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“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).”
― Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject
― 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.”
― Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject
― 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.”
― Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject
― 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).”
― Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject
― 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”
― Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject
― Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject
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