Fernando Vidal > Quotes

“At the individual level, cerebral subject is not a label that can be permanently affixed to anyone but is rather a way of denoting notions and practices that may be operative in people’s lives some of the time. In practice, no one conception of the human is monolithic or hegemonic in a given culture, and persons are not one kind of subject alone. For example, the developmental biologist Scott F. Gilbert (1995) contrasted four biological views of the body/self—the neural, immunological, genetic, and phenotypic—and put them in correspondence with different models of the body politic and different views of science. He thus highlighted how political debates mirror disputes over which body, and consequently which self, are the true body and self. “Immune selfhood” has a very rich history of its own (Tauber 2012), but writing in the mid-1990s, Gilbert noted that the genetic self had been recently winning over the other selves. These may be theoretical constructs, but they have real consequences. Thus, as Gilbert points out, in controversies over abortion, the self may be defined genetically (by the fusion of nuclei at conception), neurally (by the onset of the electroencephalographic pattern or some other neurodevelopmental criterion), or immunologically (by the separation of mother and child at birth). In each case, when affected by concrete medical decisions, individuals accomplish the “self” whose definitional criteria were used to reach the decisions.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“If neuromaturation could provide biomedical indicators of personhood, then, as human persons distinct from merely living organisms, we would exist essentially from “brain life” to “brain death” (Jones 1989, 1998).”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“In the Harvard report, intellect clearly stood for a complex of psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness, whose possession defines both our individual personal identity and human personhood in general.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“When, to give just one example, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) proclaims that illnesses categorized as “mental” or “behavioral” actually are brain disorders, that diagnoses should be aligned with neural systems, and that psychiatry must become a neuroscientific discipline (e.g., Insel 2012, Insel and Quirion 2005), his statements reflect a position that, regardless of its explicit incorporation into people’s self-concept, regulates public health policy and the allocation of resources. Whether individuals like it or not, NIMH considers them cerebral subjects, and that has a significant effect on their lives—and even more so since Thomas Insel, NIMH’s director for over a decade, became in 2015 head of the new life sciences unit of Alphabet, the company better known as Google (Regalado 2015).”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“When a phenomenon or area of knowledge is neurologized, it does not ipso facto cease to be what it previously or otherwise was. For example, in the neurobics industry examined below, “brain jogging” simply translates into training the mind, and the exercises proposed are basically the same as those long peddled to improve mental capacities. Nevertheless, when these exercises are relabeled neurobics, they realize the ideology of the cerebral subject. It may be a superficial instantiation of that ideology, where the neuro is no more than a marketing gimmick. That, however, does not abolish the fact that what is sold and bought belongs to a neuro business based on people believing (or at least being told) that they are essentially their brains.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“But the historical point is that personhood was not always reduced to those psychological features and that therefore, as long as personhood was not thus redescribed, it could not be conceived of in terms of brainhood. Anthropologists who study conceptions and practices related to the beginnings and ends of life make a similar point when they notice that “producing persons is an inherently social project” and that “personhood is not an innate or natural quality but a cultural attribute” (Kaufman and Morgan 2005, 320–321).”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“Individuals are unlikely to reduce themselves and others to their genetic makeup. However, scientific authorities may suggest such a reduction in statements epitomizing beliefs that permeate a research field, inspire its quest, legitimize its promises, nourish expectations, and orient policy. This was the case when James D. Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, uttered for Time an assertion that has been quoted hundreds of times: “We used to think our fate is in our stars. Today we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes” (Jaroff 1989). The oracular claim was supposed to be universally valid, independently of particular individuals’ sense of self.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“In the Harvard report, intellect clearly stood for a complex of psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness, whose possession defines both our individual personal identity and human personhood in general. Despite the appellation “brain death,” it is the permanent cessation of those functions, not a state of the brain per se, that signals the end of the human being as a living person.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“Similarly, in 1912, the German neurologist Oskar Vogt (1870–1959) announced that “man will increasingly become a brain animal [Der Mensch wird immer mehr ein Hirntier werden]” and anticipated that “in our further development, the brain will play an increasingly significant role” (553–554). It would be invidious to select here, for their similarity in content with these early proclamations, a few quotations from the neuroscientific literature since the mid-1990s. On the one hand, there are endless possibilities; on the other, numerous examples are to be found throughout this book and its bibliography. The point is that new neuroscientific data, theories, and techniques have allegedly substantiated but not crucially affected an ideology that in its modern form dates from the late seventeenth century. That is why the cultural history of the cerebral subject is largely independent from the history of brain science. This is particularly obvious in its early instances: it is clear that Bonnet’s aphorism about Montesquieu’s brain did not derive from neuroscientific investigation but from a conception of personhood”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“Neuroascesis,” as we call the business that sells programs of cerebral self-discipline, is a case in point. On the one hand, it appeals to the brain and neuroscience as bases for its self-help recipes to enhance memory and reasoning; fight depression, anxiety, and compulsions; improve sexual performance; achieve happiness; and even establish a direct contact with God. On the other hand, underneath the neuro surface lie beliefs and even concrete instructions that can be traced to nineteenth-century hygiene manuals. The vocabulary of fitness is transposed from the body to the brain, and traditional self-help themes and recommendations are given a neuroscientific luster.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“Beyond serving professional interests well, the combination of the Delphic “Know thyself” and the Socratic “I only know that I know nothing” has convinced many that the world is not totally disenchanted and compelled them to join the chorus. Ultimately, and beyond the narrower issues we deal with here, the ideology that tells us that we are essentially our brains claims to provide answers to a number of perennial questions about human nature and human destiny. We may object to those answers but don’t need normatively to decide whether they are right or wrong, for the main thing about them is that, as William James said of God in the conclusion to The Varieties of Religious Experience, they are real since they produce real effects.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“wrote, “If a Huron’s soul could have inherited Montesquieu’s brain, Montesquieu would still create.” The native North American was an Enlightenment paradigm of the savage, yet if his soul were joined to Montesquieu’s brain, then one of the era’s greatest thinkers would, for intellectual purposes at least, be still alive. It did not matter that the soul and body were those of a “primitive,” provided the brain was the philosopher’s own. In short, the conviction that the brain is the only organ indispensable for personal identity emerged independently or, at most, marginally connected to empirical neuroscientific advances. Bonnet’s 1760 statement about Montesquieu and the Huron declares exactly the same thing as Puccetti’s aphorism of 1969, “Where goes a brain, there goes a person,” or Gazzaniga’s confident assertion of 2005, “you are your brain.” A good number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century (neuro)scientists and (neuro)philosophers claim that their convictions about the self are based on neuroscientific data. That may be so for them personally. Historically, however, things happened the other way around: Brainhood predated reliable neuroscientific discoveries and has all the appearance of having been a motivating factor of brain research. As it advanced, this research legitimized and reinforced the brainhood ideology.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject