Neuroimaging and Critical Neurosciences
On the Human Self-Understanding in Times of Neuroculture
Brain research and neuroscience have repeatedly attracted great attention during the last 200 years. Especially technological innovations and new imaging methods have regularly kindled great expectations and opened up the prospect of putting questions about consciousness and human self-understanding on a scientific basis. Already at the end of the 19th century however, Emil du Bois-Reymond had famously declared the mind-brain problem to remain an irresolvable scientific mystery. A century later, the American President declared the 1990s the "decade of the brain“. New methods of neuroimaging ensured a new phase of great expectations as colorful pictures visualized the "brain at work". Since then, massive search efforts worldwide have generated enormous amounts of data on various aspects of the brain and its functioning, but so far du Bois-Reymond’s skepticism still holds: we do know far more about the brain today but the interaction and integration of mind, brain and body still escapes our understanding. The critical attitude questioning promises and results, seems to be all the more in place as the neurosciences have manifold effects in modern societies - from economy and advertising to dealing with psychiatric conditions and defending the legal system.
Wether brain research will ultimately succeed in redefining the human self in neuroscientific terms remains an open question, but already today a variety of social effects of this align of research have become apparent: We live in the age of neuroculture. Critical Neuroscience is the name of an initiative investigating neuroscience in its social-political context.
During my time in Montreal, I had the opportunity to work with the Critical Neuroscience Group (from which the article in the Handbook emerged), and, eventually more papers on neuroscientific research and its problematic public appreciation came together.