Being Brains offers a critical exploration of neurocentrism, the belief that “we are our brains,” which became widespread in the 1990s. Encouraged by advances in neuroimaging, the humanities and social sciences have taken a “neural turn,” in the form of neuro-subspecialties in fields such as anthropology, aesthetics, education, history, law, sociology, and theology. Dubious but successful commercial enterprises such as “neuromarketing” and “neurobics” have emerged to take advantage of the heightened sensitivity to all things neuro. While neither hegemonic nor monolithic, the neurocentric view embodies a powerful ideology that is at the heart of some of today’s most important philosophical, ethical, scientific, and political debates. Being Brains, chosen as 2018 Outstanding Book in the History of the Neurosciences by the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences, examines the internal logic of such ideology, its genealogy, and its main contemporary incarnations.
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Fernando Vidal (Author) Fernando Vidal is Research Professor of ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) at the Medical Anthropology Research Center, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain.
Francisco Ortega (Author) Francisco Ortega is Professor at the Institute for Social Medicine and Research Coordinator of the Rio Center for Global Health at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also Visiting Professor at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College, London.
“In Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject, Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega argue that the ideology of ‘brainhood,’ meaning the idea that we are, in essence, our brains, predates the sophisticated research methods or precise knowledge of brain structures that characterize contemporary neuroscience. Indeed, contemporary brain science implicitly draws on a modernist concept of the brain as author of the individual and ruler of the body as justification for continued investment in research programs and equipment. That these efforts proceed in the absence of results that provide other than correlational evidence of relations between what happens in the brain and what people feel, think, and do, will never serve as an argument for redirecting scientific attention from brains. This is because the claim that brains rule bodies is a central organizing belief, not a research finding.”---Chloe Silverman, author of Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder
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