Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject
368
Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject
368eBook
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Overview
With the rise of cognitive science and the revolution in neuroscience, the study of human subjects—thinking, feeling, acting individuals—ultimately focuses on the human brain. In both Europe and the United States, massive state-funded research is focused on mapping the brain in all its remarkable complexity. The metaphors employed are largely technological, using a diagram of synaptic connectivity as a path to understanding human behavior. But alongside this technologized discourse, we find another perspective, one that emphasizes the brain’s essential plasticity, both in development and as a response to traumas such as strokes, tumors, or gunshot wounds.
This collection of essays brings together a diverse range of scholars to investigate how the “neural subject” of the twenty-first century came to be. Taking approaches both historical and theoretical, they probe the possibilities and limits of neuroscientific understandings of human experience. Topics include landmark studies in the history of neuroscience, the relationship between neural and technological “pathologies,” and analyses of contemporary concepts of plasticity and pathology in cognitive neuroscience.
Central to the volume is a critical examination of the relationship between pathology and plasticity. Because pathology is often the occasion for neural reorganization and adaptation, it exists not in opposition to the brain’s “normal” operation but instead as something intimately connected to our ways of being and understanding.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823266159 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Toward an Ethnography of Experimental Psychology
AN ENDURING QUESTION in the history and philosophy of science is: What do we mean by objectivity and subjectivity? In their historical overview Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison set out three phases of scientific knowledge over the centuries, from "truth to nature," to "mechanical objectivity," to "trained judgment." On the one hand, the epistemic virtue of "mechanical objectivity" strives to "capture nature" while eliminating any intervention on the part of the researcher. Exemplary photos of snowflakes show how they were deliberately presented to retain asymmetries that show the capture of nature with as little interference from the researcher as possible. The epistemic virtue of "trained judgment," on the other hand, is one in which intuitive or aesthetic elements can enter into how a researcher interprets a brain image, for example. One of their examples of trained judgment is, in Daston's words, an "image of the magnetic field of the sun [mixing] the output of sophisticated equipment with a 'subjective' smoothing of data — the authors deemed the intervention necessary to remove instrumental artifacts." Epistemic virtues are not rigidly separated into different regimes as much as they are characteristic of them. In this paper I offer a modest engagement with the issue of "training" in relation to psychological experimentation as a way of understanding how experimental psychologists grapple with issues of subjectivity and objectivity. We will see that a basic goal of the experimental method in cognitive psychology is to keep the human subject stable in time and space. Since human beings are, in many other contexts in the history of neurology, understood as constitutively mobile, changeable, and profoundly plastic, this is a hard job. We should not be surprised if accomplishing such a hard, perhaps impossible job produces some contradictions.
In what follows I turn to the history of experimental psychology, which was closely connected to anthropology at its beginning, to understand what role subjectivity and objectivity were granted at an earlier time and to offer a partial solution to the puzzle I will introduce in due course. I will describe two incidents from my current fieldwork with experimental cognitive psychologists (ongoing in three labs in the United States) to present a puzzle about what role subjectivity has today in experimental psychology. I will relate what experimental cognitive psychologists explained to me as the ways they maintain objectivity in their experiments through various forms of control.
Incident #1
DURING THE TWO-YEAR wait I endured while trying to obtain permission to do fieldwork in experimental psychology labs, I passed the time by volunteering to be a subject through public requests posted by academic psychology departments on the web or on bulletin boards. I was struck by how irrelevant my experience as a subject was to the experimenters. In one experiment, for example, I was hooked up with electrodes used to measure small facial movements of which I was unaware. These would indicate my emotional responses to photographs presented on the computer screen in front of me. I pressed keys on the keyboard to register my conscious responses to these photographs. A software program tallied the results. My responses were produced, I was told, by specific parts of my brain. What the researchers sought were data about how my brain reacted to the photographs. Whatever was going on in my conscious experience could be ignored. For example, although the monitor I was to attend to and make my responses to was right in front of me, just on my left was another monitor, which would show the varying electrical impulses from my electrodes. I noted to the experimenter that I could easily see the read-out of my own responses, and she said, "That's fine, it doesn't matter." It was as if the experimental setting were considered such a secure enclosure that it could render minor aspects of my environment insignificant, including even my ability to see the readout from my own facial electrodes.
Incident #2
A GRAD STUDENT in a different lab told me about an experiment he was thinking of doing that would build on earlier research. He said, "The earlier experiment didn't work, and one of the reasons that it didn't work is they didn't train people. They just put them immediately in the scanner and tried to do everything at that time." Coincidentally, in the lab meeting for yet another lab that same week there was a long discussion of "test-enhanced learning." I learned that researchers have found experimentally that any form of practice before a test improves outcomes. It does not matter whether the student gives wrong answers or is given no questions to answer at all but only told to mechanically fill in the answer bubbles: practice of any kind before a test improves performance.
At this moment, sitting in the lab meeting, I was shocked. The grad student had just told me that lack of practice before an experiment was a factor in the failure of an experiment, but in the lab meeting I had just learned that psychological research had demonstrated the power of the "practice effect" in impinging on performance. Only then did I realize that in almost all the experiments in which I had volunteered as a subject I was being trained before the experiment started. I certainly remembered the practice exercises. But I had thought of them as if I were a student who was being tested about whether I was an adequate subject, not as a form of training that would affect my performance in the experiment. After the practices I couldn't help asking, "How did I do?" None of the experimenters ever answered that question except to say "Fine" with a smile, as if my question really didn't have an answer. Nor were my experiences unusual: the dozens of textbooks on experimental method I have consulted recommend the use of practice trials to "stabilize the subjects" "before the experimental conditions of interest are introduced."
So the puzzle conveyed by these incidents is this: in the first case the experimental setting is held to be so powerful that it can render aspects of the subject's experience irrelevant. In the second case the experimental setting actually includes training techniques that deliberately affect the subject's experience. These aspects of the two settings seem to work in opposite directions. Another way to put this is this: in the first incident it is the subject's experience that is at issue; in the second it is both the subject's experience and the experimenter's experience, in the sense that the experimenter's goal of achieving an effect might be said to have intervened in the experiment.
Understanding why I was told that my experience of seeing the readout of my own responses didn't matter comes fairly easily, thanks to historians of psychology (such as Betty Bayer, Kurt Danziger, and Jill Morawski) who have described how "introspection" — the role of the subject's own experience (his or her subjectivity) — largely came to be ruled out of experimental settings by the mid-twentieth century. According to John Carson, by eliminating introspection, the human subject was thus "transformed into a usable experimental object." Similarly historian Kurt Danziger has remarked on the progressive elimination of the subject's own experience from psychology and pointed out that where the effort has been made to reintroduce it, the refusal has been absolutely relentless. Daston and Galison say that subjectivity has at times been a "fighting word."
So far so good. But if the subject's experience can be ignored, how do we understand the need for training subjects? Psychologists generally certainly accept the virtue Daston and Galison describe as "mechanical objectivity," "capturing nature" while avoiding interventions by the researcher. But one kind of intervention is apparently an exception: experimenters design training for subjects that happens routinely as a part of the experimental protocol. We could ask whether another of Daston and Galison's virtues —"trained judgment"— is playing a role here, but we would have to realize an important difference: for Daston and Galison, it is the experimenter whose judgment is trained; in my fieldwork labs it is the human subject who is trained. How can a subject who is trained by the experimenter play a part in producing (objective) scientific knowledge?
The Experiment
TO MOVE TOWARD the beginning of an answer, we might start with the concept and practice of the experiment in psychology labs. I have learned in my psychology classes and labs that good experiments need to have the following characteristics. Dependent variables are distinguished from independent variables. All dependent variables should be clearly measurable. Dependent variables are commonly measured by reaction time, the interval between the time the stimulus is presented and the time the subject presses a key. Commonly these are behaviors in a task, such as distinguishing between different stimuli or remembering a stimulus from earlier in the experiment. The experimenter introduces independent variables and controls them precisely. These are called manipulations because the independent variables are meant to cause a change in the dependent variables.
I have been told this is difficult to follow, and it is for me too. Imagine a simple scene in an experiment. The subject sits before a keyboard and monitor. Stimuli are flashed on the screen, and the subject presses designated keys to indicate her response: yes, it is a word, or no, it is not a word is a simple example. Then the numerical results are logged on a spreadsheet. The reaction time between stimulus and response is the dependent variable and a small number of conditions are the independent variables, chosen by the researcher. These are the simple elements of a behavioral experiment, but they are also the basis of experiments using more elaborate technological methods, such as EEG measurements on the scalp or brain imaging in an fMRI machine. When all this is in place, the experimenter may see an effect. An effect is demonstrated when subjects produce statistically significant different reaction times under different conditions. Psychologists say some colleagues are especially good at "getting effects." Others are not so lucky.
The subjective experience of those sitting in the subject's chair is not supposed to be involved. The processes being measured (cognition) are not knowable to the subject — under ordinary circumstances we do not know what we remember best, what we react to most emotionally, or how we respond to a manipulation involving risk or failure. And we certainly do not know what parts of the brain may be processing these cognitive operations.
Stabilizing the Subject in Time and Space
YOU CAN SEE that control of variables plays an important role in an experiment. But so does control of the subject as a living, human person. A key part of a psychology experiment is stabilizing the subject in time and space. Historically a simple method of holding the subject still in space was the bite bar, dating to experiments by the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and reiterated in twentieth-century American college psychology labs. Its contemporary descendant is the fixation point. The fixation point is an image of a cross, in the shape of a plus sign that appears on the computer monitor in an experiment, usually between trials. No one but me thinks it is interesting! When I ask about it, people say, "Oh, it is just to prevent subjects from looking around all over the place."
In the dozens and dozens of experiments in which I have been a subject, I've noted that experimenters do not generally explicitly say to subjects, "Look at the fixation point when it appears." (I heard something like this only once.) One time, in an ongoing experiment I was observing, I asked the graduate student what the fixation point was for. Only then did he tell the subject to look at the fixation point.
Perhaps one reason subjects don't need to be told about the fixation point is that there is another way a living human being can be held steady in time and space so that comparable data can be extracted from him or her. This modest stabilizing technology, central to the psychological experiment, is the table. Obvious and overlooked, the table is nonetheless an essential accompaniment to civilized human life: the first thing Robinson Crusoe did after being shipwrecked on his island was build a table.
A table is a technology that stabilizes people and things in space for a time. The table, with its chair, enforces a posture of attention to what is on it. It permits display and use of other tools and enables precise recording on paper. It also allows the display of disparate materials on the same plane in space. Bruno Latour explained the effect of this as he watched botanists in the field arranging soil and plant samples on tables: "Specimens from different locations and times become contemporaries of one another on the flat table, all visible under the same unifying gaze." The flat plane provided by the table enables the abstraction of dissimilar specimens into categories.
Open and inviting a table might seem, but once you are sitting at it, certain forms of courtesy might serve to hold you there. If the table can be thought of as a kind of trap (following Alfred Gell) to capture and contain a subject, it is a disarming one — it looks so placid and innocent for something that has the potential for powerful constraint. The table is so embedded in the experimental context that it escapes notice, even though without it the stability of the subject in space and over time would be difficult if not impossible to achieve. Once it becomes evident that the table is an active artifact in the production of knowledge, new possibilities for opening up the nature of the experimental space in psychology abound. Latour was right to say that "laboratories are excellent sites in which to understand the production of certainty, [but] ... they have the major disadvantage of relying on the indefinite sedimentation of other disciplines, instruments, languages, and practices. ... In the laboratory there is always a pre-constructed universe that is miraculously similar to that of the sciences." After a discussion of the table's role in experiments, one of my researcher interlocutors began puzzling about what it would take to conduct an experiment about, say, memory in a crowded coffee shop instead of an experimental setting. This was disconcerting to him because leaving the laboratory would mean leaving a world of tables, flat, one-dimensional, and still. But anthropologists should take note: even the busiest coffee shop has its tables too.
In my current project tables are ubiquitous. Tables, with their chairs, keep one's body in place. In all the experiments I participated in, the experimenter made frequent and repeated requests concerning tables: Sit here at the table. Pull your chair closer to the table. Put your hand on the table. Rest your hand flat on the table. Arrange the keyboard conveniently on the table, etc. And of course tables hold computers, monitors, keyboards, and recording equipment steady. In the contemporary lab the place of the psychological subject in relation to the equipment is not open for debate. The subject sits at a table and yields data to the machines. You might say that the fixation point is ancillary to the table.
Today the psychological experiment seems governed by controls that make human subjects into "data-emitting machines" whose experience beyond what is controlled is irrelevant. We still do not have a way to understand the logic of practice or training sessions right before the data are collected. Remember that Daston and Galison's "mechanical objectivity" rules out intervention in the capture of nature on the part of the researcher. "Trained judgment" (a more recent epistemological virtue) allows training of the researcher's judgment, but this amounts to training in how to see "nature." If "nature" takes the form of a subject's psychological processing, the subject's experience falls through the cracks.
Wundt's Lab
SO, IN SEARCH of an answer, I now turn back in time, as I promised, to the history of experimental psychology to understand what role the experience of the subject had in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and to offer a partial solution to the puzzle I've raised. I begin with the psychological experiment in the German psychology lab of Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, the first of its kind in the world. Historians like Ruth Benschop and Deborah Coon helped me to understand the technologies that enabled precise measurement of time intervals in Wundt's Leipzig laboratory. As Coon explains, laboratory hardware standardized and regulated the physical stimuli to which the subject would respond, and "it also gave quantified, standardized output [while using] the introspective method." The subject was to record both when he perceived the stimulus and when he recognized its meaning. This was intended to capture conscious experience.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Contributors,
Preface David Bates and Nima Bassiri,
1. Toward an Ethnography of Experimental Psychology Emily Martin,
2. "You Are (Not) Your Synapses": Toward a Critical Approach to Neuroscience Catherine Malabou,
3. Plasticity, Pathology, and Pleasure in Cold War America Cathy Gere,
4. Epileptic Insanity and Personal Identity: John Hughlings Jackson and the Formations of the Neuropathic Self Nima Bassiri,
5. Integrations, Vigilance, Catastrophe: The Neuropsychiatry of Aphasia in Henry Head and Kurt Goldstein Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers,
6. The History of a Brain Wound: Alexander Luria and the Dialectics of Soviet Plasticity Hannah Proctor and Laura Salisbury,
7. Automaticity, Plasticity, and the Deviant Origins of Artificial Intelligence David Bates,
8. Plastic Diagrams: Circuits in the Brain and How They Got There Joseph Dumit,
9. Imperfect Reflections: Norms, Pathology, and Difference in Mirror Neuron Research Katja Guenther,
10. On How Adult Cerebral Plasticity Research Has Decoupled Pathology from Death Tobias Rees,
Index,