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Neuronal Fantasies : Reading Neuroscience with Schreber

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Author

Editor

  • Liljefors Max
  • Lundin Susanne
  • Wiszmeg Andréa

Summary, in English

This essay examines the aesthetics and rhetoric through which popular science delivers the message of brain-mind conflation—‘You are your brain’. Noting the entwinement of realist and imaginary visual tropes in popular scientific presentations of brain imaging, author seeks a correlative ‘counter-text’ to this discourse in one of the classic texts in psychiatric history, the memoirs of the paranoid nineteenth-century judge, Daniel Paul Schreber. In this juxtaposition of contemporary neuroscience and a century-old insider report from madness, the author sees two opposite fantasies about the biologization of the mind. In the end, Schreber’s is deemed the most ‘realist’, since his delusions highlight precisely the blind spots of popular neuroscience today, especially the eclipse of societal, collective meaning in strictly biologistic explanations of the mind.

Department/s

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

143-169

Publication/Series

The Atomized Body. The Cultural Life of Stem Cells, Genes and Neurons

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

Nordic Academic Press

Topic

  • Art History

Keywords

  • Schreber
  • brain science
  • visualization
  • art history
  • scientific visualization

Status

Published

Project

  • BAGADILICO – Excellence in Parkinson and Huntington Research

Research group

  • The Cultural Studies Group of Neuroscience

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-91-87121-92-0