dr. eric kandel. as you know by now, he's a nobel laureate and professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medical investigator. he is, as you know, the mastermind behind this program and once again i'm pleased to have him here at this table to tell me what we're going to talk about this evening. welcome. >> thank you. pleasure to be here. >> rose: where are we going tonight? >> we're going to discuss emotions some more. emotions are feeling states that enrich our mental life. they lead us to seek out pleasure and to avoid pain and tonight we're going to begin by discussing fear and anxiety states and then go on to discuss aggression. >> rose: why are they important to our survival? >> in the presence of a danger, the most important thing is to get away, to freeze, to decide, you know, what sort of action to take and to take that action. this is more important than almost anything else for survival is to know what is predator and what is prey. >> rose: once again, you have brought with you a

dr. eric kandel. as you know he is a noble laureate, a professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medical investigator. so i am pleased to sort of begin this conversation in this sense for reasons you will tell us, this is a different episode of our series. >> we're speaking about major psychiatric disorders. as you outlined we're going to custody pression, manic depressive disorder also called bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. we want to understand what we can do about them. these are as you indicated devastating disorders. they affect the way people think and feel and motivation. moreover one of the tragic aspects of these disorders is that they affect people early in their lives just as they're beginning to reach the peak of their productivity, the peak of their ability to enjoy themselves. schizophrenia typically begins in college or early 20's. these diseases often remain wi,h people for the rest of their life. therefore they're an extremely heavy burden for the patient and for the so

dr. eric kandel. he is a nobel laureate, as you know by now. also a professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medical investigator and, as you also know, a great friend of this series and the man who has helped us once this miraculous organ. welcome. >> pleasure to be here as always. >> so as we go through this, as we have been gone from understanding visual perception and understanding the developing brain and the aging brain and now we come to emotion. tell me what we mean and how does the brain connect to emotion? >> well, as always, you outlined it extremely well. emotions are a family of subjective experiences, states of readiness that we all experience in response to significant people and situations in our lives and emotions are designed to enhance our opportunity for happiness and drease our exposure to misery. it turns out that the first person to really consider the biology of emotion sr., in fact, our friend charles darwin, the greatest biologist of all time. in the course of his classic work on evolution he realized that

dr. eric kandel. as you know he is a nobel laureate, professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medical investigator the. i am pleased once again to have him here to help me understand all about the brain. so welcome back. >> thank you. are you doing very well understanding the brain. >> rose: and what a journey it is. so tell me about today, the disordered brain. >> well, last time we discussed psychiatric disorders. today we are going to cause neurological disorders. the bulk of the disorders of the brain so one of the first things you want to explore is how are they different from one another. what is the logic of neurological as compared to psychiatric disorders there are two fundamental differences. one in the nature of the sim poll-- symptoms and two an anatomical location. in terms of symptoms, there is overlap but from a simplified point of view you could say that psychiatric disorders deal with enhancements, exaggerations of our every day life. we all feel despondent periodically. w