This manifesto is for those of us who do not consider ourselves as belonging to one of the scientific fields generating official brain knowledge. We need a neurocultural manifesto because the brain has been put forward by others as foundational for knowing about the self and social life, because neuroscientists are being asked to be the philosophers, sociologists and gender theorists of our era - they are being asked to do our jobs - and are responding with enthusiasm, and also because brain matter is mattering. Its materiality is now making itself known everywhere: in images, texts, in culture, in embodied practices, in the clinic and the hospital and the school, in everyday life. Many of us want to...>>
Neuroculture
The articles here by Kim Cunningham, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Jesse Prinz, Deboleena Roy, and Alyson Spurgas are collectively the outcome of an experiment we undertook with a broader group of faculty and graduate students at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. This experiment, called NeuroCulture, was a year-long seminar and lecture series during which we tried to forge critical interdisciplinary engagements with neuroscience. The idea was that neuroscience is an enormously influential discourse in our current historical moment. It is both hugely popularized, in the sense that one finds references to brain science everywhere nowadays, and also highly technical, full of difficult jargon, and hard for outsiders to understand. We found that the challenges in creating interdisciplinary exchange about neuroscience are numerous. Among us were technophiles and neuroskeptics, empiricists and social constructionists, those who believe that science can be made better and those who reject its basic assumptions about objectivity and the material world in the first place. Our aim, fortunately, was not consensus. Instead we sought to proliferate thought in multiple directions, and on that score we succeeded.
Victoria Pitts-Taylor
In 2009, a team of psychotherapists sent by a humanitarian aid organization rushed to Honduras to treat survivors traumatized by the geopolitical crisis of a military coup and the resulting violence (Jarero, et al 2010). The targets of their war on trauma were in the brain---the neural networks which had been altered by this "mass critical incident." In the confines of a crowded, hot basement, the survivors escaped the violence around them, where the therapeutic team administered EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a new psychotherapy now being used globally in disaster relief efforts. EMDR consists of bilateral stimulation (tactile or visual stimulation administered on opposing sides of the body in a back and forth rhythm) combined with reliving...>>
One consequence of the Enlightenment is that human beings have become a subject of scientific scrutiny. Another consequence is that the sciences are regarded as hierarchically arranged. Officially, the hierarchy is mereological. We move from the tiny particles of physics, up to biology and chemistry, then to psychology and onto economics, and so on. But the hierarchy is also valued. Some sciences are said to be hard, others are soft, where degree of softness is correlated with kinship to the humanities. Thus, there is an upward ascent from physics to sociology and cultural anthropology, which may be one small step away from poetry. Physics is more respectable on this scheme. Thus, in deciding how to study the mind, it...>>
Recently, feminine desire has received a lot of attention in the popular press. In 2009, two feature-length articles were published in the New York Times Magazine that focused on the phenomenon of diagnosably-low sexual desire in women[1], [2], and, since then, stories of the elusive, complex, unwieldy, inherently responsive or submission-oriented, and sometimes simply weak or absent nature of feminine desire have proliferated in the mainstream media[3], published medical research[4], and popular neuroscience[5]. One subcategory of female sexual dysfunction, called hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), is sometimes studied with the help of an instrument called a vaginal photoplethysmograph. This device is inserted into the vagina and used to detect blood flow and muscular...>>
The senses (... depicted by examples of vision, balance, smell, touch, taste and hearing) provide an interface between the external world and its internal representation in our minds. − Vosshall and Carandini, (2009, Current Opinion in Neurobiology) Free will is not something that's spontaneous. It's the product of the biology of the brain. − Nora Volkow (2011, The New York Times) As a feminist science studies scholar trained in molecular neuroendocrinology, I have worked side by side with neuroscientists who have very different ways of looking at the world around them, and in turn, very different ideas of our place in that world as humans beings who have brains. Many of these neuroscientists - but not all...>>
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