The Cerebral Subject: Brain and Self in Contemporary Culture
Cooperation Partners: Institute for Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The goal of this project is to study in history and
contemporary culture the idea, epitomized by the expression “cerebral subject,”
that the human person is constituted essentially by the brain, or that the
brain is the only part of the body one needs to have in order to be herself or
himself. Since the 1990s, several disciplines, such as neurotheology,
neuroeducation, neuroesthetics, neuropsychoanalysis, neuromarketing or
neuroeconomics have advanced bold plans to reform the human sciences on the
basis of knowledge about the brain.
Driven by the availability of brain imaging technologies, these fields tend to focus on the quest for neural correlates of behaviors and mental processes. The media has given much room to these emergent fields; it has also reported on new forms of sociability incarnate in the growing “neurodiversity” movement, and has decisively contributed to turn brain scans into modern icons of personhood. Parallel to academic approaches, but interacting with them, there is an expanding galaxy of beliefs and practices that go from learning how to draw or feel with one side of the brain, to various forms of neurohealthism, neuroascetics, neuroesotericism and neuroeschatology. The project approaches these phenomena from different angles, and in reference not only to science and medicine, but also to extra-scientific ideas and practices that ultimately concern the self and the definition of the human being.
Contact: Fernando Vidal, vidal[AT]mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
