In recent years we have seen a relentless emphasis on brain-based
approaches in the human sciences, medicine and popular culture. While the
cognitive, social and affective neurosciences and the many new hyphenated
neuro-disciplines (such as neuro-education, neuro-economy or
neuro-theology) are amassing resources and attention, many of its
practitioners are confident that it is just a matter of time before rival
approaches to the understanding of mind, behaviour and ‘human nature’ are
superseded. Besides promising novel insights into the workings of human
capacities, neuroscience announces the advent of new technologies ranging
from pharmaceutical drugs to monitoring and detection devices with
wide-ranging civil and military uses.

Critical Neuroscience is the name of a project that takes issue with these
developments from a multi-disciplinary perspective. It aspires to
seriously bridge the social and anthropological study of the neurosciences
to the neuroscience laboratory by engaging neuroscientists and
non-neuroscientists – philosophers, historians of science, anthropologists
– in concrete collaborations focused on specific themes of cultural
relevance. Examples include pathologies of individual development (mental
illnesses such as depression), social pathologies (such as alienation in
work and life environments, violence, ADHD, aggression, fear), ideas and
popular conceptions of well-being and suggested ways of their
implementation, to name just a few. What these themes have in common is a
call for approaches spanning various disciplines to develop explanations
on multiple levels, from the brain to bodies, dynamic relationships,
communities, societies and politics. These phenomena no doubt involve the
brain and neuroscientific approaches, but cannot be investigated from a
neuroscience perspective alone.

The talk outlines the motivation and background assumptions of the project
and discusses a few examples of interactions taking place between the
neurosciences and the social and cultural contexts in which they are
embedded. The catchword “adaptivity” figures as one example in a recent
trend towards an odd intermingling of discourses in flexible, post-Fordian
capitalism and human-level neuroscience. Is today’s neuroscience tacitly
and unwittingly contributing to the spread of a neoliberal ideology?

For more information, see www.critical-neuroscience.org