Eveyln Waugh’s classic novel, Brideshead Revisited, is about love, religion, vice – and about subjectivity: who are we, really, and how did we come to be that way? Towards the middle of the book, as the charming and flamboyant Sebastian Flyte participates in ever more excess, our chief protagonist, Charles Ryder, reflects back on comments made by Sebastian’s sister, …
A 2008 article on “Swarm Cognition in Honey Bees” promised to “show how several of the key elements underlying cognition in the neuron-based brains of vertebrates are also found in the insect-based swarms of honey bees” (Passino, Seeley, and Visscher 2008, 401). One could read this work as an example of biologists’ tendency to continuously expand the brain’s domain. In …
Are we our brains? Have we become “cerebral subjects,” our identities located in nothing more, nor less, than the gray matter in our heads? Why have so many—from scientists and scholars to popular writers and Hollywood producers—signed on to what Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega call “the neuro,” the complex of theories, practices, and institutions that supports cerebral selfhood, …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Des Fitzgerald writes of his book, Tracing Autism, “This is a book about scientists talking about their own practice, in tones that are beset by ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, and even some anxiety” (9). This is true, and after reading the book one might find the description a little understated. By now the idea that neuroscience, any science, is …
As the NFL continues to dominate headlines in both sports and politics, there was a renewed focus this month on CTE and its impact on the lives of players from youth to professional football. CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, is a degenerative brain disorder resulting from repeated, sub-concussive blows to the head causing the buildup of an abnormal protein called …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism revisits feminism’s traditionally antagonistic engagement with biology with a call to reposition the body in feminist thought. As Wilson critically explores relationships between guts and melancholia, pharmacokinetics and bile, psyche and soma, she generates tools and insights for a new feminist reading of biology, and articulates the role of aggression as a necessary condition for feminist …