Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience brings together multi-disciplinary scholars from around the world to explore key social, historical and philosophical studies of neuroscience, and to analyze the socio-cultural implications of recent advances in the field. This text's original, interdisciplinary approach explores the creative potential for engaging experimental neuroscience with social studies of neuroscience while furthering the dialogue between neuroscience and the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.

Table of Contents

• Credits
• List of Illustrations
• Figures
• Color Plates
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Imagined Futures (or, What Revolution?)
• Neuroscience, Society, and Personhood
• Countering the Cerebral Subject: Embodied Experience and the Politics of Situated Subjectivity
• Outline of Chapters
• Part I Motivations and Foundations
• 1 Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience
• Assemblage: The Thickening of Brain-Based Phenomena
• How Does the Social Get Under the Skin?
• Re-invoking the Social in Studies of Neuroscience
• Structural Pathologies in Science and Society
• Whose Norms? Expertise, Participation, and Contestation
• What Difference Can Critique Make to Neuroscience?
• Conclusion
• 2 The Need for a Critical Neuroscience
• The Rise of Neuroscience
• The Limits to Reductionism
• On Consciousness
• The Autopoietic View
• The Cerebroscope
• On Neurotechnology
• So What should Critical Neuroscience Do?
• 3 Against First Nature
• The Failures of Traditional Theory
• The Failures of Positivism and Naturalism
• Is Neuroscience Positivistic—or Naturalistic?
• Flexible Capitalism and Neuroscience
• 4 Scanning the Lifeworld
• Agency and Free Will
• Theory of Mind
• An Alternative Theory
• Neural Simulation or Enactive Perception?
• Implications for Critical Theory
• Part II Histories of the Brain
• 5 Toys are Us
• The Tape Recorder and the Electrode
• The Brain as Communication Technology: A Humanist's Utopia
• Form and Function Beyond Technology
• The Brain as Writing Apparatus and Symbolic Machine
• The Plastic Brain: What You See is What You Get
• 6 The Neuromance of Cerebral History
• Neuromance
• Cyber Romance
• Conclusion
• 7 Empathic Cruelty and the Origins of the Social Brain
• Versions of Human Nature
• The Prehistory of Empathy
• Empathy and Mirror Neurons
• The Social Brain
• The Narrative of the Jacksonian Brain
• The Narrative of Other Minds
• The Problem of the One and Many
• The Narrative of the One and Many
• Schadenfreude
• Empathic Cruelty and Human Nature
• Empathic Psychopaths
• Conclusion
• Part III Neuroscience in Context
• 8 Disrupting Images
• Traditional Psychiatric Practice
• New Knowledge and Old Psychiatry
• Patients’ Disruptions
• Making it Real
• Discussion
• 9 Critically Producing Brain Images of Mind
• Creating Experiments: A Difficult Task
• STAGE 1: EXPERIMENT DESIGN
• STAGE 3: MAKING DATA COMPARABLE
• STAGE 4: PRODUCING INTERPRETED IMAGES
• 10 Radical Reductions
• From “Diseased Wills” to “Hijacked Brains”
• Reductionism as Politics
• Disease States
• Condition and Suggest: Narcology's Therapies
• Conclusion: Radical Measures
• 11 Delirious Brain Chemistry and Controlled Culture
• Ethnographic Vignette I: Bad Trip
• Ethnographic Vignette II: “This is it!”
• The Persistence of the Subjective
• Setting Matters: The Limits of Placebo Controls
• Controlling for Culture
• Conclusion
• Part IV Situating the brain
• 12 From Neuroimaging to Tea Leaves in the Bottom of a Cup1
• The Perils of Neuroimaging
• The Promise of Neuroimaging
• Conclusion
• 13 The Salmon of Doubt
• PART I: Voodoos and Don'ts
• PART II: Critical Tactics in Action
• 14 Cultural Neuroscience as Critical Neuroscience in Practice
• Critical Neuroscience: A Timely Challenge for Behavioral and Brain Scientists
• Cultural Neuroscience: Bridging Cultural and Biological Sciences
• Culture and Mental Illness: An Example of Cultural Neuroscience as Critical Neuroscience in Practice
• Conclusion
• Part V Beyond neural correlates
• 15 Re-Socializing Psychiatry
• Varieties of Reductionism
• Ontologies of Mind
• Subjectivity and the Social Construction of the Self
• Social Origins of Psychiatric Disorder
• Socializing Biological Psychiatry
• Conclusion: Beyond Reductionism
• 16 Are Mental Illnesses Diseases of the Brain?
• Circular Causality of Living Systems
• Mental Illness as Circular Process
• Circular Causality in Pathogenesis
• Circular Causality in Therapy
• Conclusion
• 17 Are there Neural Correlates of Depression?
• The Neural Correlates of Consciousness
• Depression: Neuroimages and Neurocorrelates
• Concluding Remarks
• 18 The Future of Critical Neuroscience
• Varieties of Critical Neuroscience
• Locating Nervous Systems
• Uncovering Looping Effects
• The Rhetorical Appeal of Neuroscience in Psychiatry
• The Willful Brain
• Spectral Selves
• Conclusion
• Plates