Jaak Panksepp has taken on many unusual roles in his storied career, but none so memorable as rat tickler: He learned how to stimulate the animals to elicit high-frequency chirps that he identified as laughter. Panksepp’s interspecies game-playing garnered amused media coverage, but the news also stirred up old controversies about human and animal emotions. Since the 1960s, first at Bowling Green State University and later at Washington State University, Panksepp has charted seven networks of emotion in the brain: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. He spells them in all caps because they are so fundamental, he says, that they have similar functions across species, from people to cats to, yes, rats.
Panksepp’s work has led him to conclude that basic emotion emerges not from the cerebral cortex, associated with complex thought in humans, but from deep, ancient brain structures, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus. Those findings may show how talk therapy can filter down from the cortex to alter the recesses of the mind. But Panksepp says his real goal is pushing cures up from below. His first therapeutic effort will use deep brain stimulation in the ancient neural networks he has charted to counteract depression. Panksepp recently sat down with DISCOVER executive editor Pamela Weintraub at the magazine’s offices in New York City to explain his iconoclastic take on emotion. His new book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion, will be published in July.
Your interest in emotion was sparked by an odd job you had in college. What happened there? Putting myself through college at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964, I did night work on the side and ended up a night orderly in the psychiatric hospital. I came in when it was dark and people were starting to settle down and go to bed. Some of them were on heavy meds. Others were very disturbed and would wander all night unless they were put into restraints. Everyone who worked there had free access to the patient files, which were thorough in relating the life history of individuals. You really got to know a lot about the people. After that I decided to get into the field.
How did you get started in those early years? I went to do my Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, starting in the clinical program. In my first year, I had the great fortune of becoming a Veterans Administration trainee and got a job in the electroencephalography (EEG) lab where they analyzed brain waves, mostly to diagnose seizure patients. The head of the lab was a psychologist, Arnold Trehub, who pretty much asked me, what do you want to do with your life? And I said, what I’m really interested in is brain stimulation and reward.
That was a rather precise and arcane interest for a clinical-psychologist-in-training during the 1960s. How did the idea occur to you? A new faculty member at UMass, Jay Trowill, was interested in this exciting new technique: inserting electrodes in rat brains to create pleasure or excitement. After you inserted the electrode, you gave the rat the chance to turn it on or off itself by pushing a lever. Thanks to my experience in the EEG lab, Jay asked me to be his first student and run his lab. I had to build my own boxes that had levers that animals would press to turn on the electricity.
