Fernando Vidal

Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies | ICREA · Medical Anthropology Research Center - Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Performing Brains on Screen deals with film enactments and representations of the belief that human beings are essentially their brains, a belief that embodies one of the most influential modern ways of understanding the human. Films have performed brains in two chief ways: by turning physical brains into protagonists, as in the “brain movies” of t...

Given its abundance, dispersion, and revision and publication history, the work of the Genevan critic and historian of medicine Jean Starobinski (1920-1999) presents very considerable technical and ethical challenges for its would-be editors. The first part of the present article discusses these challenges. The second part focuses on the editorial...

Consecuencias del feminicidio en violencia machista: análisis de necesidades de hijos, hijas y familiares para nuevas propuestas de intervención integral en CataluñaAntropologia i fenomenologia de la síndrome del captiveri (Locked-in Syndrome)El cuidado importa. Impacto de género en las cuidadoras/es de mayores y dependientes en tiempos de la Covid...

Tracheostomy with invasive ventilation (TIV) may be required for the survival of patients at advanced stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In Japan it has been shown that a proactive approach toward TIV may prolong the survival of ALS patients by over 10 years by preventing the lethal respiratory failure that generally occurs within 3-5 y...

There is no systematic knowledge about how individuals with Locked-in Syndrome (LIS) experience their situation. A phenomenology of LIS, in the sense of a description of subjective experience as lived by the ill persons themselves, does not yet exist as an organized endeavor. The present article takes a step in that direction by reviewing various m...

The existential situation of persons who suffer from the locked-in syndrome (LIS) raises manifold issues significant to medical anthropology, phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and neuroethics that have not yet been systematically explored. The present special issue of Neuroethics illustrates the joint effort of a consolidating network of scholars f...

En hommage posthume à Jean Starobinski (1920-2019) à l’occasion du centenaire de sa naissance, nous esquissons ici sa pensée sur les « raisons du corps » en la reliant à certains champs de recherche contemporains. Prolongeant le « tournant somatique » des années 1980, les « tournants émotionnel » et « intéroceptif » prétendent réintégrer le corps d...

Scientists, engineers, and healthcare professionals are currently developing a variety of new devices under the category of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Current and future applications are both medical/assistive (e.g., for communication) and non-medical (e.g., for gaming). This array of possibilities comes with ethical challenges for all stake...

Since its emergence in the early 2000s, neuroethics has become a recognized, institutionalized and professionalized field. A central strategy for its successful development has been the claim that it must be an autonomous discipline, distinct in particular from bioethics. Such claim has been justified by the conviction, sustained since the 1990s by...

Little is known about how individuals with Locked-in Syndrome (LIS) experience their situation. There is still no phenomenology of LIS, in the sense of a description of the locked-in persons’ subjective experience. Research into quality of life, as well as other questionnaire-based investigations, provide important material. Arguably the best sourc...

Ann Thomson L’âme des Lumières. Le débat sur l’être humain entre religion et science, Angleterre-France, 1690-1760 Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2013, 389 p. - Volume 73 Issue 2 - Fernando Vidal

Science in film , and usual equivalents such as science on film or science on screen , refer to the cinematographic representation, staging, and enactment of actors, information, and processes involved in any aspect or dimension of science and its history. Of course, boundaries are blurry, and films shot as research tools or documentation also disp...

Argument “Deficit model” designates an outlook on the public understanding and communication of science that emphasizes scientific illiteracy and the need to educate the public. Though criticized, it is still widespread, especially among scientists. Its persistence is due not only to factors ranging from scientists’ training to policy design, but a...

Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject is a fine-grained account of the "neuro-" in a range of disciplines, and, importantly-crucially-, takes stock of the history and scope of this prefix. But more than this the book is an exploration, a critical engagement with the surge of brain-centered approaches to behavior, to physiology, to mind, to subj...

Since the 1990s, several disciplines have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the sciences of cultures. Their goal is to understand both how the brain produces culture and how culture is inscribed in the brain. In this chapter we offer an overview of neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience, the two main “neurodisciplines of cultur...

The chapter explores the cerebralization of psychological distress. The psychopharmacological revolution took place in the 1950s. Later on, the nosological biologization of mental disorders received a crucial impetus when DSM III opened the way to redescribing in neurological terms disorders such as schizophrenia, autism and depression. Behaviors p...

This chapter considers the emergence, since the 1990s, of fields whose names often combine the suffix neuro with the name of one of the human and social sciences, from anthropology and art history to education, law and theology. These “disciplines of the neuro ” reframe the human sciences and their corresponding subjects on the basis of knowledge a...

The conclusion underlines that all the fields analyzed in the book share what we characterized as a “modern creed.” It explains that such creed is modern because of its chronology, and because it is an element of the psychological, philosophical, political and scientific cosmologies usually identified to modernity. It is a creed because it states b...

This book offers a critical exploration of the influential and pervasive belief that “we are our brains” (and that therefore he neurosciences will provide the key to all human phenomena). Since the 1990s, “neurocentrism” has become widespread in most Western and many non-Western societies. Advances, especially in neuroimaging, decisively bolstered...

The first chapter proposes to trace the distant roots of the cerebral subject to the late seventeenth century, and particularly to debates about the seat of the soul, the corpuscularian theory of matter, and John Locke’s philosophy of personal identity. In the wake of Locke, eighteenth century authors began to assert that the brain is the only part...

The introduction presents the basic question this book seeks to explore: How did the idea that humans are essentially their brains become thinkable? It also positions itself not “against” brain research, but against some of the most extravagant claims of the “neuro.” It explains that although the book does not explicitly explore the biopolitical re...

The chapter addresses forms of the neuro in popular culture. Film and literature have in many ways rehearsed the connection between personal identity, having a body and being a brain, and have been major sites for elaborating and questioning the human as cerebral subject. Numerous works can be identified as “brain movies” and “brain novels:” most F...

Being Brains offers a critical exploration of one of the most influential and pervasive contemporary beliefs: “We are our brains.” Starting in the “Decade of the Brain” of the 1990s, “neurocentrism” became widespread in most Western and many non-Western societies. Formidable advances, especially in neuroimaging, have bolstered this “neurocentrism”...

Since it first appeared in the public eye in the early 2000s, neuroethics has acquired all the sociological features that define a discipline, such as international societies, university chairs, journals, and academic programs. An important element of its rapid development as a discipline was the claim that it should be autonomous from the field th...

Since the 1990s, several disciplines have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the social and human sciences. For the most part, they aim at capturing the commonalities that underlay the heterogeneity of human behaviors and experiences. Neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience, or the "neurodisciplines of culture," appear different,...

Even before the brain?s deterioration became a health problem of pandemic proportions, literature and film rehearsed the fiction of brain transplantations that would allow an aging person to inhabit a younger body, so that successive surgeries may result in that person?s immortality. Such fiction makes the brain operate like an immaterial soul that...

Both in its development and in the definition of its tasks, neuroethics has been intimately connected to neuroimaging, especially to the widespread application of functional brain imaging technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Neuroimaging itself, in particular its uses, interpretat...

Since the 1990s, several disciplines, from neuroanthropology to neurotheology, have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the social and human sciences. These "neurodisciplines" share basic assumptions about the brain/mind relationship, a preference for neuroimaging methodology, and the goal of establishing the neurobiological foundatio...

The article is an essay review of recent work in neuroaesthetics.

Desde meados do século XX, numerosos discursos e práticas, dentro e fora das disciplinas científicas e filosóficas, têm apresentado o desenvolvimento da noção de ser humano como um ‘sujeito cerebral’. O cérebro é concebido como a única parte do corpo que devemos possuir, e que deve ser nossa, para que sejamos nós mesmos. Já que a personalidade é a...

This text is an Afterword to a collection of Jean Starobinski's writings on melancholy in history, medicine and literature.

Postface à Jean Starobinski, "L'Encre de la mélancolie" (2012).

The Neural Correlates of ConsciousnessDepression: Neuroimages and NeurocorrelatesConcluding RemarksReferences

Neuroaesthetics : A Scientistic Form of Aestheticism Neuroaesthetics has been defined as the science that studies the neurobiological bases of aesthetic appreciation and of the perception of beauty, particularly in the arts. It thereby aims at giving a scientific foundation to “traditionally philosophical” questions. This article examines the inter...

Studies the representation of the human-as-brain in fiction film.

Studies how films since the 1980s have explored and staged the connections of brain, memory and personal identity.

From University of Chicago Press site: The Sciences of the Soul is the first attempt to explain the development of the disciplinary conception of psychology from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Fernando Vidal traces this...

Overview This chapter explores some historical developments concerning ideas about the connection between brain and self, and suggests that they constitute the background – and, indeed, the historical and intellectual conditions of possibility – for projects, such as the one that inspires this volume on the “educated brain,” aimed at integrating th...

The research reported here aims at mapping the “cerebral subject” in contemporary society. The term “cerebral subject” refers to an anthropological figure that embodies the belief that human beings are essentially reducible to their brains. Our focus is on the discourses, images and practices that might globally be designated as “neuroculture.” Fro...

BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT and BRUNO BERNARDI (eds.), Rousseau et les sciences. Paris, Budapest and Turin: L'Harmattan, 2003. Pp. 316. ISBN 2-7475-5100-8. €25.90 (paperback). - - Volume 38 Issue 3 - FERNANDO VIDAL

Disciple of Charles Bonnet, the Genevan Jean Trembley (1749-1811) published in 1781 what is apparently the first French-speaking discussion of the methods of empirical psychology. His multiple interests - in mathematics, physics, psychology, esthetics, theology, and politics - offer common methodological and epistemological convictions about the pr...

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.3 (2002) 591-593 At the outset, the editors of this splendid collection of essays remark that "[f]ew subjects have stimulated a more intensive intellectual interchange among physicians and philosophers than the nature of the human soul and its relationship to the body" (p. 1). It would be a mistake, however, t...

Instead of limiting himself to postulating two discontinuous types of thought, autistic and logical, Piaget studied transitional forms, thereby placing autistic and logical thought on a developmental continuum. Nevertheless, the discovery of transitional forms did not lessen the opposition between the two extremes of autistic and logical thought. (...

L’histoire de la psychologie en tant que discipline autonome comporte non seulement des développements méthodologiques et institutionnels, mais aussi l’élaboration du concept même depsychologie et des représentations de sa place dans l’ordre des sciences. Si de telles représentations ne déterminent pas la constitution du champ professionnel ou la p...

The great Swiss psychologist and theorist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) had much to say about the developing mind. He also had plenty to say about his own development, much of it, as Fernando Vidal shows, plainly inaccurate. In this historical biography of Piaget, Vidal tells the story of the psychologist's intellectual and personal development up to 191...

Examines the conceptualization of 18th-century psychology as represented in that century's main encyclopedias. Encyclopedias show "psychology' emerging as a distinct field—not yet as a professionally structured discipline, but as a rubric. Born in the 16th century within Protestant scholasticism as the doctrine of the rational soul, by the end of t...

A 1912 letter from fifteen-year-old Jean Piaget (1896-1980) to the director of the Museum of Natural History of Geneva illustrates Piaget's precocious integration into a community of professional naturalists, and reveals his hitherto unknown plan to study medicine. It is not certain whether he actually intended to realize that plan. An essential bi...

This article first examines the way in which early developmental psychologists interpreted and modified Darwin's original insights in the direction of both recapitulation and organic selection. It then examines some of the scientific and extrascientific factors that led the young Piaget to reject Darwinism. Finally, it notices that, in spite of the...

Discusses the views on immanence, affectivity, and democracy expressed in Piaget's work Moral Judgements in Children, in which he argues vs French social scientist Émile Durkheim's theory of authority and moral education. Social interactions in childhood, cognitive development, the paradox of egocentrism, the co-existing opposing tendencies of con...

Protestant background Christian youth / The Swiss Christian Students Association "The Mission of the Idea" (1915) getting away from "metaphysics" the quest for science the project of a scientific psychology of values immanent liberalism (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)