This review article critically surveys the following literature by placing it under the historiographical banner of ‘the history of the brain and mind sciences’: Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Katja Guenther, Localization and its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis & the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Stephen Casper and Delia Gavrus (eds), The History of the Brain and Mind Sciences: Technique, Technology, Therapy (Rochester: University of (...) Rochester Press, 2017); Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Neurotechnologies of the Self: Mind, Brain and Subjectivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). This framework highlights contemporary attempts to historicize the integrative project of neuroscience and set the correct limits to interdisciplinary collaboration. While attempts to critically engage with the ‘neuro’ rhetoric of contemporary neuroscientists can seem at odds with historians seeking to write the history of neuroscience from the margins, it is argued that together these two projects represent a positive historiographical direction for the history of the neurosciences after the decade of the brain. (shrink)

This review article critically surveys the following literature by placing it under the historiographical banner of ‘the history of the brain and mind sciences’: Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Katja Guenther, Localization and its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis & the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Stephen Casper and Delia Gavrus (eds), The History of the Brain and Mind Sciences: Technique, Technology, Therapy (Rochester: University of (...) Rochester Press, 2017); Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Neurotechnologies of the Self: Mind, Brain and Subjectivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). This framework highlights contemporary attempts to historicize the integrative project of neuroscience and set the correct limits to interdisciplinary collaboration. While attempts to critically engage with the ‘neuro’ rhetoric of contemporary neuroscientists can seem at odds with historians seeking to write the history of neuroscience from the margins, it is argued that together these two projects represent a positive historiographical direction for the history of the neurosciences after the decade of the brain. (shrink)

This paper takes an integrated history and philosophy of science approach to the topic of "simplicity out of complexity". The reflex theory was a framework within early twentieth century psychology and neuroscience which aimed to decompose complex behaviours and neural responses into simple reflexes. It was controversial in its time, and did not live up to its own theoretical and empirical ambitions. Examination of this episode poses important questions about the limitations of simplifying strategies, and the relationship between simplification and (...) the engineering approach to biology. (shrink)

Extensive scholarship has described the historical and ethical imperatives shaping the emergence of the brain death criteria in the 1960s and 1970s. This essay explores the longer intellectual history that shaped theories of neurological consciousness from the late-nineteenth century to that period, and argues that a significant transformation occurred in the elaboration of those theories in the 1960s and after, the period when various disturbances of consciousness were discovered or thoroughly elaborated. Numerous historical conditions can be identified and attributed to (...) the production of the new theories that emerged from that period-on, not least in the broader social and cultural transformations that occurred with decolonialization, pro-democracy movements, and civil and disability rights advocacy, all contexts which exerted pressures on the institutions and professions of medicine. In this telling, the discovery of the locked-in patient is thus the exploration of a transformed vision of medical patients – one that moved them from a liminal indefinite space into a firmly grounded epistemological existence – in a backdrop in which medical professionals in particular and society in general was beginning to see the body differently. With this new vision, came a relational theory of consciousness to, a reading of a body and it signs, that shifted consciousness from an internally-derived state into a relationally-constructed object. The ontology of consciousness, whatever it was, thereby became entangled with the social condition of consciousness, one that bridged the worlds of close relationship with the social movements and anxieties about personhood that emanated out of that fraught period. (shrink)