TO BEGIN WITH
1. On the use and abuse of the prefix neuro-, see for example Muzur and Rinčić (2013).
2. Moreover, unlike a critic such as the German philosopher Markus Gabriel (2015), we have taken into account and entered into dialogue with the very large body of research that deals with the phenomenon of “neurocentrism” (a term Gabriel gives the impression of having coined himself).
3. BRAIN stands for “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.”
4. The extremes of this ribbon touch. In 2014, tensions related to the Human Brain Project (HBP) became public after several hundred scientists published a protest letter. While the core problems concerned governance and transparency, as well as the place of cognitive and systems neuroscience within HBP, numerous neuroscientists had from the beginning questioned its basic scientific logic, and even the Mediation Report’s subdued language echoes the many who believe that HBP was sold on unrealistic claims and overstated promises (Marquardt 2015). Bartlett (2015) and Theil (2015) give a good idea of the controversy.
5. See for example EyeWire, “a citizen science project aimed at mapping the neural connections of the retina,” launched by a professor of computational neuroscience at MIT: http://scistarter.com/project/566-Eyewire.
6. The singular “neuroscience” is practical, but it masks the heterogeneity of approaches, methods, and concepts used to deal empirically with the brain (on this point see for example Abi-Rached 2008).
7. “Cuando entendamos el cerebro, la humanidad se entenderá a sí misma por dentro por primera vez. No me extrañaría que esto revolucione la cultura y cambie muchísimas cosas como la educación, el sistema legal o la economía. Será un nuevo humanismo” (Yuste 2015).
8. The “Pepsi paradox” refers to the fact that people show a reliable preference for Coke (vs. Pepsi) when they have brand information (as in supermarkets) but not in the absence of such information (as in blind taste tests). Neuroimaging studies of this phenomenon demonstrate a consistent neural response in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex correlated with subjects’ behavioral preferences (McClure et al. 2004) and that damage to that brain area abolishes the paradox (Koenigs and Tranel 2008). When it comes to knowing that branding makes a difference in consumer preference, neuroimaging results are superfluous. Moreover, it has been easy to go beyond the neural correlates uncovered by these fascinating studies to claim, improperly, that they show “why” people choose Coke over Pepsi (e.g., Mlodinow 2012).
9. We have drawn inspiration from Nicolai Krementsov’s discussion of biology as a cultural resource in his book on the quest for immortality in Bolshevik science (Krementsov 2014, 187–193).
1. GENEALOGY OF THE CEREBRAL SUBJECT
1. The first brain thought-experiment in professional philosophy seems to appear in Sidney Shoemaker’s Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (1963), in the form of Brownson, a character with Robinson’s body and Brown’s brain. The best-known version is Hilary Putnam’s “brains in a vat” in the first chapter of Reason, Truth, and History (1981). But there are many others. The Mind’s I, a popular 1981 book edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, gathered some particularly extravagant varieties; in Philosophical Explanations (1981), Robert Nozick tested his own theory of personal identity against eight brain-fictional situations. Philosophers do not refer to J. D. Bernal’s 1929 depiction of a future world where humanity is made up of interconnected brains in vats (The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. An Enquiry Into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, chap. 3; see Gere 2004). See Wilkes (1988) for a critical discussion of thought experiments as tools for the philosophy of personal identity.
2. Calls for an “embodied cognitive science” that would give up the “brain-centered view of cognitive function” and would “no longer be able to claim that the brain is the organ of the mind” (Kiverstein and Miller 2015, 9) remain programmatic and represent a minority.
3. Ferret (1993) here summarizes a position widespread in Anglo-American philosophy of personal identity.
4. The “cerebral subject” is thus to be distinguished from the “cerebral self,” defined as a prepsychological bodily reality made up of the cortex and its sensorimotor connections (Arminjon, Ansermet, and Magistretti 2011). Beyond that distinction, self, person, and subject tend to have different connotations. We have chosen not to differentiate these terms rigorously but will use them according to the nuances they convey: While self evokes interiority and reflexive consciousness, person and personhood are connected to attributes more directly relevant to legal and moral contexts, and subject may be more associated with the making of subjectivity in particular environments.
5. Such an interpretation and the work on which it is based may be limited, but it is hard to see how, as Cooter (2014, 148) affirms about the work of one of us (FV), historicizing “only serve[s] further to naturalize and sustain neuro representations” and thus becomes one of the “technologies of power for the new regime of truth.”
6. http://www.neurosurgery.org/cybermuseum/pre20th/epapyrus.html, www.ibro1.info/Pub/Pub_Main_Display.asp?LC_Docs_ID=3199.
7. Burton 1651, part. I, memb. III, subsect. I, “Passions and Perturbations of the Mind, how they cause Melancholy.”
8. Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease, trans. Francis Adams [The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, 1849], http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/sacred.html.
9. Lega (2006) argues that Willis’s work on the brain helped Locke go beyond Descartes “and develop a unique and radical philosophy that ultimately served as the foundation for modern neuroscience” (573). The thesis is interesting but is not substantiated in detail. On Willis in connection with the present discussion, see in particular Frank (1990).
10. See also the special section “20 Years of fMRI—What Has It Done for Understanding Cognition?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8 (1), 2013.
11. See also Paterniti (2000), an account of the author’s trip across the United States with Dr. Harvey, to return the extant pieces of Einstein’s brain to the physicist’s granddaughter.
12. See http://www.skepdic.com/braingym.html and http://www.senseaboutscience.org/resources.php/55/sense-about-brain-gym. Paul and Gail Dennison, the authors of the incriminated Brain Gym®: Teachers Edition, respond in http://www.braingym.org.nz/articles2.asp. In 2016, a “brain training” company agreed to pay $2 million to settle United States Federal Trade Commission charges of deceptive advertising (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/01/lumosity-pay-2-million-settle-ftc-deceptive-advertising-charges).
13. http://www.positscience.com/about.
2. DISCIPLINES OF THE NEURO
1. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking is not the only scholar who, following Foucault’s lead, has investigated such reflexive action. His depiction of “looping effects” in the processes of “making up people” as well as his notions about “historical ontology” have been perhaps the most influential; we refer to them later. In a similar spirit, the sociologist Nikolas Rose, often cited in this book, has been investigating subjectivation since his early work on the “psy disciplines” (Rose 1990, 1996). Hacking, Rose, and many others have sought to document subjectivation processes concretely; other authors (e.g., Richards 2002) have remained more purely programmatic. In his History of the Human Sciences, Roger Smith (1997, 22) characterizes well the phenomenon in question when he writes that “since ordinary people provided these sciences with their subject matter, the human sciences existed in a circle of interactions between science and ordinary life, a circle in which they influenced and were influenced by popular culture.”
2. Neurobabble and neuromythology are common in blogs and articles of various sorts; the latter also as a book title (Tallis 2004). For the other terms, see, respectively, Tallis (2008a, 2009), Legrenzi and Umiltà (2009), Hasler (2009).
3. Neuroimaging overhype is documented throughout this chapter and other places of this book, but see in addition Rusconi and Mitchener-Nissen (2014).
4. We have used “organic” in the sense that the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci applied to the intellectuals who would self-consciously articulate from within the experiences and interests of the working class. Gramsci contrasted organic intellectuals to the “traditional” ones who, though claiming to be disinterested, were tied to the dominant class and culture.
5. http://www.neuroethics.ox.ac.uk.
6. http://www.jsmf.org/programs/uhc.
7. Less simplistic attempts at articulating the human and the biological sciences by way of a “nuanced epigenetic and neurobiological attention” (in the case we mention here, to the links between health and urban life) seem to be emerging (Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh 2016a). However, even profound thinkers with an original and valuable project may get carried away by the grandiosity of their views, and, in euphuistic language, stick to neuro- prefixes, offer the customary prosopopoeia of the brain, and rapturously convey (perhaps against their own viewpoint) the usual ontological illusions about the empirical, theoretical, and political significance of showing that a phenomenon (in this case, “urban citizenship”) can be “instantiated neurobiologically” (Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh 2016b, 234).
8. Rosen presented his richly documented assessment in 2011 as a lecture on the twentieth anniversary of the first public presentation of fMRI (video at http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/history-fMRI). As of 2016, nothing indicates that it should be revised.
9. It is only fair to underline that the “questionable research practices” discussed in these and other articles are by far not unique to neuroscience. For an example from psychology, see Open Science Collaboration (2015).
11. http://neuroanthropology.net/ 2008/08/14/cultural-neuroscience/.
12. http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/08/24/the-first-phd-in-neuroanthropology.
13. Several collective works give a good idea of the range of neuroaesthetic inquiry: Dresler (2009), Lauring (2015), Martín-Aragúz et al. (2010), Martindale, Locher, and Petrov (2007), Skov and Vartanian (2009a). See also the collection of articles devoted to “Perspectives in Neuroaesthetics” in Rendiconti Lincei di Scienze Fisiche e Naturali 23(3), 2012. The best examination of neuroaesthetics as a whole remains Cappelletto (2009); like other discussions from outside the field, it has been totally ignored by its practitioners.
14. http://www.aesthetics.mpg.de.
15. http://www.uea.ac.uk/about/media-room/press-release-archive/-/asset_publisher/a2jEGMiFHPhv/content/cracking-the-real-da-vinci-code
16. For more on Redies’s model, see Redies et al. (2007) and Redies, Hasenstein, and Denzler (2007). The model derives largely from the purported existence of scale-invariant, fractal-like properties shared by artworks and complex natural scenes. In yet another attempt to reduce art to basic perceptual processes, these properties were said to characterize Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and thus to provide the clue to their “fundamental content” (Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas 1999; see also Taylor 2002); for a critical discussion (with further references) of the supposed fractality of Pollock’s art and its controversial use in authentication, see Schreyach (2007).
17. We draw the distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic relation from the French literary critic Gérard Genette (1999). As far as we can tell, neither empirical aesthetics in general nor neuroaesthetics in particular use these concepts. However, we shall employ them because those disciplines do convey (often implicitly) a notion of “aesthetic(s)” that overlaps with Genette’s usage. They all aim at taking into account the sensory and cognitive dimensions of experience in understanding the human “aesthetic” response to artworks and non-art objects. See also Schaeffer (1997, 2009).
18. We say “functional equivalents” because, for example, it is possible to enjoy colors though suffering from color blindness, as is the case of the artist Neil Harbisson: born with achromatopsia, he carries a permanently implanted “eyeborg” that allows him to hear colors, and he advocates, through his Cyborg Foundation, the development of similar devices for all the senses (http://cyborgism.wix.com/cyborg).
19. Canonical neurons, also in the F5 area of the ventral premotor cortex of monkeys, fire when one sees an object that can be grasped by the prehensile movement of the hand whose movements they encode.
3. CEREBRALIZING DISTRESS
1. DSM is now in its fifth edition (DSM-5 2013, http://www.dsm5.org); ICD is now in its tenth edition (ICD-10, http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/). The first version of ICD-10 was released in 1990, and ICD-11 is scheduled for 2018.
2. E.g., http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/ (October 2015).
3. The same applies to a much shorter handbook, Anderson and Camm (2014).
4. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/nimh-research-domain-criteria-rdoc.shtml.
5. The literature on the history of melancholy is vast. Saturn and Melancholy (Klibanksy, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964) remains the iconic classic; its scope is matched only by Jackson (1986), which emphasizes the continuity between melancholy and depression and attributes it to their representing the same empirical reality. For a recent and perceptive discussion of the historiography and the historical and conceptual issues involved, see Bell (2014), which focuses on the centuries up to 1800.
6. Summerfield argues against GMH, Miller tries to show its agenda is not “a form of cultural imperialism,” and White balances between the two. See Cooper (2016) for a reflection on how to move beyond the current impasse.
7. Amanda Baggs, who speaks through a voice synthesizer, became one of the best-known autism self-advocates after posting, in January 2007, her video In My Language (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc). There is controversy over whether Baggs is really a person with autism and if she really made the video herself. See among others http://amandabaggscontroversy.blogspot.com/.
8. See http://www.neurodiversity.com and http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com for the sites of two of the most vocal groups.
9. Recently published research demonstrating that the “mentally ill” label prompts significantly lower levels of tolerance and acceptance than person-first language (Granello and Gibbs 2016) will perhaps have an impact among advocates of neurodiversity.
10. http://www.autism-society.org.
11. http://www.naar.org/naar.asp; http://web.archive.org/web/20040927074818/http://www.cureautismnow.org/. See also Silverman (2012).
12. http://www.autismspeaks.org/index.php.
13. To understand better the debate and the positions at play, see Chamak (2008), Clarke and van Amerom (2007, 2008), Silverman (2008a, 2008b, 2012).
15. See for instance the post “Nevertheless, There Are Differences Between Autistics Who Approve of and Disapprove of Neurodiversity” (March 3, 2009), http://autismnaturalvariation.blogspot.com.es/2009/03/nevertheless-there-are-differences.html.
16. See also http://www.jonathans-stories.com.
17. See http://www.wrongplanet.net and http://web.archive.org/web/20070202083611/http://autisticculture.com/ for particularly interesting and informative websites in this respect.
18. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_Pride_Day.
19. http://cafepress.com/proudlyautistic.
21. See Brownlow (2007), Brownlow and O’Dell (2006), Cascio (2014), Clarke and Amerom (2007, 2008), Davidson (2008), Goupil (2014), Jones and Meldal (2001), Jones et al. (2001), Ortega et al. (2013), Waltz (2005).
22. A critique of this “mereological fallacy” (ascribing to the part properties of the whole) is at the heart of M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker’s Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003, part I, chap. 3).
23. http://welkowitz.typepad.com.
24. http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=184314.
25. http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/archive/index.php/thread-11062.html.
26. http://dannilion.com/category/wow/page/2/, our emphasis.
27. “Identity politics and the language controversy,” http://doraraymaker.com/wp/change/?p=3853 (emphasis added)
28. http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/showthread.php?tid=11062.
29. “Snippet” from Jane Meyerding’s website, http://web.archive.org/web/20050205082305/http://mjane.zolaweb.com/snipframe.html.
30. http://www.causes.com/actions/1593909-dsm-5-committee-dont-reduce-the-criteria-for-an-autism-spectrum-disorder-in-the-dsm-5.
31. http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/showthread.php?tid=11062.
32. http://everything2.com/title/neurotypical.
33. Whereas the radicalism of some self-advocates in the United States, Canada, and Australia has pushed the movement toward identity politics by essentializing neurological uniqueness and typologizing brain difference, this does not seem to have happened in countries like France or Brazil (Block and Cavalcante 2014, Chamak 2008, Ortega et al. 2013, Rios and Andrada 2015).
4. BRAINS ON SCREEN AND PAPER
1. One competition is organized by the Neuro Bureau, an “open neuroscience” initiative; the other one, called Art of Neuroscience, is run by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, with sponsorship from the publisher Springer (http://www.neurobureau.org/galleries/brain-art-competition-2015; http://aon.nin.knaw.nl/). On brain/art as well as exhibition catalogs, see Albano, Arnold, and Wallace (2002); Aldworth et al. (2008); Anker and Frazzetto (2006); Frazzetto and Anker (2009); Gilmore (2006); Kwint and Wingate (2012); Landi (2009); Pepperell (2011).
2. “Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities?” New York Times (5 April 2010), http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/can-neuro-lit-crit-save-the-humanities/.
3. New York Times review of Frankenstein (5 December 1931); in Tabula Rasa 3 (1994), http://www.tabula-rasa.info/Horror/FrankensteinFiles.html.
4. The image, “Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases Exhibits Pictures of 50 Criminal Brains,” announces a display at the American Museum of Natural History during the Second International Congress of Eugenics (1921); reproduced in Lederer (2002, 45) and available at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/index2.html?tag=567.
“UP FOR GRABS”
1. Similarly, in connection with climate change, the historian Julia Thomas (2015, 255) concludes: “Engaging with biology reveals a multiplicity of human figures and delimits the possible answers to humanistic questions of value—but cannot decide them. Ultimately, defining what is most endangered by climate change is the role of the humanists.”
2. Statement by the distinguished Spanish neuroscientist Manuel Martín-Loeches. http://www.tendencias21.net/Martin-Loeches-Todo-absolutamente-todo-esta-en-el-cerebro_a7130.html. We have provided throughout this book many other examples of such a stance.