#163 - Daniela Schiller -The neural basis of emotion and social cognition. Neuroscience & Psychiatry

Daniela Schiller is professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she directs the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience. Her research focuses on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Her lab has delineated the neural computations of threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination, and the dynamic tracking of affective states and social relationships.

Schiller earned her Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University, where she developed a laboratory model for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, where she examined methods for emotional memory modification in the human brain. She joined Mount Sinai in 2010.

Schiller’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and she has received many awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences.

Daniela Schiller, a neuroscience and psychiatry professor, shares insights on affective neuroscience, memory, trauma, and the interconnectedness of body and mind. This episode explores how our emotional states influence memory, the malleability of memories, and innovative approaches to healing trauma.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Daniela Schiller and her work

02:11 The neural basis of emotion and social cognition

04:07 The holistic view: body, environment, and affect

07:05 The human affectum framework and interdisciplinary research

12:54 Memory: malleability, reconsolidation, and implications

19:00 Traumatic vs. regular memories and their unique features

27:07 Evolutionary perspective on traumatic memories