Critical Neuroscience (eBook)

Suparna Choudhury is Junior Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Berlin Institute for Mind and Brain, Humboldt University, Germany. Her research examines the emergence of the 'neurological adolescent'. She has also published on cultural neuroscience and topics at the intersection of neuroscience and society. Jan Slaby is Junior Professor in Philosophy of Mind and Emotion at Free University Berlin, Germany. The author of a German-language book exploring the world-disclosing nature of human emotions, he has also been involved in research and teaching on the philosophy of psychiatry, with a particular focus on affective disorders and background feelings.

Credits vii

List of Illustrations viii

About the Editors x

List of Contributors xi

Preface xiii

Introduction: Critical Neuroscience--Between Lifeworld and Laboratory 1
Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby

Part I--Motivations and Foundations 27

1 Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience 29
Jan Slaby and Suparna Choudhury

2 The Need for a Critical Neuroscience: From Neuroideology to Neurotechnology 53
Steven Rose

3 Against First Nature: Critical Theory and Neuroscience 67
Martin Hartmann

4 Scanning the Lifeworld: Toward a Critical Neuroscience of Action and Interaction 85
Shaun Gallagher

Part II--Histories of the Brain 111

5 Toys are Us: Models and Metaphors in Brain Research 113
Cornelius Borck

6 The Neuromance of Cerebral History 135
Max Stadler

7 Empathic Cruelty and the Origins of the Social Brain 159
Allan Young

Part III--Neuroscience in Context: From Laboratory to Lifeworld 177

8 Disrupting Images: Neuroscientific Representations in the Lives of Psychiatric Patients 179
Simon Cohn

9 Critically Producing Brain Images of Mind 195
Joseph Dumit

10 Radical Reductions: Neurophysiology, Politics and Personhood in Russian Addiction Medicine 227
Eugene Raikhel

11 Delirious Brain Chemistry and Controlled Culture: Exploring the Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects 253
Nicolas Langlitz

Part IV--Situating the Brain: From Lifeworld back to Laboratory? 263

12 From Neuroimaging to Tea Leaves in the Bottom of a Cup 265
Amir Raz

13 The Salmon of Doubt: Six Months of Methodological Controversy within Social Neuroscience 273
Daniel S. Margulies

14 Cultural Neuroscience as Critical Neuroscience in Practice 287
Joan Y. Chiao and Bobby K. Cheon

Part V--Beyond Neural Correlates: Ecological Approaches to Psychiatry 305

15 Re-Socializing Psychiatry: Critical Neuroscience and the Limits of Reductionism 307
Laurence J. Kirmayer and Ian Gold

16 Are Mental Illnesses Diseases of the Brain? 331
Thomas Fuchs

17 Are there Neural Correlates of Depression? 345
Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega

18 The Future of Critical Neuroscience 367
Laurence J. Kirmayer

Index 385

Neurological thinking has extended itself into a great many spheres
of life, from "neuroanthropology" to "neurozoology". We have
urgently needed to understand this development within a broad
historical and cultural context and Critical Neuroscience
provides us with the necessary tools to engage with neuroscience
and its social impacts in productive and intelligent ways. The book
will be an extremely important resource for anyone interested in
understanding how and why neuroscientific research has led us to
think about social life in new ways.

Emily Martin, Professor of Anthropology, New York
University and author of 'Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and
Depression in American Culture'

At a time where neuroscience, whether molecular or social, is
expanding so rapidly to nearly all aspects of human societies, way
beyond academia, this volume brings a welcome and refreshing
perspective. Choudhury and Slaby are to be commended for bringing
together various scholars within a framework that constructively
criticizes and analyzes potentials and problems, promises and
challenges, pitfalls and strengths associated with human
neuroscience. This volume is extremely important to all, and is of
special benefit to the emerging field of social neuroscience.

Jean Decety, Professor of Psychology and
Psychiatry and Co-Director of Brain Research Imaging Centre,
University of Chicago

The neurosciences today are at once the site of genuinely
exciting research, of wild claims for the field's
"revolutionary" significance for human
self-understanding, and of skeptical dismissals of both.
Critical Neuroscience shows instead how to analyze this
scientific work with utmost seriousness, through critical
reflection on its history and guiding assumptions, its involvement
in multiple practical and institutional settings, its scientific
prospects, and how it affects and is affected by how we think about
ourselves. The book offers a model for thoughtful engagement
with innovative, widely influential scientific research.

Joseph Rouse, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of
the 'Science in Society' Program, Wesleyan University, USA