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Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience
Abstract
Critical 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. Original, interdisciplinary approach explores the creative potential for engaging experimental neuroscience with social studies of neuroscience. Furthers the dialogue between neuroscience and the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Transcends traditional scepticism, introducing novel ideas about 'how to be critical' in and about science. Features contributions from eminent scholars including Steven Rose, Joseph Dumit, Laurence Kirmayer, Shaun Gallagher, Fernando Vidal, Allan Young and Joan Chiao.
... Isso significa que a dimensão existencial apresenta uma camada de complexidade adicional da experiência humana, na medida em que nós não experienciamos apenas coisas e objetos em geral, mas podemos também tomar uma posição sobre tais experiências, nós mesmos e nossa situação particular. Da mesma forma, algumas posições em psiquiatria sustentam que é essa própria capacidade autoavaliativa que contribui como uma pré-condição para o surgimento de transtornos mentais (Fuchs, 2011(Fuchs, , 2013. Essa relação autoavaliativa, por sua vez, pode desempenhar um papel bastante significativo no âmbito psiquiátrico, pois se assume que esta pode coconstituir a transtorno, ser afetada pelo transtorno ou, ainda, modular o curso do transtorno (de Haan, 2017(de Haan, , 2020. ...
... Nesse caso, a formulação e adequação de um conceito de dúvida relativo ao domínio da existência, no âmbito dos transtornos mentais, nos parece, por conseguinte, filosófica e praticamente relevante. Uma vez que o domínio existencial desempenha um papel fundamental na emergência e manutenção dos transtornos mentais (de Haan, 2017(de Haan, , 2020Fuchs, 2011Fuchs, , 2013, o surgimento da dúvida nesse domínio, nos parece, necessita ser mais bem elucidada. Importantemente, a escolha do qualificativo existencial também se justifica, visto que não promove uma dicotomia mente-corpo como interna aos transtornos mentais (Graham, 2010;Fuchs, 2005;Schlimme, 2009). ...
Resumo: Recentemente, o conceito de dúvida corporal foi proposto como modelo de descrição da experiência da enfermidade. A dúvida acerca das capacidades corporais determinaria, assim, toda e qualquer experiência de enfermidade, seja somática, seja mental. Não obstante, a fenomenologia dos transtornos mentais apresenta uma série de perturbações experienciais que vão além da dúvida, no nível corporal. A hipótese a ser investigada, neste trabalho, diz respeito à formulação de um conceito de dúvida adequado do ponto de vista desses transtornos. No mais das vezes, pacientes psiquiátricos experimentam sua condição de sofrimento primariamente nos termos de uma dúvida a propósito da totalidade de suas experiências, e não apenas relativamente ao elemento corporal. Por outro lado, elementos cognitivos, afetivos e comportamentais também desempenham um papel fundamental na determinação dos transtornos mentais. No intuito de identificar as peculiaridades da noção de dúvida, nesse âmbito, o presente texto parte da reconstrução e análise da literatura fenomenológica sobre enfermidade somática e mental, bem como de abordagens não reducionistas da cognição (4EA cognition) e seus transtornos.
... erstanding of how culture influences the brain further, and moreover, it seeks to grasp ethical implications for society and culture. This explains the manner in which people perceive the events, as well as the cognitive processes they employ to make decisions. It's a pattern of culture and social activity that shapes the neurobiology of the brain (Choudhury, Suparna. & Slaby, 2016). It is a neurological process that assists our understanding of actions, wishes, desires, emotions (Rolls, 2005), sense of style, and other aspects of human behavior. For instance, if we love a piece of art, there may be a way for cognition to directly affect the pleasure we derive from it. The implication is to enhance subjective pleas ...
... Further afield, it looks to sociology, cultural anthropology and media theory as well as science and technology studies and related areas. With this orientation, political philosophy of mind builds upon other interdisciplinary developments in the mind sciences, such as cognitive sociology (DiMaggio, 1997;Zerubavel, 1999), cognitive archaeology (Donald, 1991;Malafouris, 2013), cognitive-science-adjacent memory studies (Sutton, 2010;Michaelian & Sutton, 2013;Heersmink, 2018;Heersmink & Carter, 2020); phenomenological psychiatry (Stanghellini et al. 2018;Fuchs, 2017;Ratcliffe, 2017), and critical neuroscience (Choudhury & Slaby, 2012;Slaby & Gallagher, 2014). A central source of inspiration is work in the 4E tradition of philosophy of mind and cognitive science: the four E's standing for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended approaches to the mind; in effect, a combination, not without internal tensions, of extended mind theory (Clark, 1996;Clark & Chalmers, 1998), enactivism (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007;Noë, 2004Noë, , 2009Thompson, 2007) and phenomenologically informed cognitive science (Gallagher, 2020;Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008). ...
This text maps out a territory for political philosophy of mind, with emphasis on habit, affect and an expanded notion of the social niche. We first survey the historical development of classic philosophy of mind towards the articulation of political philosophy of mind and discuss further influences for the field. We then outline commitments to relationality, dynamism, and emergence, to adopt a post-cognitivist view of cognition as embodied and situated, as ongoing dynamic interaction with the environment. We propose to move beyond the user/resource framework dominant in extended mind approaches and to surpass what Jesper Aagaard calls the “dogma of harmony” prevalent in 4E approaches. Moving beyond the individual subject, towards situated agents shaped by institutional procedures, social domains and subjectification practices, we highlight the role of affect and habit in processes of societal mind-shaping. We propose a critical methodology: inverting key concepts from philosophy of mind to bring out their ambivalent standing amidst oppressive and exploitative social structures, thereby expanding the purview of the socio-material niches in which cognitive and affective capacities are developed and expressed. We discuss work on habit in the enactivist and pragmatist traditions to put our method of concept inversion and niche expansion to work. The article is meant to be an introduction and invitation to join an emerging scholarly effort at the intersection of philosophy of mind, 4E cognitive science and social as well as political philosophy.
The aim of the article is to analyze the patriarchal system in the light of the cognitive concept of the extended mind. The extended mind hypothesis fits in the externalist definition of the mind, where environmental and social factors (exostructures) are valued in explaining complex mental and cognitive processes – subjective experience in general. In this scientific interpretation, the reproduction of patriarchy can be reduced to the individual reproduction of a specific type of mentality, more precisely, the androcentrically shaped intentionality of participants in collective life. In other words, male and female mentality – including perceptual and introspective awareness – are gradually dependent on a complex and multi-level mechanism of cultural transmission. A process that in this case should be perceived as a key factor in promoting patriarchal models of femininity/masculinity, which is directly related to the dissemination of phallogocentric thinking, attitudes, behaviors, etc. in society.
Purpose
This article aims to delve into the connections between DNA, cultural intelligence (CQ) and knowledge dynamics (KD) as native ingredients of the global mindset of multicultural managers and leaders. Cognitive science and knowledge management researchers show that business process decision-making is not entirely rational, based on explicit knowledge. They depend on the dynamics of rational, emotional and spiritual knowledge fields and on the capacity to integrate those dynamics into cultural intelligence. Most business process management studies show that managerial competencies depend on native and educational components. The literature usually addresses the developing process of those competencies through educational programs and leaves a knowledge gap concerning their native ingredients.
Design/methodology/approach
We designed an integrated research approach containing a critical literature review, supported by a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer and a quantitative analysis derived from questionnaires and their statistical processing using SPSS, version 28. Based on VOSviewer variant 1.6.20, the bibliometric approach is used to understand the intricate correlation between DNA, CQ and KD, while the quantitative analysis is rooted in a questionnaire’s results from a sample of 101 managers with cross-cultural experience.
Findings
The analysis reveals that DNA diversity can play a notable role as a vector and predictor of CQ and KD. The results demonstrate the connection between geo-genetic diversity, CQ and the ability to be effective in multicultural business environments. Furthermore, the study highlights the impact of DNA on knowledge dynamics, revealing how geo-genetic variations impact the transfer and transformation of knowledge within sociocultural contexts—with implications for organizational behavior and cross-cultural and multicultural management.
Research limitations/implications
This study may encounter limitations in establishing a direct and unique causal relationship between DNA, cultural intelligence and knowledge dynamics, as the complex interplay of various factors, such as individual experiences, social environment and education, could influence the interpretations of the findings. Additionally, generalizing the results across diverse populations would be challenging due to the potential ethnic and geographic variations in genetic and cultural contexts (Alexander et al. , 2021). Also, for future research, we could reverse the process and measure a self-reported CQ before the DNA test in order to avoid any potential cultural bias or extended perception. Business process management within a multicultural environment is strongly nonlinear and more complex models should be developed to reveal the inner correlations between main constructs.
Practical implications
This research extends beyond academia into practical domains such as organizational behavior, cross-cultural and multicultural leadership, and sustainable business processes. Acknowledging the role of genetic diversity in these phenomena encourages further inquiry, prompting scholars and practitioners to investigate the organization’s concrete ways to increase creativity and innovation, adaptability and resilience toward successful navigation in the international business environment based on diversity, inclusion and global mindset.
Social implications
Comprehending the genetic underpinnings of cultural intelligence and knowledge dynamics has potential implications for various fields, such as education, cross-cultural communication and even policy-making. By acknowledging and harnessing the influence of genetic diversity in these domains, we aim to create more inclusive and opportunity-rich environments that foster intercultural learning and cooperation. We also aim to generate more sustainable business approaches based on flexibility, continuous learning and cultural adaptation.
Originality/value
Previous literature mainly concentrated on environmental and individual factors acting on CQ and KD; however, this study is focused on uncovering DNA’s influence on these concepts and topics. The originality of this study lies in challenging conventional views on CQ and KD by introducing genetic factors to understand individual differences. Recognizing the impact of diverse genetic roots on CQ and KD, this paper emphasizes values like respect for the culture and historical background, understanding others' values, diversity and inclusion, and learning and agilely adapting. These vectors are the foundation for modern business processes in multicultural environments.
In this article, we examine the clinical encounters of people diagnosed with a severe mental illness (SMI). Drawing on more than 1-year of ethnographic research and interviews in Indonesia, we show that instances of moral self-reflection occurring in the process of acquiring and appropriating clinical insight emerge at the intersection of heterogeneous discursive regimes. When biomedical notions of health and illness dominate these discourses, they reimag-ine pre-existing notions about spirituality and religion. Furthermore, consenting to psychiatric notions of health and illness can create common ground and a sense of shared experience, leading to grassroots movements for the empowerment of the mentally ill, self-help groups, and other support structures. At the same time, these processes can increase uncertainty and be generative of a culture of blame, as individuals are caught in overlapping and at times contradictory moral systems that each have the potential to strip patients of their moral status.
Neuroethics was officially born at the beginning of the twenty-first century, thanks to the advance of neuroscience, as the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The former attempts to develop an ethical framework for regulating behavior in neuroscientific research and its application to humans, while the latter refers to the impact of neuroscientific knowledge on our understanding of ethics itself. This chapter aims to briefly discuss neuroethics in its dual aspect and to address the challenge of naturalism in neuroethics.
T his essay examines the reciprocal influences between neuroscience and social science, focusing on the relationship between neurology and sociology. The reader will get a foretaste of neurological explanations of social facts. We have chosen the example of the phenomenon of imitation, placing Gabriel Tarde's sociological theory of the laws of 'imitation' side by side with Rizzolatti's neurological theory of 'mirror neurons'. We will then give an overview of the 'social brain hypothesis', which is hegemonic and exclusive of the cultural sciences. A final section is devoted to the response of sociologists, divided between sceptics and supporters. Epistemologically, neuroscientific explanations are clearer and more precise than their sociological counterparts because the latter are more interpretive and are weakened by the large margin of uncertainty in the correlations between variables.
A neuron is not an isolated entity, but rather relies heavily on its surrounding cellular environment for survival and proper functioning. This chapter examines the various contexts that impact a neuron’s function, ranging from its immediate tissue surroundings to larger neural networks, as well as the bodily and sociocultural contexts of psychobiological development. It is posited that the function of a neuron is the result of the collective effects of a group of cells and that neural networks, psychological processes, and cultural conditions provide the broader context within which individual neurons are recruited and carry out specific functions. Within this multilayered context, the single neuron is exposed to a constant stream of information that it must integrate and decode to perform its function. Furthermore, this chapter explores how neuroepigenetic mechanisms enable the neuron to integrate different signaling contexts in an energy-efficient way and thus provide measurements to register neuron activity in context. Finally, it is concluded that the context dependence of the neuron forces us to conceptualize the neuron as a bidirectional hub, which is simultaneously the product and producer of neural function, both influenced by and contributing to the neural functions they support.
Constructing the Subject traces the history of psychological research methodology from the nineteenth century to the emergence of currently favored styles of research in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Kurt Danziger considers methodology to be a kind of social practice rather than simply a matter of technique. Therefore his historical analysis is primarily concerned with such topics as the development of the social structure of the research relationship between experimenters and their subjects, as well as the role of the methodology in the relationship of investigators to each other in a wider social context. The book begins with a historical discussion of introspection as a research practice and proceeds to an analysis of diverging styles of psychological investigation. There is an extensive exploration of the role of quantification and statistics in the historical development of psychological research. The influence of the social context on research practice is illustrated by a comparison of American and German developments, especially in the field of personality research. In this analysis, psychology is treated less as a body of facts or theories than a particular set of social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical conditions. This perspective means that the historical analysis has important consequences for a critical understanding of psychological methodology in general.
When did fidgety children begin to suffer from attention deficit disorder? How did frightened people come to be called paranoid? Why are we considered to have emotional intelligence and not simply caring personalities?
While psychological knowledge began in the relative isolation of laboratories and universities, it has since permeated various professions, institutions, and everyday life. Society and our conceptions of self have fundamentally changed with psychology's modernization of the mind. Ward provides a social and cultural history of the spread of psychological knowledge, assessing the way this proliferation has reconfigured society's meaning, and the way people view themselves and others.
Using ideas borrowed from science and technology studies, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of organizations, Ward examines how American psychology established itself as the central purveyor of truth about the mind and self in the 20th century. He examines how psychology has essentially become common knowledge, and his innovative account offers a novel theory about the growth and influence of numerous different knowledge forms.
Recent neuroscience, in replacing the old model of the brain as a single centralized source of control, has emphasized "plasticity," the quality by which our brains develop and change throughout the course of our lives. Our brains exist as historical products, developing in interaction with themselves and with their surroundings. Hence there is a thin line between the organization of the nervous system and the political and social organization that both conditions and is conditioned by human experience. Looking carefully at contemporary neuroscience, it is hard not to notice that the new way of talking about the brain mirrors the management discourse of the neo-liberal capitalist world in which we now live, with its talk of decentralization, networks, and flexibility. Consciously or unconsciously, science cannot but echo the world in which it takes place. In the neo-liberal world, "plasticity" can be equated with "flexibility"-a term that has become a buzzword in economics and management theory. The plastic brain would thus represent just another style of power, which, although less centralized, is still a means of control. In this book, Catherine Malabou develops a second, more radical meaning for plasticity. Not only does plasticity allow our brains to adapt to existing circumstances, it opens a margin of freedom to intervene, to change those very circumstances. Such an understanding opens up a newly transformative aspect of the neurosciences. In insisting on this proximity between the neurosciences and the social sciences, Malabou applies to the brain Marx's well-known phrase about history: people make their own brains, but they do not know it. This book is a summons to such knowledge.
An investigation into the conceptual foundations of a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate all cognition "in the head."
There is a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate mental processes exclusively "in the head." Some think that this expanded conception of the mind will be the basis of a new science of the mind. In this book, leading philosopher Mark Rowlands investigates the conceptual foundations of this new science of the mind. The new way of thinking about the mind emphasizes the ways in which mental processes are embodied (made up partly of extraneural bodily structures and processes), embedded (designed to function in tandem with the environment), enacted (constituted in part by action), and extended (located in the environment).
The new way of thinking about the mind, Rowlands writes, is actually an old way of thinking that has taken on new form. Rowlands describes a conception of mind that had its clearest expression in phenomenology—in the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. He builds on these views, clarifies and renders consistent the ideas of embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended mind, and develops a unified philosophical treatment of the novel conception of the mind that underlies the new science of the mind.
Bradford Books imprint
In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. Drawing on the stories of troubling--and hopeful--educational developments from around the world, Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.