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A Study of Material, Practice and Imagination in Neuroscience's Expanding Scope

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A Study of Material, Practice and Imagination in Neuroscience's Expanding Scope Neuroscience’s brain: a study of material, practice and imagination in neuroscience’s expanding scope Samantha Lynnette Croy Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2017 Health Humanities and Social Sciences Unit, Centre for Health Equity School of Population and Global Health University of Melbourne Abstract This thesis is a brain-based study of neuroscience. While human beings have studied the brain and considered its role in what makes a human being since at least the ancient Greeks, neuroscience is a very specific contemporary formation. Within the project laid out by the field to understand the human mind in terms of the brain, what is considered to be within the scope of research on the brain includes a growing range of complex human phenomena. This ethnographic study explores the growth of neuroscience and considers the factors that sustain its entry into the investigation of an ever-broadening research scope. The thesis is an ‘object ethnography’ that explores neuroscience as a particular cultural world through a focus on the brain as neuroscience’s object. The research involved participant observation in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience laboratories and interviews with neuroscientist key informants in a major metropolitan Australian city, as well as an analysis of popular neuroscience books written by key neuroscientist writers. My central argument is that ‘neuroscience’s brain’ provides an evolving multidisciplinary field with coherence and with the ability to expand into the study of increasingly complex human issues. Through my ethnographic data I show: first, how neuroscience’s brain addresses organisational needs by bringing together a diverse group of scientists and providing them with space within the field where they are able to develop their particular areas of interest; second, how the brain, conceived of as both mind and body, embodies tensions between the material and immaterial that are used productively to drive neuroscientific work forward; third, how the brain facilitates the mixing of neuroscientific knowledge with other domains of knowledge through its status as a particularly human kind of scientific object. Neuroscience’s brain provides concrete explanations of human behaviour, allows materiality to be extended into areas where the material is not yet able to go, and through mixing with other systems of meaning, is seen to provide a compelling frame within which human life can be imagined. By focusing on the brain and drawing on theories of objects from medical anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emphasise the material, processual and imaginative, I show how an approach to understanding the human is taking shape in the work of neuroscience, and in neuroscientists’ broader articulations of their object beyond the laboratory. The thesis provides an alternative account of the links between brain, human, and i neuroscience; links that, within a neuroscience explosion, are taken to be natural and self- evident. ii Declaration This is to certify that: i. The thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD. ii. Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used. iii. The thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, the list of references and appendices. Samantha Croy 5 October 2017 iii Dedication and acknowledgments This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Eunice and George Croy, without whom, when you get down to it, nothing would have been possible. This project would not have materialised if not for the neuroscientists who took time from their already hectic schedules as research scientists to talk to me about their work, to show me what they were working on, and to patiently answer my naïve, obvious, outsider questions. I am especially grateful to the two laboratories that accommodated me over the course of fieldwork, to the laboratory heads who kindly granted me access, and to the research assistants and postdoctoral fellows who, in the end, were the ones who had to put up with me getting in their way. I thank my participants for their extraordinary generosity. I hope that this thesis does some justice to what they showed and told me, and particularly, to the spirit of open inquiry with which they shared their stories. This thesis has only been possible through the expertise, support and encouragement of my supervisors Marilys Guillemin and James Bradley. Marilys’s remarkable powers of organisation and her depth of knowledge and experience of methodology and theory were instrumental in the crafting of this research project, and her practical problem-solving approach essential to its completion. James’s breadth of knowledge of the history of mind and brain could always be counted on to put contemporary neuroscience in a different light, and served as a moderator for social scientists’ sometimes ahistorical tendency to latch onto new developments in science as revolutionary and world-changing. Both Marilys’s and James’s interest in, and enthusiasm for, the project sustained me and allowed me to keep at it, and I constantly marvel at my good fortune of having drawn the ‘golden ticket’ as far as supervision goes. I have had wonderful supervision throughout my PhD, and changes in supervision along the way were made necessary by institutional restructuring rather than personal choice. Timothy Marjoribanks, as my initial primary supervisor, as well as Rosemary Robins and Jenny Lewis at different times, helped me to develop my research proposal in the first few years of my candidature, while Alison Young was chair of my confirmation panel and provided me with helpful feedback on my research proposal. I am grateful to them for introducing me to some of the key ideas and approaches that are now central features in my researcher toolkit. It was Tim who introduced me to medical anthropology in the first place, and who was the kindest, most dedicated supervisor an awkward honours student, newly arrived from Singapore all those years ago, could have hoped for. I also benefitted from an amazing advisory committee of Richard Chenhall, Cordelia Fine and Michael Arnold who provided crucial insight and guidance along the way with their expertise in ethnography, critical neuroscience, and science and technology studies respectively. Cordelia also generously took time to meet me to refine my selection of popular neuroscience books, to provide helpful writing tips, and to read and comment on an earlier draft of chapter four. I would also like to thank Cordelia, as well as Michael Salzburg, for their helpful suggestions for the kinds of places that I might conduct my fieldwork, and for opening up avenues for recruitment through their knowledge of, and connections to, the world of Australian neuroscience. I thank my family for their encouragement and support during the PhD and always. My sisters, Amanda Croy and Kimberley Croy-Chua, are and were throughout, my constant iv companions, only a quick call, text message or video chat away. Amanda helped to fix my atrocious photography for the photographs that appear in this thesis; Kim supplied regular stories of the antics of little Graeme and Emma, as well as regular photo and video updates which sustained me with injections of fun and hilarity. I am grateful to my parents for always supporting and encouraging me in my studies. For my mother’s endlessly positive outlook, my dad’s enthusiasm and impatience for me to ‘get finished’, for their attention as I practised presentations though they did not know ‘what on earth [I was] on about’. Thank you also to my dad for kindly proofreading chapter one on his holiday in Melbourne, and for inspiring my curiosity and love of learning. The completion of this thesis has been a long haul and it would have been unbearable without the company of my fellow students, particularly, Marcela González, Prabhathi Basnayake, Assunta Hunter, Greg Connolly, Geoff Browne, Juan Pablo Villanueva, Patricia Rarau, Emma Barnard, Liz Gill-Atkinson, Lila Moosad, and many, many others who shared the joy, pain and frequent absurdity of life as a PhD student. I would like to thank Marcela and Prabhathi, in particular, for their friendship and intellectual camaraderie. One of the highlights of doing this PhD has been to have acquired them as friends and future collaborators. I thank Andrew Jahn of Andy’s Brainblog ( https://www.andysbrainblog.com ) for allowing me to use stills of his AFNI (analysis of functional neuroimages) YouTube tutorials in this thesis. These appear in chapter four. I would also like to thank the neuroscience blogger Neuroskeptic for providing advice on the selection of neuroscience books for analysis. The doing of this PhD ran a real risk of landing in the too-hard basket, and I would like to especially thank Marilys Guillemin again for making the completion of this thesis possible. It is to Marilys that I owe many of the opportunities that the process of carrying out doctoral research and completing a PhD thesis has given me. v Notes on style • Square brackets have been used where quotes have been edited for clarity and readability, or when a clarifying parenthesis was needed. • Ellipsis points indicate that part of a quotation or dialogue has been omitted. • Direct quotations and direct speech have been marked by single quotation marks. Quotes within quotes appear in double quotation marks. • A dash appearing in quotes from direct speech indicate an abrupt break in participants’ dialogue.
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