Abstract
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Atomized Body. The Cultural Life of Stem Cells, Genes and Neurons |
| Editors | Liljefors Max, Lundin Susanne, Wiszmeg Andréa |
| Publisher | Nordic Academic Press |
| Pages | 143-169 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-91-87121-92-0 |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |
Subject classification (UKÄ)
- Art History
Free keywords
- Schreber
- brain science
- visualization
- art history
- scientific visualization