Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject

by David Bates, Nima Bassiri

Overview

With the rise of cognitive science and the revolution in neuroscience, it is now commonplace to assume that the study of a human person-a thinking, feeling, acting subject-is ultimately the study of 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: A wiring diagram of synaptic connectivity will lead to a better understanding of human behavior and perhaps insights into the breakdown of human personhood with diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer's. Alongside this technologized discourse of the brain as locus of human subjectivity we find another perspective, one that emphasizes its essential plasticity-in both the developmental sense 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:	9780823266142
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2016
Series:	Berkeley Forum in the Humanities
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Bates is Professor and Chair in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political.

Nima Bassiri is Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Harper- Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. His research on the history of neuroscience has been published in journals such as Critical Inquiry and Journal of the History of Ideas.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Contributors ix

Preface David Bates Ninia Bassiri xi

1 Toward an Ethnography of Experimental Psychology Emily Martin 1

2 "You Are (Not) Your Synapses": Toward a Critical Approach to Neuroscience Catherine Malabou 20

3 Plasticity, Pathology, and Pleasure in Cold War America Cathy Gere 35

4 Epileptic Insanity and Personal Identity: John Hughlings Jackson and the Formations of the Neuropathic Self Nima Bassiri 65

5 Integrations, Vigilance, Catastrophe: The Neuropsychiatry of Aphasia in Henry Head and Kurt Goldstein Stefanos Geroulanos Todd Meyers 112

6 The History of a Brain Wound: Alexander Luria and the Dialectics of Soviet Plasticity Hannah Proctor Laura Salisbury 159

7 Automaticity, Plasticity, and the Deviant Origins of Artificial intelligence David Bates 194

8 Plastic Diagrams: Circuits in the Brain and How They Got There Joseph Dumit 219

9 Imperfect Reflections: Norms, Pathology, and Difference in Mirror Neuron Research Katja Guenther 268

10 On How Adult Cerebral Plasticity Research Has Decoupled Pathology from Death Tobias Rees 309

Index 343