous systems in stress response and their effects on cancer progression will be reviewed.

Resilience is not merely a matter of being upbeat in the face of adversity, but consists of realistic optimism: facing the worst while hoping for the best. Treating the patient with the disease, not just the disease within the patient, contributes to overall medical outcome. It is not simply mind over matter, but mind does matter.

Dr. Spiegel's research interests involve stress and health: cognitive control over somatic functions, including cancer progression; the response to traumatic stress; and the perception of pain and anxiety. His current studies involve the relationships among sleep disturbance, diurnal stress hormone patterns, and breast cancer survival and  the relationship between the acute response to trauma. His research program is designed to examine neurophysiological and peripheral mechanisms through which psychological and social support may influence physical health.

Jerilyn Ross Lecture

Friday, April 13
Lunch symposium, 1:00–2:00 pm

Joseph LeDoux, PhD

Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science
Professor of Neural Science and Psychology and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University
Director, Emotional Brain Institute (EBI)

The Anxious Brain

One major emphasis of the EBI laboratories is on studies of fear and anxiety. The lab is a joint initiative of New York University and New York State, located at the Washington Square Campus of NYU and the NYU Langone School of Medicine, both in Manhattan, and the Nathan Kline Institute, in Orangeburg. This focus builds on the progress that has been made in understanding the neurobiology of fear and the application of this information to fear and anxiety disorders. Anxiety and fear are normal responses to threatening events. However, when they are expressed beyond the extent called for by the situation, an anxiety disorder exists.

"My lab's research is aimed at understanding the biological mechanisms of emotional memory. We are particularly interested in how the brain learns and stores information about danger. Using classical fear conditioning as way of inducing emotional memories in rats, we have mapped the neural pathways by which sensory stimuli enter and flow through the brain in the process of fear learning. This work implicated specific circuits in within the amygdala as essential for the formation of memories of the fear conditioning experience. It is now clear that the same brain system underlies fear learning in and humans. The detailed mechanisms of fear, which can only be uncovered through animal studies, are thus applicable to understanding fear processing in the human brain."

Dr. LeDoux’s research focuses on the brain mechanisms of emotion and memory. He is author of The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in The Amygdaloids, a New York City rock band of scientists who shed their scientific garb at night and take to the stage with songs about love and life peppered with insights drawn from research about mind and brain and mental disorders.

More Highlights

Scientific Research Symposium
Master Clinicians and Clinical Rounds