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.

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.

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.

• Apart from publication titles, scientific names, foreign words and occasional use for emphasis, words in italics have been used for the first appearance in the thesis of technical neuroscience terms that appear in the glossary.

Contents Abstract ...... i Declaration ...... iii Dedication and acknowledgments ...... iv Notes on style ...... vi Contents ...... vii Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 The brain in neuroscience ...... 3 A neuroscience explosion: neuroscience, the brain, and the human...... 6 Locating this thesis ...... 12 Theoretical framework: Material, Practice and Imagination ...... 15 A note on the ontological turn in medical anthropology and science studies ...... 17 Overarching framework: boundary infrastructure and symbolic form ...... 19 Objects in science...... 22 Method ...... 23 Overview of the thesis ...... 24 Chapter 2 The neuroscience enterprise: studying mind in terms of brain ...... 28 Brain (and mind) in neuroscience today ...... 31 Historical approaches to mind and brain ...... 34 An evolving concept of mind ...... 34 Imagining mind in biological terms ...... 37 Neuroscience and the mind-body problem ...... 42 Investigations of mind/brain ...... 44 Animal experimentation ...... 46 Brain imaging research with human participants ...... 49 Conclusion ...... 53 Chapter 3 Method and Methodology ...... 55 An ethnography of the brain in neuroscience ...... 56 Ethnographies of objects ...... 59 Data Collection ...... 60 The neuroscience laboratories...... 61 The neuroscientist key informants ...... 65 The popular neuroscience books by neuroscientists ...... 67 Analysis ...... 71 Analysis of data from laboratories ...... 71

vii

Analysis of Interviews ...... 72 Textual analysis ...... 73 Bringing all three together ...... 74 Ethics ...... 75 A note on my position in relation to neuroscience ...... 77 Conclusion ...... 79 Chapter 4 The Tangible Brain ...... 81 The brain and who is a neuroscientist ...... 85 The neuroscience neophyte and the brain in the Memory Lab ...... 90 A tangible brain in the Self-Control Lab: product and process ...... 96 At the desk: materialising the real ...... 98 In the scanner: things that obscure the material ...... 103 Sense-making through the brain ...... 108 Conclusion ...... 112 Chapter 5 The Projected Brain ...... 114 Managing mind and brain in the mind/brain...... 120 The ephemeral and the concrete in the Memory Lab ...... 125 Managing a mouse’s experience – making use of and overcoming the concrete ...... 127 A Projected Brain ...... 132 Human behaviour ‘one cell at a time’ ...... 135 The projected brain and the scope of neuroscience ...... 142 Conclusion ...... 148 Chapter 6 The Versatile Brain ...... 150 Brain and self: a very special organ and an organ like any other ...... 156 Damasio’s ‘Looking for Spinoza’: possibilities for connection ...... 160 The philosopher and the neuroscientist ...... 163 The neuroscientist and a new system of meaning ...... 164 The obvious uses of a versatile brain ...... 167 Conclusion ...... 174 Chapter 7 Conclusion: Neuroscience’s brain ...... 176 Summary of thesis ...... 178 Contributions of this research ...... 183 Methodological contributions ...... 183 Conceptual contributions...... 185 Significance of this research: understanding neuroscience’s expanding scope ...... 187 Limitations of research ...... 192

viii

Possibilities for future research ...... 193 Conclusion ...... 195 Glossary ...... 197 References ...... 201 Appendices ...... 215 Appendix A: Plain language statement for participant observation...... 215 Appendix B: Plain language statement for key informant interviews ...... 217 Appendix C: Notice informing laboratory visitors about study in progress ...... 219 Appendix D: Interview schedule ...... 220 Appendix E: Proforma for textual analysis ...... 221

Chapter 1 Introduction

Brain-based explanations for a range of complex human issues have become increasingly prominent in societies like Australia in the last few decades. They circulate in popular culture (Frazzetto and Anker, 2009), policy making (Millei and Joronen, 2016), and public health social marketing (Farrugia and Fraser, 2017). From the role of the brain in addiction (Volkow and Li, 2004) and political belief formation (Chawke and Kanai, 2016), to the brain-based effects of experiences such as economic deprivation (Noble et al., 2015) and addiction-related stigma (Heilig et al., 2016), the brain has come to be particularly salient in contemporary culture. ‘This is your brain on [insert phenomenon of choice]’ is a popular format for newspaper and magazine articles describing the effects of different things on the brain including ‘nature’ (National Geographic , January 2016), ‘coffee’ (NYTimes , 6 Jun 2013) and ‘burgers’ (The Sunday Age , Melbourne, 28 February 2016 ). Books about the brain fill bookstores’ popular science shelves. Many of these, such as the bestselling The Brain that Changes Itself by ‘neuropsychoanalyst’ Norman Doidge (2007), sit at the borders of popular science and self-help. Even love, neuroscience tells us, is clearly a matter of the brain rather than the heart. Young lovers who know their neuroscience, an Australian neuroscientist wrote two Valentine’s Days ago in the Sydney Morning Herald , ought really to be sending each other brain-shaped emoticons; just as beautiful, and far more accurate (Paxinos, 2015).

Neuroscience, the discipline at the centre of these transformations, is a rapidly changing interdisciplinary field that appears to provide an authoritative and compelling explanatory framework for human thought, behaviour and feeling. In the context of this neuroscience ‘explosion’, the brain, the human and neuroscience, as the field that studies the brain, are intimately linked. Within a neuroscientific explanatory framework, what were once seen to be disorders of the mind are understood to be disorders of the brain (Insel and Quirion, 2005), and the actions of talk therapy can be understood to be occurring at the level of the neuron (Kandel 2001). This thesis jumps onto the brain-based bandwagon to contribute a brain- based study of neuroscience. It explores the way in which a multidisciplinary field has come together around this particular object, the human brain, and how this object facilitates the ongoing work of neuroscience and the growth of the discipline. Through ethnographic methods that focus on the brain as an object in neuroscience, I explore how an approach to understanding and acting on increasingly complex human problems is taking shape.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

The central question that I address is what sustains neuroscience’s expansion into the study of increasingly broad, complex human phenomena? While the brain has formed an important part of human beings’ theories about themselves from the beginning of recorded history, ideas about what it should account for have evolved over time. This evolution has happened no more rapidly than in the expansion of neuroscience since the first George Bush (1990) declared the nineties to be the ‘Decade of the Brain’. It is against this backdrop that I explore how the brain, as the object of neuroscientific work, connects scientists, technologies, materials, processes and ideas. In this thesis, I consider the links between brain, human, and neuroscience that in a neuroscience explosion are taken for granted, and I emphasise the role of human activity in the making and sustaining of these links.

Within neuroscience, the brain is a singular object that spans molecules to mind. I argue that, as the object of neuroscientific discipline-building and work, the brain is a shifting object whose flexibility holds together a collective of scientists with a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds; scientists whose work ranges from probing the brain at the molecular level, to the level of consciousness, and into the realm of sociality. I have drawn on theories of how objects in science work to consider how the brain can facilitate the work of a field that encompasses this broad range of methods and ideas. Through considerations of the brain’s status as a particularly human kind of scientific object, I show how neuroscience, through the brain, is seen to be a compelling explanatory framework for human issues. The thesis highlights the creative potential of the material, practical and imaginative arrangements of contemporary neuroscience, and the challenges of interdisciplinary work as neuroscience investigates an increasing range of facets of human nature.

This chapter provides the background and rationale to the study, details my theoretical approach, and introduces the methods I have used. To make a case for an ethnographic study of neuroscience through the brain, I begin with a discussion of the question of what the brain in neuroscience is. I then provide a brief overview of the rapid growth of neuroscience from the 1990s onwards and discuss how neuroscience is studying increasingly broad human issues. I develop a theoretical approach that enables me to interrogate the links between the flourishing of a new interdisciplinary field, its centring around the brain as its object, and its role as the source of authoritative knowledge about the human in increasingly broad contexts.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

The brain in neuroscience Why start with the brain in a study of neuroscience’s expanding scope? Neuroscience is an eclectic field, spanning the neuroscience of digestion (Bray, 2015) to the neuroscience of more nebulous processes such as consciousness (Koch et al., 2016). At the most basic level, neuroscientists are scientists who study the brain and nervous systems of humans as well as non-human organisms. ‘How the brain works’ seems a basic enough question, that on first thought, may not require much critical analysis. The brain is made of cells called neurons, the basic organisation of which is laid out by an organism’s genetic code. These cells possess undeniable physical properties and function in discernible ways. The brain is an organ which, with its accompanying nervous system, exists in a material body made up of other organs that all interact with the brain and nervous system in some way. ‘How the brain works’, allows consideration of a wide range of processes. These include the signals from the brain to the kidneys that allow one to sleep for eight-hour stretches without needing the toilet, or the processes involved in reacting to feedback from the environment when one scratches an itch.

Yet what the brain is, and what it is seen to contain at any one time in history, has changed (Choudhury and Slaby, 2012, Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013, Borck, 2016), even as the official story of the brain within neuroscience is that of an unchanged object that is there to be discovered (Cohn, 2004). Indeed, Borck (2008) suggests that the frequent inability of science to live up to proclamations that the understanding of a particular phenomenon is just within grasp, is not naivety on the part of scientists, but rather, because each development increases the complexity of the object being studied.

In their book Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind , Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) point out that the brain that preoccupied neurologists in the nineteenth century was markedly different to the brain that is the object of contemporary neuroscience. Using Ludwik Fleck’s notion of the ‘thought style’1, they argue that a new ‘neuromolecular thought style’ (ibid., p. 43) is a key characteristic in neuroscience, one that is central to neuroscience’s influence beyond the laboratory since the ‘neuromolecular brain’ (ibid., p. 45) can be seen to contain human complexity. It is a truism that the brain must capture and account in some way for all of human experience. This thought style, along with recent emphases on the plasticity of the brain, allows the brain to be easily imagined in processes

1 Ludwik Fleck theorised groups of scientists who converged on the basis of shared interests as ‘thought collectives’ with particular ‘thought styles’ (Mößner, 2016). These thought styles involved a preparedness for a kind of ‘directed perception’ (Fleck 1979 cited in ibid., p. 309), namely, a shared way of perceiving the objects of their study (Sady, 2016).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

from the physical sensation of stubbing one’s toe on a bedpost, responding to hearing an uplifting piece of chamber music, or interacting with a friend. Indeed, Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) suggest that this thought style is a basic unity connecting the various disciplines that make up neuroscience.

Where does the biological brain end, and the brain that is a projection of what it is seen to contain start? In contemporary neuroscience, the brain can be seen as a basic underlying net and catchall for a range of human experience. The limits to studying this range of human experience in brain terms are practical and technological, having to do with how this complexity can be isolated and made discernible in a physical object. Animals and insects are an important part of neuroscience research, including the humble nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans (Vérièpe et al., 2015), Drosophila flies and mice (Anderson, 2016), rats (Lewis, 2012) and primates (Welberg, 2012). However, it is the human brain that neuroscience is ultimately concerned with. Further, neuroscience is concerned with the human being in its entirety, spanning processes that occur in the brain when someone has a stroke (Hayakawa et al., 2016), to the interaction between two people (Thepsoonthorn et al., 2016) and the neural impact of human groups in a broad social context (Heilig et al., 2016).

Following Sarah Franklin’s (2003) argument about genes, it is helpful to remember that the brain already means something to the researchers who study it, and it is already considered to be important in questions of how human beings function. The brain possesses a ‘symbolic efficacy’ that is derived from the meanings that the brain as an object is seen to contain and the different ways in which this object can be used (Vidal and Ortega, 2011, p. 11). In their book, Neurocultures , Vidal and Ortega describe the brain as the ‘icon of modernity’ (ibid., p. 13). The brain is prominent in contemporary culture in highly industrialised societies not only in medicine, science and the new neuro-fields, but also in the arts and fiction (ibid.).

Vidal (2009) has argued that the ‘cerebral subject’ is the ‘anthropological figure of modernity’ (2009. p. 5), and he argues that ‘brainhood’ is a prominent mode of understanding identity, a situation in which personhood is understood to reside in one’s brain. Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) challenge the idea of ‘brainhood’, arguing that the overlap between brain and self is not all-encompassing since human beings are seen to be able to act on their brains. Likewise, Pickersgill et al. (2011a) found that for the lay person, the brain is an ‘object of mundane significance’ (p. 346) and that neuroscientific understandings sit alongside other ways of thinking about the self. Nevertheless, Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) suggest that this

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

current moment is characterised by an increasing preoccupation with what they call ‘embodied mind’ (p. 22).

While the authority of science rests on the assumption that it provides objective accounts of nature, historians and social scientists have shown how ideas about the body are infused with ideas that are prevalent in particular times and places. Emily Martin’s (1987, 1994) ethnographies of biomedicine are empirical examples of the presence of these particular sociocultural ideas in how the body is understood. Martin’s work has explored how dominant ideas in capitalism and the global economy pervade biomedical understandings of the body. In her early work, The Woman in the Body , Martin (1987) showed how the language of obstetrics and gynaecology displayed strong capitalist metaphors of production or failure of production; women themselves began to embody these metaphors in their own experiences of menstruation, menopause, and childbirth. In Flexible Bodies , Martin (1994) looks at the late capitalist emphases on flexible accumulation and how this focus has led to a parallel evolution in ideas about the immune system, from something that needed to be protected from outside invaders, to the view of a strong immune system as a flexible one. Similarly, in relation to neuroscience, Pitts-Taylor (2010) has argued that current emphases on neural plasticity in popular culture resonate strongly with neoliberal forms of selfhood that place a premium on individual responsibility and adaptability. This has led Pitts-Taylor (2010), along with Rose and Abi-Rached (2013), to suggest that that the brain has become a site for governmentality, where people are expected to work on themselves at the level of their brains.

Human kinds, as Hacking (2002) has argued, are susceptible to ‘looping effects’ that feed new forms of classification back into themselves because of the impact that new categories have on the people classified. In his book Picturing Personhood , an ethnography of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, Joseph Dumit (2004) demonstrates how such a looping effect operates. PET scans became part of what Dumit calls ‘objective self-fashioning’, where the objective self is the version supplied by neuroscience. He writes:

Objective self-fashioning is thus an acknowledgement of local mutations in categories of people highlighting the active and continual process of self-definition and self- participation in that process. Objective self-fashioning is how we take facts about ourselves - (about our bodies, minds, capacities, traits, states, limitations, propensities, and so on) - that we have read, heard, or otherwise encountered in the world and incorporate them into our lives. (p. 164)

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Similarly, Choudhury et al. (2009), also applying Fleck’s thought style and thought collective, argue that brain facts are not ‘objectively given things-in-themselves’ (p. 64), but emerge from groups of scientists working together in particular contexts, and at particular points in history. These facts, developed via a neuroscientific style of thought, move beyond the laboratory into the public arena and eventually make their way back to the brain fact as outside pressures draw particular topics of study to the scientist’s attention. Thus, the brain in neuroscience is by no means a static object. As an object of knowledge driving the work of neuroscience (Knorr Cetina, 1997, Knorr Cetina, 2001, Rheinberger, 1997), what the brain is seen to encompass in the context of a neuroscience explosion is an important question in considering neuroscience’s expanding scope.

A neuroscience explosion: neuroscience, the brain, and the human Neuro , as Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) aptly titled their book on contemporary neuroscience, is a veritable industry . The increasing presence of the brain and neuroscience in everyday life has given rise to what some have called a ‘neuroculture’ (Frazzetto and Anker, 2009, Vidal and Ortega, 2011). While the brain is an object of science, it is also a public object with a great deal of cultural cachet. Evidence of the appearance of such a ‘neuroculture’ exists in events such as the Thoughtography installation at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), in Melbourne, Australia, in 2016. In collaboration with La Trobe University, the NGV provided visitors to their Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei exhibition with the experience of undergoing an electroencephalogram (EEG) while viewing works of art. This generated a ‘thoughtograph’, a visual representation of their brain waves while viewing pieces from the exhibition. Advertisers have not only relied on neuroscience research to enhance the effectiveness of their campaigns (Stipp, 2015) but have also capitalised on the influence that perceived effects on the brain have to entice people to buy a particular product (Chancellor and Chatterjee, 2011).

‘Neurohype’ has been a characteristic of this neuroscience explosion, a phenomenon that some argue that social scientists themselves contribute to (Pickersgill, 2013). This has been met by a critique of neuroscience sensationalism, epitomised by what neuroscience bloggers such as NYTimes journalist Quart (2012) called the ‘neuro-doubters’. On the publication of the book Brainwashed: the seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience by psychiatrist Sally

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Satel and psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus (2013), writing in the New Yorker , claimed that ‘the backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing’ (New Yorker June 19, 2015).Yet, neuroscientists themselves are not without a sense of irony and critical attitude towards their field as is evident in the tongue-in-cheek studies of neural networks of the Christmas spirit (Hougaard et al., 2015) and the IgNobel Prize-winning study of the brain activity of a dead salmon (Bennett et al., 2009). Indeed, the ‘neuro-doubters’ that Quart (2012) writes about in ‘Neuroscience Under Attack’, are by and large neuroscientists who blog about so-called ‘neurobollocks’, exaggerated claims in neuroscience research and dubious write-ups of neuroscience in the popular media.

Before the close of the Decade of the Brain, which George Bush senior (1990) had declared to emphasise the benefits of neuroscience, plans were being drawn up to organise a conference celebrating the brain (and neuroscience’s) approaching century (Hagner and Borck, 2001). Large neuroscience projects have been launched in recent years such as then President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and the European Union’s Human Brain Project. The BRAIN Initiative, standing for ‘brain research through advancing innovative technologies’, is another decade-long project launched in 2013 with the overarching aim of supporting the development of technologies that will facilitate the ability to make links between brain function and behaviour (National Institutes of Health, 2017). The Human Brain Project seeks to advance computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics by consolidating data on the brain and developing simulated brain models (Human Brain Project, 2017). And while the rapid growth of neuroscience has been largely a US and European phenomenon, neuroscience’s popularity is by no means restricted to the West. In 2014, Japan launched its own Brain/MIND (Brain Mapping by Integrated Neurotechnologies for Disease Studies) project, with the aim of mapping the brain of marmosets to develop primate models of neurological and mental disorders (Cyranoski, 2014). A China Brain Project is also in the works (Poo et al., 2016), and like the Japanese project, will focus on primate research (Cyranoski, 2014). Indeed, this has led some to lament the inequitable state of neuroscience capabilities between the developed and developing world, calling for support for big brain initiatives like the BRAIN initiative and the Human Brain Project in developing countries (Ahmad and Komai, 2016).

While studies of the brain and the nervous system have a long history, the emergence of neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field with the distinct aim of understanding all aspects of the brain and nervous system is of relatively recent vintage. Neuroscience today is often

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

called medicine’s ‘last frontier’ (Shostak and Waggoner, 2011, p. 51). It is an area where big, complex problems such as consciousness are considered, and where popularisers of neuroscience, such as Eric Kandel and V. S. Ramachandran, suggest that neuroscience is poised to answer questions that have challenged philosophers for centuries (Ramachandran, 2011, Kandel, 2006). Brain-based explanations saturate popular media (Frazzetto and Anker, 2009), and the brain has become a unique symbol in contemporary industrialised societies such as Australia, representing a system of meaning anchored in rationality and science.

Neuroscience appeared as a distinct field in the 1960s and was particularly enhanced by methods in molecular biology and later imaging technologies. With the start of the Decade of the Brain, university departments in the United States started renaming themselves. For example, in 1995, New York University’s Department of Physiology and Biophysics changed its name to ‘Neuroscience and Physiology’ (NYU School of Medicine, 2017), while Dartmouth College’s Department of Psychology became ‘Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences’ in 1999 (Jaffe, 2011). In little over a decade, the number of dedicated neuroscience PhD programmes in the United States had tripled (Mize et al., 2000). The US-based Society for Neuroscience’s first annual conference in 1971 gathered 1, 396 (Society for Neuroscience, 2017b) while from 2006 to 2016, the meeting has regularly drawn over thirty thousand attendees (Society for Neuroscience, 2017a). In 2006, according to an editorial in Nature Neuroscience , 344 neuroscience journals were indexed in Thomson Scientific’s Journal Citation Reports (Nature Neuroscience 2006).

Neuroscience in Australia operates on a much more modest scale than in the United States. As with other developed countries like the UK, Norway and Canada, funding for medical research in Australia falls well behind that of the US in terms of the proportion of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) spent (Research Australia, 2009 cited in Valenzuela, 2012). The Australian Neuroscience Society, now the Australasian Neuroscience Society (ANS), was formed in 1979 and began meeting annually in 1980, though the society had been meeting informally since 1971 (2017a). Tiny in comparison to the US Society for Neuroscience’s conferences, these draw together about a thousand neuroscientists, from an initial 200 in 1981 (Australasian Neuroscience Society, 2017b). Nevertheless, neuroscience in Australia is a prominent force. Australia participates in the annual international Brain Awareness Week organised by the US philanthropic Dana Foundation (2017b), as well as the International Brain Bee organised by the University of Maryland (2017), a competition for high school students, that aims to promote neuroscience.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Australian drug and alcohol health promotion regularly draws on the authority of neuroscience and the power of images of the ‘addicted brain’ to dissuade young people from consuming alcohol and illicit drugs (Farrugia and Fraser, 2017). Just as extrapolations from neuroscience research on brain development have been shown to have given rise to persistent myths in education internationally (Howard-Jones, 2014), so too reasoning based on research in neuroscience has been used in Australian early childhood education and government policy (Millei and Joronen, 2016). These have been applied in questionable ways and calls have been made to provide teachers with training to equip them to separate neuro-fact from fiction (Bellert and Graham, 2013).

McCabe and Castel (2008) found that people tend to give more credence to brain-related explanations than they do to other accounts of human behaviour, while Beck (2010) showed that brain-based findings are enthusiastically taken up by the media. As an extension of already evolving modes of ‘somatisation’ (Novas and Rose, 2000), scholars like Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) and Pitts-Taylor (2010) have suggested that brain-based ways to remake oneself are taking shape. Others (e.g. Pickersgill et al., 2011a) have questioned the extent to which such brain-based approaches to self-understanding have been taken up, cautioning against adding to the hype, and showing that these exist alongside other ways of understanding and are by no means dominant. Pickersgill et al. (2011) found that while the brain certainly did figure in people’s self-conceptions, the extent to which it did differed in people’s engagement with neuroscience in the popular media, or experiences of health conditions that forced them to think about themselves in terms of their brains. The authors argue that the brain is not ‘some magnificent epicentre of subjectivity’, but rather, is ‘an object of mundane significance’ (p. 361).

Pickersgill (2009) suggests that in contemporary neuroscience the brain represents a focus for interactions between mind, body and society. In a 2007 issue of Science , a group of ten neuroscientists called for a ‘Decade of the Mind’ initiative to follow the Decade of the Brain. The authors (Albus et al., 2007) suggested that technological breakthroughs now put the understanding of how the brain generates mind within grasp, and argued for the need to support multidisciplinary research into the mind. They envisioned this as requiring the efforts of ‘disparate fields’ such as psychology and cognitive science and drawing insights from areas that include the social sciences. This call, however, as Kirmayer (2012) points out, is overwhelmingly focused on neuroscience.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Neuroscience is, unsurprisingly, a powerful force in psychiatry where the developments in neuroscience hold out the hope for the identification of biomarkers to aid in diagnoses of mental health conditions, and for the development of more specific, personalised and targeted drug treatments (Cuthbert and Insel, 2013). Thomas Insel, who was director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 and 2015, with Quirion (2005) described psychiatry as a ‘clinical neuroscience discipline’, arguing for mental disorders to be understood as brain disorders, and for psychiatrists to be trained as neuroscientists. Indeed, in the United States, divisions of the National Institute of Health (NIH) that fund psychological research have, in the last ten years, shifted their funding priorities from social science-based research to neuroscience (Schwartz et al., 2016).

The appeal of neuroscience for psychiatry has led some (e.g. Stein et al., 2015) to argue that neuroscience has the potential to address issues of mental health on a global scale. The field of global mental health has emerged as an academic discipline (Patel, 2012) along with the recognition of mental illness as a worldwide problem (World Health Organization, 2008). In their Lancet Psychiatry article discussing the role of neuroscience in addressing global mental health issues, Stein et al. (2015) note that global mental health and neuroscience take very different approaches, the former focused on communities and social processes, while the latter emphasises individual biology at a molecular level. The authors argue that there these two paradigms could be usefully brought together in a way that avoids the reductionism of either approach on its own.

Developed countries with ageing populations face the prospect of a growing prevalence of brain disorders, since the risk of neurological disease increases with age (Jetté et al., 2016). The World Health Organization (cited in Gammon, 2014) foresees neurodegenerative illnesses overtaking cancer as the second leading cause of death after heart disease. While neuroscience has made strides in understanding brain disorders, cures have not yet been discovered (Przedborski, 2017, Brayne, 2007). This provides urgency, interest and opportunity for neuroscience investigations of these diseases (Gammon, 2014).

Notwithstanding neuroscience’s potential to address brain and mental (Stein et al. 2015) disorders and to alleviate human suffering, in a neuroscience explosion, this has given rise to a promissory discourse (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013, Pickersgill, 2011) that fuels hype and raises expectations. The growing acceptance that the brain retains some of its ability to structurally reorganise (Merzenich et al., 1983) and to generate new neurons into adulthood

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

(Gould and Reeves, 1999), has opened up space for hope. This hope is based on the idea that the adult brain is much more amenable to therapeutic intervention than previously thought (Rubin, 2009).

The growth of neuroscience has seen the development of an increasing number of new composite disciplines with the prefix ‘neuro’ (Vidal, 2009, p. 9). These include neuroeconomics, neurotheology, neuromarketing, and indeed, neuroanthropology. In a recent introduction to neuroanthropology, The Encultured Brain, Lende and Downey (2012) discuss the consolidation of work in the burgeoning field at the interface of anthropology and neuroscience that ‘places the brain at the center of discussions about human nature and culture’ (p. 23). ‘The brain and nervous system’, Lende and Downey note, ‘are our most cultural organs’ (p. 23). Themselves anthropologists, they envision a mutually collaborative endeavour where anthropologists allow a more ‘epistemologically sophisticated’ (p. 25) understanding of culture than they suggest is currently present in the area of cultural neuroscience, where culture is merely tacked on as an extra variable. A neuroanthropological model would consider interactions not only at a neural level, but also at a sociocultural level, since the brain is ‘shot through with the environment down to its cellular structure’ (p. 49).

Efforts have been made to ensure that the perspectives of humanities and social science scholars are taken into account in the growing trend towards the neuroscientific study of phenomena. The European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN), based at the London School of Economics and led by sociologist Nikolas Rose, ran from 2007 to 2012 (Rose, 2013) as part of an effort to understand the developments in the neurosciences from a social, political and ethical perspective. One of the key programmes run by the network were four week-long NeuroSchools that brought together early career researchers in neuroscience and the social sciences. The aim of the NeuroSchool was to enable participants to share their expertise in the methodologies of their discipline, to gain a basic understanding of concepts unfamiliar to them, and to work on projects that would satisfy the methodological and epistemological requirements of their different disciplines (Frazzetto, 2011). Participants in these NeuroSchools have published journal articles on these experiences (see Fitzgerald et al., 2014, Fitzgerald and Callard, 2015). However, Fitzgerald et al. (2014) note that despite genuine desires for mutual and equal-footed disciplinary exchange, the social was seen to place limitations of what could be done experimentally:

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

When the group collaborated around the pragmatics of the experiment, knowledges and tools got aligned in very specific ways. The white board, for example, was filled with ‘2×2’ factorial designs, ‘x and y’ axes and ‘vectors’ of various kinds; it never contained sociological or humanistic theories. (p. 713)

Thus, while neuroscience expands to include complex human phenomena into its remit, in the end, as Fitzgerald et al, (2014) and Kirmayer (2012) note, it is the neural, specifically, that is ‘shot through’ (Lende & Downey 2012, p. 49) with everything else. Neuroscience is experiencing unprecedented growth and popularity in societies like Australia. Within this context, the brain, as it is imagined in neuroscience, is able to hold the complexity of the human being, and even one in context. Neuroscience, brain, and human are seen to be intimately and inherently linked. In the next sections, I describe the approach that I take in this thesis to understand these links and the ongoing work of sustaining them.

Locating this thesis

This thesis is located at the intersection of medical anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). I have drawn from each discipline to put together an approach that assists in understanding neuroscience as a dominant explanatory framework in industrialised societies like Australia. Taking a combined approach allows me to draw on the relevant tools from each discipline. These tools facilitate an understanding of how a newly organised field called ‘neuroscience’, focused on the human brain, is able to successfully grow to include increasingly complex problems within the scope of its research, and how this comes to be seen as a compelling approach to human affairs. The thesis deals with STS concerns of how scientific knowledge is produced and how it comes to be established; it addresses medical anthropology concerns of meaning and interpretation, drawing attention to what is at stake in approaches to understanding health, illness, and the human through neuroscience.

Medical anthropology and STS have a long association, which, as Inhorn and Wentzell (2012) note in their edited volume on the intersection of medical anthropology and cognate disciplines, grew out of feminist anthropologists’ studies of the applications of medical technologies to women’s bodies. STS scholars’ critical concerns about the status of scientific knowledge were especially relevant to medical anthropologists trying to understand the production of biomedical knowledge about women’s bodies. Emily Martin (2012) was part of this exchange in her work, The Woman in the Body . , Martin writes in Inhorn and Wentzell’s

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

(2012) edited volume that medical anthropologists realised the importance of what was happening behind the scenes in scientific laboratories to the questions that they were asking about biomedicine. Martin argues that STS provided medical anthropologists with the tools to read the sociality in the material objects of medicine.

In their approaches to understanding biomedicine and science medical anthropology and STS share a similar trajectory in their development. Early sociologists of science looked at how science was organised and focused on relations between scientists, leaving aside questions about the content of science (Hess, 1997b, Thompson, 2005, Sismondo, 2010). Similarly, while anthropologists investigated the cultural components of non-Western medical systems, the knowledge and practices of biomedicine were thought to be the beyond scope of anthropological inquiry (Lock and Nguyen, 2010, Young and Rees, 2011). Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, both medical anthropology and STS have grown to include the investigation of the content of biomedicine and science, and both fields have developed ways in which to understand these as unique cultural worlds in their own right (Hess, 1997b, Good, 1994).

Yet STS and medical anthropology are different in key ways. STS has particularly emphasised materiality in scientific work, identifying materiality as the ‘subtle and profound’ (Ihde and Selinger, 2003, p. 1) way in which people, and scientists in particular, do things in the world. This has been especially useful for drawing attention to non-human entities that are crucial in the making of science (Thompson, 2005). Some STS scholars advocate a ‘symmetrical’ approach to human and non-humans in science that does not privilege the role of the human being. This approach, however, would be untenable for anthropologists concerned with human beings’ experience and understanding of the world (Young and Rees, 2011, Good, 1994). Nevertheless, for medical anthropologists who deal with questions of biology and society, STS approaches to materiality provide a way of avoiding a hierarchical approach to these, questioning whether biology or the social are seen as coming prior (Cohen, 1998). For example, in her comparative study of menopause in Japan and the US, medical anthropologist Margaret Lock (1993 cited in Lock and Nguyen, 2010) developed the concept of ‘local biologies’ to capture the way in which biology and culture were inseparably intertwined.

Theories in STS are particularly useful for considering the way in which things that might be taken as natural givens achieve coherence relationally and in practice. Some STS scholars

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

have used metaphors denoting confluence and entanglement to represent work in science (Edwards et al. 2007). Scholars have expanded the perspective from the objects of study to consider other material entities such as the technologies and laboratory animals that enable scientific work. Acts of ‘translation’ are seen to involve operations that link technical devices, statements and human beings, forming connections between things previously unassociated (Callon 1980 cited in Brown and Capdevila, 1999). These approaches set aside the assumption that a thing’s coherence is bestowed by nature, and instead, offer ways of thinking about how coherence might be produced through human activity. In this theoretical approach, coherence and stability are achievements (Young, 1995, Berg and Mol, 1998), and the singularity belies a rich multiplicity (Dugdale, 1999). These theories draw attention to the vast arrangements of materials and multiple actors that allow a particular scientific fact to be established.

In his now classic study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anthropologist Allan Young (1995) argued that PTSD was not a timeless object that existed outside of the context of psychiatric culture. Instead, PTSD could be understood to have been ‘glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives’ (p. 5) through which it is known. The concepts that form the category of PTSD do not arise ‘spontaneously’, but instead, Young argues, are ‘an achievement, a product of psychiatric culture and technology’ (p. 116). Like Daston (2000) argues in relation to scientific objects, Young writes that this approach to understanding PTSD as historical does not in any way make it less real. Young’s job as an ethnographer of PTSD was to show how it was ‘made real’ (1995, p. 6) in the work and applications of psychiatry.

Choudhury and Slaby (2012) argue for the need for a critical approach to neuroscience, developing the project of a ‘critical neuroscience’ in response to neuroscience’s colonising tendencies. This interdisciplinary effort includes sociologists, anthropologists, historians, cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers engaged in understanding the neuroscience explosion from a variety of angles. ‘Critical neuroscience’ aims to be a ‘historico-political mission’ (p. 29) with the goal of understanding the sociohistorical contingencies of neuroscience and the way neuroscience facts are used beyond the lab. Slaby and Choudhury see such a critique as engaged with, rather than removed from, laboratory work, with the aim of engendering a more reflective neuroscience that is attuned to its situatedness.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

The close and seemingly natural relations between the field of neuroscience, the brain, and human beings are taken to be self-evident when the materials, ideas, and practices that have gone into understanding the brain are disregarded (Edwards et al., 2007, Choudhury and Slaby, 2012). STS scholars have challenged the stability of ahistorical, asocial claims in science by drawing attention to materiality and practices in science, having the effect of revealing hitherto unseen links and relations (Edwards et al. 2007), and challenging the popular narrative of science as a ‘culture of no culture’ (Downey and Dumit, 1997, p. 6). In this way, the nexus of neuroscience, brain and human becomes more evidently the work of human activity, rather than a natural given.

My theoretical frame brings together critical elements with interpretive ones (Lock and Scheper-Hughes, 1996, Good, 1994), both of which are essential. An interpretive approach, concerned with the ‘webs of culture that people spin’ (Lock and Scheper-Hughes, 1996, p. 44) is crucial to understanding the appeal of neuroscience as an explanatory framework, and the way that this approach constructs the phenomena that fall within its scope. Furthermore, neuroscience’s object is not merely a scientific one. Good (1994) argues that biomedicine is not just instrumental reason but also inevitably concerned with questions of life and death. Similarly, neuroscience, in dealing with a particularly human object, and one that has been tied to ideas of the soul and mind, deals with questions that extend well beyond laboratory.

Theoretical framework: Material, Practice and Imagination My approach takes into consideration the role of work, sociality, material, and meaning in the nexus of neuroscience, brain and human being. My overarching conceptual framework has two parts: first, I employ Star and colleagues’ concept of the ‘boundary object’ (Bowker and Star, 1999, Star, 2010, Star and Griesemer, 1989) and ‘boundary infrastructure’ (Bowker & Star 1999), a network of boundary objects. Boundary objects are shared objects that allow collaborative work to occur where agreement is not guaranteed. Second, I draw on the philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s concept of the ‘symbolic form’, and particularly on Byron Good’s (1994) elaboration of the concept as a way of understanding biomedicine. The symbolic form combines the symbolic and the schematic (Barash, 2008), bringing things that are beyond the senses into the way in which reality is experienced (Motzkin, 2008). I go on to discuss these two parts of my theoretical framework more fully in a later section.

The concept of the ‘boundary infrastructure’ draws attention to the work processes and organisational needs (Bowker and Star 1999) in the establishment of neuroscience as a new

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

interdisciplinary field. Through the concept of the ‘boundary object’ (ibid., Star 2010), this part of my overarching framework further provides ways of thinking about how neuroscience’s brain is made in the process of the work of building the field. Cassirer’s ‘symbolic form’ draws attention to the imaginative and the way in which this shapes a particular way of seeing and acting (Good 1994) towards the kind of human phenomena that increasingly fall within neuroscience’s purview. The concept is particularly useful in considering the imaginative appeal of understanding human issues through an object like the brain. Together, these two approaches complement each other and contribute to an understanding of neuroscience as a particular cultural world with a specific way of understanding human issues.

Within this frame, I employ theories that assist in thinking about objects in science, theories that I also go on to elaborate in the following sections. These theories, like my overarching theoretical framework, allow a focus on neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field, and one that deals with questions of human importance. They assist in thinking about work at borderlands and boundaries, where different disciplines intersect, where the concerns of scientists and their publics interact. The concepts I draw on emphasise the practices of knowledge production in science and the significance of the material for scientists in the way they do things. These approaches together provide an approach to examining the brain as an object in neuroscience that emphasises materiality in a relational way.

In their definition of what is an ‘object’, Bowker and Star (1999) draw from Clarke and Fujimura’s (1992a) work on tools in scientific practice. Clarke and Fujimura argue that tools become ‘meaning-laden entities’ (p. 16) as they are intertwined in scientific work, and what counts as a ‘tool’ varies depending on the circumstances of practice. Similarly, Bowker and Star (1999), drawing on the full sense of the word ‘object’, take it to mean things that matter for the community in question; they see this to include material things, as well as concepts, processes, and ideas.

Objects are dynamic and dialectical; they become objects through use, are shaped through this use, and themselves mediate future action (Bowker & Star 1999). In scientific work, they are things that scientists ‘act towards or with’ (Star 2010, p. 603). While the concept of ‘boundary object’ certainly includes the common usage of ‘object’ to mean material things, Star (2010) writes that in developing the concept, she intended the materiality of these objects to come from their use in human action rather than a ‘prefabricated stuff or ‘thing’-ness’ (p.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

603). Thus, Star suggests that ‘boundary objects’ can be understood to be ‘work arrangements that are at once material and processual’ (p. 604).

In the ways I have described briefly above, I conceptualise the brain as an object through its role as a target of, as well as an arbiter of, human action and imagination. I develop an understanding of the brain in neuroscience as the basis as well as the goal of shared work, as an object that takes shape in ongoing work of a collection of scientists from different scientific disciplines. I consider the kinds of ‘formative principles’ at work in neuroscience; the principles through which reality is given shape via a brain-centred understanding of the human (Good 1994). STS theories have been useful in emphasising the material, though in advocating symmetrical approaching to the human and non-human, have tended to overlook the role of imagination (Street and Coleman 2012). My focus on the symbolic in medical anthropology through Good’s work is aimed at addressing what is lacking in STS theories of scientific objects.

In this section, I first briefly discuss the ontological turn in medical anthropology and STS and locate my work in relation to this body of work. Next, I expand first on the theories that make up my overarching framework, namely those of ‘boundary infrastructure’ (Bowker & Star 1999) and ‘symbolic form’ (Good 1994). Third, I describe the theories that inform my understanding of the brain as a scientific object and as a human object.

A note on the ontological turn in medical anthropology and science studies The ‘ontological turn’ is a move in medical anthropology and science studies towards considering the ontologies 2 of the objects of medicine and science. Anthropologist Viveiros de Castro (cited in Henare et al., 2007), who has been one of the ontological turn’s key proponents, argues that with Descartes’s separation of extended matter from unextended thought, came the separation of the social and cultural from the material. Ontology was simplified, leading the social sciences to confine itself to questions of epistemology: how different societies and cultures approach a unified, underlying reality. Instead, proponents of the ontological turn suggest that rather than being different approaches to a singular reality, these differences, in fact, constitute different realities or ontologies (Henare et al. 2007).

2 Graeber (2015) notes that the word is used in the social sciences to mean ‘being’, rather than the study of the nature of being, its classic use in philosophy.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

A classic example of the ontological turn applied to medicine is empirical philosopher Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple . Rather than view different scientific or medical approaches as perspectives on a singular object, the ontological turn in medical anthropology and STS instead focuses attention on the way in which things are ‘enacted’ or ‘done’ (Mol, 2002). In her title, Mol applies a plural adjective to a singular noun, to make the point that atherosclerosis, the topic of her study, involves different enactments in the clinic, in surgery and elsewhere. Mol argues that the fact that a single disease called atherosclerosis is seen to exist is the result of a co-ordinated striving towards singularity. Mol describes her approach to atherosclerosis as ‘praxiological’ (p. 84), taking what is to be equivalent to what is done .

Some commentators have questioned the ontological proponents’ claims to novelty. Woolgar and Lezaun (2013) have described it as a ‘more thoroughgoing or insistent form of deconstruction’ (p. 322) that maximises the implications of previous turns (such as the materialist or performative). They suggest that the focus on ontologies is not in fact much different from earlier notions of construction and co-production. In response to Henare et al.’s (2007) call for taking respondents’ ontologies at face value, Graeber (2015) argues that this runs the risk of blinding the researcher to ways in which people equivocate and often contradict themselves, instead, closing off the diversity that the ontological turn is aiming to promote. Nevertheless, critics have pointed to the methodological value of these approaches, namely the ‘creative respect’ for respondent’s worldviews (Graeber 2015, p. 21).

In this thesis, I adopt some of the concepts and approaches of the ontological turn as theoretical and methodological tools, without making the accompanying philosophical commitment to multiple ontologies. I adopt a realist take on the ontological turn, using the recommendations of this turn as analytical tools, in the way that Hacking 3 (1988) adopts in his own realist interpretation of Latour and Woolgar’s irrealism in Laboratory Life . Hacking notes that a realist approach does not demand that it is even possible to fully understand what this reality is, a view that Graeber (2015) also asserts when he argues that anthropologists approach reality as something that neither the anthropologist nor their respondents have a full handle on.

3 Byron Good (1994) takes a similar approach in his use of Cassirer's symbolic forms. Cassirer was an idealist philosopher who argued that different symbolic forms actually created different realities.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Overarching framework: boundary infrastructure and symbolic form Boundary objects are shared objects that allow different social groups to work together without the need for consensus (Bowker and Star, 1999, Star, 2010); they serve the informational needs of all groups, being well defined in specialised use, and more loosely defined in shared use. Boundary objects possess an interpretive flexibility, serve the information needs of scientists, and take shape in the movement from specific to more general use (Star 2010). Boundary objects can be multiple things at the same time: both concrete and abstract, ambiguous yet constant (Bowker & Star 1999). Bowker and Star expanded on this concept further to include the concept of ‘boundary infrastructure’ as a network of boundary objects. Infrastructure, Bowker and Star argue, facilitates ongoing work and ‘keeps things moving along’ (p. 313). Infrastructure that works well is invisible; it is only when it breaks down that it is noticed.

Being a shared object that sits across different disciplinary boundaries, the brain can also be conceived in terms of what Peter Galison (1999) calls a ‘trading zone’, a concept similar to that of the boundary object. Galison describes the trading zone as a spatial as well as a symbolic space where ideas, materials, and techniques are exchanged. Strathern’s (1992) concept of overlap, which she refers to as ‘merographic connections’, also deal with questions of exchange. Galison’s concept of a ‘trading zone’ deals specifically with exchange in scientific work, while Strathern’s (1992) brings the brain into the context of human life. I draw on both Galison’s and Strathern’s concepts within the framework of the boundary object to talk about exchange and overlap, along with other theories of objects in science. However, for clarity’s sake, I confine myself to Star et al.’s terminology of the ‘boundary object’ in this thesis. Star’s concept of the boundary object is itself flexible enough to accommodate a range of other theories within it to tease out the specific aspects of the brain in neuroscience in a way that is relevant to my analysis.

In his book, Medicine, Rationality, and Experience , Byron Good (1994) applies Cassirer’s concept of the ‘symbolic form’ to biomedicine. Good (1994) suggests that biomedicine may be thought of as a symbolic form: a unique culture that involves a ‘symbolically mediated mode of apprehending and acting on the world’ (Good 1994, p. 87). Good (1994) analysed the way that medical students’ experience of the human body changed over the course of their education, arguing that medical education inducts students into a cultural world in which the body and ill health are given a culturally distinctive shape. I suggest that a similar

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

approach can be taken towards a neuroscientific view of the human to explore how neuroscience serves as a cultural frame in which human behaviour is given a particular shape.

With his concept of the ‘symbolic form’, Cassirer extended the usual meaning of the ‘symbol’ to combine the mind’s symbolising and schematising functions (Barash, 2008). Symbols represent ideas that are beyond the realm of direct experience, while mental schemas give shape to experience. Cassirer formulated this theory as a departure from Kant’s idea of the mental schema. Kant argued that human beings did not encounter the world as it existed. Rather, Kant posited an innate cognitive framework that structured our experience of the world (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001). Kant argued that ‘forms’, what he defined as concepts existing in the mind prior to experience, gave shape to human beings’ experience of the world (Rohlf, 2016). For Kant, it was these forms or a priori concepts that provided structure and coherence to objects in the sensuous world (Barash 2008) rather than qualities inherent in the objects themselves (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001).

To show how these two frameworks of ‘boundary infrastructure’ and ‘symbolic form’ can work alongside each other, it is helpful to refer briefly to Michel Foucault, a theorist whose work I do not use directly in this thesis, but to whom much work in the social studies of medicine and science is indebted. Ian Hacking (2002) describes Foucault’s ‘episteme’ - the conditions of a specific time and place that make certain kinds of knowledge possible - as a historicisation of Kant. While Foucault moved Kant’s schema or structure into time and place, Cassirer moved it into the symbol by expanding the usual use of the word ‘symbol’ in philosophy (Barash 2008). Kant made a distinction between the mind’s organising and symbolising activities, while Cassirer brought these together in the ‘symbolic form’ (ibid.). Cassirer emphasised the role of symbols in how human beings experience reality. The primary effect of this synthesis, Barash (2008) notes, is that it brings the supersensual into the domain of mundane experience. For Good (1994), it is exactly this move that allows the concept of the symbolic form to be of use in understanding how a culture of medicine gives shape to the phenomena that it encounters. Symbolic forms, like Foucault’s episteme, are ‘historically evolving cultural structures’ (Barash 2008, p. xii).

Bowker and Star (1999) refer to ‘infrastructure inversion’ as the approach in science studies that highlights the unseen work, materials and connections that facilitate scientific research. This thesis is also a kind of infrastructural inversion of the brain as the central object of contemporary neuroscience. By focusing on the brain as an object in neuroscience, I highlight

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

the processes, connections, and materials that allow the field of neuroscience to hold together in and through the brain. Star and colleagues’ work on boundary objects is located in the social worlds branch of science studies, coming out of the Chicago School of pragmatic philosophy (Hess, 1997b). The social worlds approach is particularly useful for thinking about work practices where different groups of people come together and must collaborate without necessarily agreeing. This approach is helpful in calling attention to the normally unseen work, the ‘normally invisible Lilliputian threads’, (Bowker & Star 1999, p. 34) that hold together, guide, shape or constrain.

These approaches combine thought and practice, and allow considerations of the material, conceptual, and processual. Star et al.’s work is more concerned with pragmatic work processes and draws attention to the making of the brain as an object through the ongoing work of neuroscience (Star, 2010, Star and Griesemer, 1989, Bowker and Star, 1999). Cassirer’s (cited in Good 1994) is an idealist concept that emphasises the imaginative aspect of thinking through the brain and how this structures experience and gives shape to reality. These two concepts both relate to ‘structure’ in terms of organising principles and provide a complementary overarching framework within which I develop my analysis of the brain, neuroscience, and its growing reach in a Western, industrialised society.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Objects in science Within my overarching framework of boundary infrastructure and symbolic form, I draw from various theorisations of objects in science and medicine (including boundary objects as outlined above) to inform my analysis of the brain in neuroscience. STS has a rich literature that provides useful ways of thinking about the objects in science. These consider the materiality of objects in a way that focuses on how they facilitate sociality (Knorr Cetina, 1997, Knorr Cetina, 2001); they provide a means of thinking about objects in science processually, in a way that emphasises their entanglement in human action (Langwick, 2011).

The objects of science are different from everyday objects. In her edited volume Biographies of Scientific Objects, historian of science Lorraine Daston (2000) argues that everyday objects have an obviousness and solidity that objects of science lack. She notes the oppositional connotation of the word ‘object’, of a thing ‘throw[n]…in front of us’, that ‘smite[s] the senses’, and is ‘thrust…into our consciousness’ (p. 2). Scientific objects, on the other hand, are much more elusive, sometimes requiring special tools in order to be seen (ibid).

The brain is both of these. It is an object that, in a ‘neuroculture’ (Frazzetto and Anker, 2009, Vidal and Ortega, 2011), is ‘thrust…into our consciousness’ (Daston, 2000). However, as a scientific object, it is evolving, being changed by neuroscience inquiry. Daston (2000) emphasises that she is not saying that objects of science do not exist independent to their being studied. She writes:

Scientific objects may not be invented, but they grow more richly real as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. In contrast to quotidian objects, scientific objects broaden and deepen: they become ever more widely connected to other phenomena and, at the same time, yield ever more layers of hidden structure. (p. 13)

Karin Knorr Cetina (1997) develops the concept of an object-centred sociality in thinking about scientific cultures. She suggests that scientific cultures are object-centred collectives. These objects that form the basis of a scientific collective ‘serve as centring and integrating devices for regimes of expertise that transcend an expert’s lifetime’ (Knorr Cetina 1997, p. 9). Objects of science are unfinished and are yet to be fully charted, described or mapped, giving objects of science a generative function that fuels productivity in science (Daston, 2000, Knorr Cetina, 1997, Rheinberger, 1997). These objects operate as what Rheinberger

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

(1997) refers to as ‘epistemic things’ and Knorr Cetina (1997, 2000) as ‘knowledge objects’. These objects are open-ended, unfinished and evolving, projections that capture the unknown (Rheinberger 1997). They are animated as much by the absences as well as the presences they contain, and provide structure and direction to scientists’ work (Knorr Cetina 1997). In this sense, the brain is first a ‘meeting place’ (p. 13) for scientists from a wide range of disciplines. While their place in neuroscience may be tenuous at first, as an unfinished object of knowledge, the brain provides neuroscientists with ‘collective obligations’ towards it, and in this sense, provides scientists with an ‘embedding environment’ (Knorr Cetina, 1997, p. 25). These theories in STS provide a way of considering a more complex materiality than is usually acknowledged in science (Edwards et al. 2007).

Method My focus is on the study of neuroscience in Australia and its expanding scope in modern, industrialised, and mostly Western, societies. The approach that I take is an ethnographic one that centres on the brain as an object in neuroscience. I have drawn from anthropological studies in science that ‘follow’ objects into different spaces (Dumit, 2004, Franklin and Roberts, 2006, Franklin, 2007) to illuminate their human context (Appadurai, 1986). I have also drawn from literature in STS that contributes towards the formulation of an ethnography of objects (e.g. Henare et al., 2007, Star, 1999, Knorr Cetina, 1997, Knorr Cetina, 2001). By centring my analysis on the brain, I am able to link the dispersed spaces within which science is made (Martin, 1997).

Situating this research within anthropological studies of science, I examine the growth in neuroscience from the perspective of the neuroscientist (Hess, 1997b), though necessarily balancing this with an outsider’s consideration of the place of neuroscience in contemporary Australian society (Choudhury and Slaby, 2012, Madden, 2010). In this study, I focus specifically on areas of neuroscience that deal in some way with human thought, behaviour, and feeling. To understand neuroscience as a ‘unique cultural world’ with a particular mode of approaching reality (Good 1994), I have gathered data in three different ways. First, I conducted participant observation with two neuroscience laboratories in a large Australian city, as well as interviews with laboratory members. These were a behavioural neuroscience lab that conducted research on mice, principally involved in work related to learning and memory, and a cognitive neuroscience laboratory studying aspects of self-control that conducted brain scanning experiments with human subjects. Second, I interviewed neuroscientist key informants. These were senior neuroscientists who all ran their own

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

laboratories, and who were involved in studying human thought, behaviour and feeling. Third, I conducted a textual analysis of popular neuroscience books written by neuroscientists that again dealt with some aspect of human experience.

In the laboratories, I observed the unique and hard-won arrangements of materials, technologies, subjects and participants that allowed phenomena such as fear and self-control to be studied in terms of the brain, what these arrangements allowed, and what they constrained. In interviews, I heard about career trajectories that spanned neuroscience ‘boom- time’, where the opportunities provided by a ‘neuroscience explosion’ were accepted and its objectives committed to. I heard both official versions of the neuroscience story (the ones seen in neuroscience textbooks or scientist-public communiques) as well as doubts about the sustainability of its growth. The popular neuroscience texts provided examples of how neuroscientists were translating and communicating the field to their public, and served as a space where neuroscientists could be more speculative about what neuroscientific facts are able to say about human beings.

The methods that I have used to understand the world of neuroscience, and particularly in the context of the expansion of neuroscience into the study of increasingly broad phenomena has allowed me to show how the material, processes of work, and ideas play a role in the figuration of the brain in contemporary society. By focusing my analysis on the brain as a central object of neuroscience, I have been able to consider how the links between neuroscience, brain and human are made and sustained. These approaches in social studies of science draw attention to things that are normally erased in final accounts of science, an erasure on which scientific authority is constructed (Edwards et al. 2007). This is not done, however, to undermine the validity of the work that these scientists do. Rather, my aim in this thesis is to represent neuroscience as a human activity, carried out in a particular milieu, under particular material circumstances.

Overview of the thesis My central argument in this thesis is that the brain in neuroscience is a shifting object that provides coherence to the neuroscience enterprise and sustains its expansion into increasingly complex areas of inquiry. I suggest that the brain that is the object of neuroscience can be seen as boundary infrastructure that keeps the work of neuroscience moving along, links neuroscience, brain and human, and that it is also a symbolic form that is involved in neuroscience worldmaking. In order to illustrate this, I explore three forms that the brain in

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

neuroscience takes: a tangible, projected and versatile form. I show how each works as a boundary object that serves a specific purpose.

Chapter two provides the historical background to the figuration of the brain as an object of human interest, and to the development of a contemporary neuroscience and its endeavour to understand the mind in terms of the brain. In particular, the chapter illustrates the entanglements of ideas, materials, methods and milieus. I provide a brief overview of ideas of mind in Western thought and the place of the brain in those ideas. I then consider the mind and body problem and its place in neuroscience today. Finally, I provide some background to the techniques that are used in the investigation of mind and brain, namely, neuroimaging and the use of rodents in behavioural neuroscience. This chapter provides the context for thinking about the different things that are part of the brain in neuroscience, emphasising that the brain, as an object of human knowledge, is not a static entity (Borck 2016).

In chapter three, I provide justification for the approach that I take to the question of neuroscience’s expanding scope and show how my choices of methods furnish an ethnographic account that is situated first and foremost in the participants’ point of view. My approach draws inspiration from the anthropological end of ethnographies of science that are concerned with understanding science as a cultural world from the perspectives of those involved (Hess 1997), though necessarily also needing to balance this with some distance (Madden 2010). I make a case for the suitability of an ethnography of the brain in neuroscience, bringing together method and theory to address my central questions. Through the focus on an object (or objects), I tie together neuroscience, and ideas of the brain and human being as a way of delimiting my field (ibid.).

Chapter four deals with what I have called the ‘tangible brain’, focusing on the importance of the brain’s materiality for neuroscientists. I present this version of the brain as foundational in what I am arguing is the boundary infrastructure of the brain in neuroscience. It is what draws together a group of scientists from different disciplines in the first place into a shared physical and symbolic space (Galison, 1999). As a boundary object, it accommodates the different methods, styles of thought, techniques and values of neuroscientists’ home disciplines (Bowker and Star, 1999, Star, 2010, Star and Griesemer, 1989). The tangible brain facilitates the process of materialisation and takes shape in the concrete statistics and brain images that the laboratories produce. Serving the informational needs of neuroscientists (Star

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

2010), it provides for them what counts as genuine understanding, and allows a specific mode of approaching and acting on human behaviour based on a concrete, physical object.

In chapter five, I present the ‘projected brain’, the still-to-be-discovered thing that functions as an object of knowledge and a goal toward which neuroscientists work (Knorr Cetina 1997, 2000; Rheinberger 1997). I explore how this version of the brain is a boundary object that arises out of the need to juggle the categories of mind and brain (Bowker and Star 1999). As neuroscientists manage mind and brain through various conceptual arrangements and practical measures and investigate a brain that includes a broadening scope, the ‘projected’ object that they articulate is at once material and immaterial, known and unknown, concrete and abstract. This chapter complicates the more straightforward approach to materiality that I take in the preceding chapter.

Chapter six deals with the ‘versatile brain’. This is the brain that, being central to human functioning, sits at the intersection of multiple domains of human life. Through Western knowledge-making conventions (Strathern 1992), this brain is able to connect the biological to a host of other orders of knowledge. Possessing an interpretive flexibility (Star 2010), the versatile brain is evoked in, and slipped into, explanations of a range of human phenomena. These uses provide opportunities for knowledge to be moved around (Franklin, 2013), shaping what this object is seen to apply to, both within neuroscience and broader contemporary culture.

Chapter seven concludes the thesis. It provides a summary of my central argument and of the chapters of the thesis. I consider the methodological and conceptual contributions that my research makes, focusing on the approach of object ethnography, and on my overarching framework of thinking about the brain in neuroscience as boundary infrastructure and symbolic form. I discuss the substantive contributions of the research towards understanding and engaging with the growth of neuroscience and its expanding scope. Specifically, I consider the possibilities and limits to neuroscience’s ability to accommodate different subject areas, and discuss the role of invention in the conceptualisation of neuroscience’s brain. The chapter concludes with a statement of the limitations within which the research should be considered and makes suggestions for further research.

In this thesis, I argue that that the brain as it is conceived of and researched in contemporary neuroscience provides a boundary infrastructure that supports the expansion of neuroscience’s foray into increasingly complex human phenomena. It serves as Bowker and

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Star (1999) say of boundary infrastructures to ‘keep things moving along’ (p. 313), keeping the work of neuroscience moving along. By peering closely at the object of the brain and examining how it is used as material, idea and tool, I develop an understanding of the coherence of neuroscience around this compelling object.

Chapter 2 The neuroscience enterprise: studying mind in terms of brain

That neuroscience, in investigating the brain, should be able to tell us about mind, is not a foregone conclusion. As a PhD student in the late 1950s who was interested in neurochemistry, British neuroscientist Steven Rose recalls being ‘rapidly disabused of any idea that (his) research might lead to a greater understanding of how the brain could be “the organ of mind”’ (2012, p. 54). In today’s brain science, this situation has decidedly changed. Mind is very much considered to be within the discipline’s scope, and the biggest questions of mind, even ones that deal with perennially challenging problems such as consciousness, are considered to be investigable by neuroscientific methods.

When Francis O. Schmitt established the Neuroscience Research Program at that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1962, a key event in the establishment of neuroscience as a field (Rose & Abi-Rached 2013), he saw the understanding of the human mind in terms of the brain to be within reach (Adelman, 2010). Likewise, in their influential textbook Principles of Neural Science , a staple of university neuroscience teaching (Olivo, 1992, Schultz, 2001), Kandel et al. (2013) describe contemporary brain science as being up to the task of understanding the biological processes involved in human thought, behaviour and feeling, including consciousness.

In this chapter, I use the word ‘enterprise’ to describe the organisation of neuroscience around the project of understanding mind in terms of brain to capture the sense, for neuroscientists, of this being a bold endeavour (Oxford English Dictionary). The neuroscience enterprise involves the ‘ultimate challenge’ (Kandel et al. 2013, Chap 1, Introduction) and ‘quantum step’ (Worden et al. 1975 cited in Abi-Rached and Rose, 2010, p. 23) of understanding mind in brain terms. This aim is an important force that shapes the possibilities of neuroscience research, just as particular social and intellectual trends drove early research on the brain (see Clarke and Jacyna, 1987, Harrington, 1987). Yet neuroscience’s expanding scope and the seemingly self-evident links between neuroscience, brain, mind and human, do not lie in the ideational and the imaginative alone. Neuroscience has been described as the ‘hybrid of hybrids’, the most interdisciplinary of interdisciplinary disciplines (Abi-Rached & Rose 2010). In the context of a formalised programme, it draws together a range of scientific fields, each with their specific tools and approaches. Within this

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

enterprise, links are made between things that were not previously associated (Callon 1980 cited in Brown and Capdevila 1999), including animals, technologies, tools, professionals of different sorts, ideas and ways of thinking.

In their edited volume, The Right Tools for the Job , Clarke and Fujimura (1992a) emphasise the multiple things that make up the ‘situation’ in which science is done. Rather than use the word ‘context’, which they suggest has the connotation of an inert setting in which science occurs, they use the word ‘situation’ to draw attention to the importance of the various elements that make up science. In this way, Clarke and Fujimura emphasise that the different things that are part of the situation in which science occurs are more than just superfluous background noise. The relations established in the process of scientific work, they suggest, are not confined to objects, ideas and technologies, but extend to scientists, careers, research animals, laboratories, institutions, publics and so on. Anything and everything that is part of the situation (past and present) in which scientific work is carried out is relevant. These relations, Clarke and Fujimura argue, are ‘complex, multiple, dialectical, transformative, and even conflicted and contradictory’ (p. 6).

Neuroscience brings together many things. It brings new ideas into a scientist’s toolbox, theories of personality into the work of a geneticist, or the processes of nerve cells into the work of a psychologist. It establishes relationships, for example, between engineers, biologists, psychologists, mathematicians and computer scientists, expensive brain scanners and genetically modified rodents. As a discipline centred on the brain and nervous system, neuroscience is inevitably also intertwined with questions that extend beyond the realm of laboratory science. Good (1994) has argued that while the biological sciences focus on an instrumental rationality aimed at technical problem-solving, in dealing with a mortal human body in sickness and health, they inevitably also touch on questions that transcend the merely mechanical. Furthermore, ideas about the brain over the course of human history have dealt with key questions about human identity.

In this chapter, I situate the neuroscience enterprise in the context of approaches to mind and brain over time. I provide a sketch of the backdrop against which work in contemporary brain science is carried out, and against which the brain as the object of neuroscience investigation is conceived. This is by no means a comprehensive historical account of the ‘origins of

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

[neuroscience’s] present’ (Kumar, 2015, p. 276) nor of the present of its objects 4. Rather, I highlight key developments in approaches to mind and brain that illustrate the complex, transformative, and sometimes contradictory entanglements that make up the situation in which the neuroscience enterprise occurs (Clarke & Fujimura 1992).

First, as a basis for my methodological strategy of taking the brain in neuroscience to be what neuroscientists take it to be (Henare et al., 2007), I justify understanding neuroscience’s object as ‘mind/brain’ (Adelman 2010). I draw from the aims expressed in Schmitt’s Neuroscience Research Program and from the Principles textbook (Kandel et al. 2013). Second, I explore the entanglement of concepts of mind and brain in Western history with the possibilities for studying each, and describe the imaginative opportunities for thinking about mind in brain terms and vice-versa. Third, I touch on the history of the mind-body problem in philosophy, and its implications for studying and understanding mind and brain, to locate contemporary neuroscience’s position in relation to this problem. Fourth, I turn to how the brain (and mind) have been studied, highlighting the tension, ambiguities and paradoxes that must be managed in this work. Here, to provide a background for understanding behavioural and cognitive neuroscience in particular as areas where the mind is studied in terms of the brain, I focus on the use of laboratory animals in research, technologies that allow functional studies of the brain (i.e. what brain does), and imaging technologies. In this section, I show how a neuroscience enterprise focused on understanding mind in terms of brain is far from a straightforward endeavour.

The background that I provide illustrates the range of elements to take into account when considering contemporary brain science. The situation (Clarke & Fujimura 1992) in which neuroscience work is carried out includes a history of evolving ideas about brain and mind, societal attitudes about possibilities of studying either, development of disciplines, technologies, experimental subjects and so on, as well as the creation of new hybrid objects (Beaulieu, 2002). This chapter unsettles the idea of the human brain that is coming to be

4 This would itself be a separate project, requiring a historian’s expertise and a much more methodologically astute approach. It would involve separating out robust historiography from the ‘performative’ storytelling that is part of neuroscience’s discipline building (Rose & Abi-Rached 2013, p. 29). The history that I provide here is selective. It commits the habitual sins of a social scientist drawing on history, namely, ‘play[ing] “pick and mix” in history’s sweetshop’ (Goldthorpe, 1991, p. 225) and of relying on the ‘interpretation of interpretations of, perhaps interpretations’ (p. 223).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

known through neuroscience as a natural given. It highlights the way in which neuroscience’s brain is conceived through human activity in the context of a constantly shifting situation (Delanty and Isin, 2003).

Brain (and mind) in neuroscience today

Though the study and theorisation of the human brain have a long history, neuroscience as a coordinated effort came together in the 1960s, and it was at this time that the word ‘neuroscience’ started to appear in scientific journal articles (Abi-Rached and Rose, 2010). Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) suggest that several strands, drawing from physiology, neurology, and psychiatry, came together in the 1960s. One of the central events that they identify as being significant in marking the beginning of a contemporary neuroscience was the establishment of the interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Program (NRP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1962 by biologist Francis O. Schmitt. Inspired by the successes in molecular biology, Schmitt was confident that an interdisciplinary programme, drawing on the strengths of molecular biology, would put the understanding of the human mind in terms of the brain within reach (Adelman 2010).

The underlying organisational principle of Schmitt’s endeavour was the unity of science thesis (Adelman 2010), the view that there is a hierarchy of phenomena reflecting the different scientific disciplines from physics to the social sciences, and that these can be integrated (Hess 1997b, p. 15). The assertion that mind and brain arise from matter forms a key part of this thesis (Hacking, 1996). The programme would draw together disciplines that had traditionally dealt with mind and brain, such as the behavioural and life sciences, with the chemical and physical sciences (Swazey, 1992) to explore the possibilities of linking molecules to mind. Just as molecular biology addressed the ‘cell-molecule problem’, the new neuroscience would have the potential to make inroads into a parallel ‘mind-brain-neuron- molecule’ problem (in Swazey 1992, p. 541). Within the remit of the programme that Schmitt brought together, according to Schmitt’s colleague and neuroscience editor George Adelman, was none other than the study of the ‘mind/brain’ (Adelman 2010, p. 16). Schmitt’s explicit vision which he conveyed on the Neuroscience Research Program’s first anniversary was to instigate the ‘quantum step in an understanding of the mind’ (Worden et al. 1975 cited in Abi-Rached & Rose 2010 p. 23). This was to be not only an academic exercise or a search for cures, but a project in ‘learn[ing] more about the nature of our own being’ (ibid.).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Kandel et al. (2013) reiterate this vision in Principles of Neural Science textbook where they outline the tasks of a neural science and position these within the broader goal of a ‘unification within biology’ (2013, Chap 1, Introduction) for generations of neuroscientists . The textbook, coming out of the neuroscience programme at Columbia University, was first published in 1981 and is now in its fifth edition (Olivo 1992, Schultz 2001). Its fourth edition, published in 2000, developed a greater focus on the role of molecular biology and expanded its coverage of higher cortical functions including consciousness (Schultz 2001). By virtue of the ‘remarkable unification’ which has already occurred, the authors suggest, the stage is set for addressing the ‘ultimate challenge’ of understanding the biological processes involved in consciousness and in human thought, behaviour and feeling (Kandel et al.2013, Chap 1, Introduction):

The current challenge in the unification within biology, which we outline in this book, is the unification of the study of behavior—the science of the mind—and neural science—the science of the brain.

Such a unified approach, in which mind and body are not viewed as separate entities, rests on the view that all behavior is the result of brain function. What we commonly call the mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain. Brain processes underlie not only simple motor behaviors such as walking and eating but also all the complex cognitive acts and behavior that we regard as quintessentially human—thinking, speaking, and creating works of art. (Chap 1, Introduction)

While there were challenges, especially when it comes to the question of how the cells of the brain that are responsible for human cognition and behaviour are ‘influenced by the environment which includes social experience’ (ibid.), these are set up as questions of technical problem-solving. The Principles authors state that ‘…the excitement evident in neural science today stems from the conviction that at last we have the proper tools to explore empirically the organ of mental function and eventually to fathom the biological principles that underlie human behavior’ (Kandel et al. 2013, Chap 1, Mental processes are the end products of the interactions between elementary processing units in the brain).

For the authors of the Principles textbook, mind is, in the popular parlance of neuroscience, ‘what brain does’. Arguing for mental illness to be understood as brain disease, the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen (1997) suggests that such a definition is a practical one. It allows neuroscientists to get on with the work of neuroscience while debates in philosophy about the relation between mind and brain continue without resolution. In this

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

practical solution, the category of mind has a paradoxical status. Even while it is a key component of neuroscience’s central organising principle as expressed by Schmitt (Adelman, 2010) and the Principles authors (Kandel et al. 2013), namely, the quest to understand mind in terms of brain, it is engulfed by brain and effectively ‘disappeared’. Cohn (2004), for example, has found that mind is not a concept that neuroscientists think they need concern themselves with, preferring to leave the question of mind to philosophers.

Mind is not a well-defined thing in the first place. According to Morton (2005) mind is what a being has if it is able to perceive, think and feel. Mind is not a stagnant concept, and what it is thought to encompass has changed over time, as I illustrate below, and concepts about it vary between cultures. It can just as well be treated as an object, as well as not (ibid.). It is a ‘hypothetical faculty postulated to account for the ability of conscious beings to think, feel, will, or behave’ (Oxford World Encyclopaedia).

As a flexible category imbibed into neuroscience’s brain, mind (and thus brain) can encompass ‘the environment which includes social experience’ (Kandel et al. 2013, Chap 1, Introduction). As neuroscience expands into the study of increasingly complex phenomena, scholars such as Pickersgill (2009) and Beaulieu (2002) have pointed to the inadequacy of understanding these shifts as simple reductionism or determinism. Far from discounting or excluding the social, in neuroscience’s articulation of its object, the social is biologised (Beaulieu, 2002, 2003).

The vision of a singular discipline called ‘neuroscience’ that is powerfully articulated by leaders in the neuroscience enterprise, such as Schmitt and Kandel, is no means ones that all neuroscientists share, as I go on to show in the following chapters of this thesis. Brosnan and Michael (2014) studied a translational neuroscience laboratory whose research spanned work on cells as well as brain imaging; working on very specialised areas of biology or psychology, laboratory members saw the all-encompassing term of ‘neuroscience’ to be more a label applied for the benefit of lay people, rather than being something that was meaningful to themselves in their professional identities. Nevertheless, the articulations of Kandel and Schmitt do important work and stand for an official version of neuroscience, even if not all neuroscientists on the ground may agree with it.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Historical approaches to mind and brain In the context of the neuroscience enterprise where mind is investigated in brain terms, neither mind nor brain are stagnant categories (Cohn 2004, Beaulieu 2002). Nor have they ever been. I begin this section by focusing first on transformations in the way mind has been conceived. While this is an arbitrary separation, I do this to show the kind of work that the concept of mind has been made to do and the kind of phenomena it has been seen to be associated with. Ideas about the brain inevitably linger in the background, and I next move specifically to these, to the way that these have shaped concepts of mind and vice-versa.

An evolving concept of mind Neuroscientists may themselves see their role as confined to understanding how the brain works, and may not think that ‘mind’ is a category that they need attend to (Cohn 2004). Howeveras I have illustrated, ‘mind’ is most certainly encompassed in the conception of neuroscience’s brain, as articulated by Kandel et al. (REF) and Schmitt (REF). Key ideas that make up Western 5 conceptions of mind that are today taken for granted, such as interiority, as well as the mind’s relation to the rational and irrational, have particular historical origins, and can be traced to Greek antiquity (Simon, 2008). The content of what the category of ‘mind’ encompasses is by no means preordained. In fact, Homeric epics, which, along with the works of Plato and Hippocrates, formed a key aspect of the ancient Greeks’ approach to mind (ibid.), did not contain the concept of an interior life at all (Porter, 2003). By the time of Plato (c. 428 bc–347 bc), human beings’ interior worlds began to take shape and to become a key matter of interest (ibid.). Plato placed rationality squarely at the top of his hierarchy of the psyche (Simon 2008), which in ancient Greek philosophy referred to an animating principle such as the soul or spirit (Oxford English Dictionary; Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). Plato’s scheme was central in the development of modern psychiatry and psychology (Simon 2008), where the rational and irrational were seen to be starkly opposed, and emotion considered to be distinct from cognition (Porter 2003).

The idea of mind has been intermingled with notions about spirit and soul, a fact that that is regularly used in contemporary neuroscience as a counterpoint for its own materialist conception of mind (see for example Kandel et al. 2013, Chapter 17, Consciousness Poses

5 As this thesis deals with the development of the idea of the brain through Western science, it does not address the history of ideas of mind in Eastern philosophies. Ideas of mind in non-Western philosophies are especially relevant to neuroscience work involving research on Buddhist meditation Davidson et al. (2003) and the neuroscience of yoga (Yang et al., 2016, Brunner et al., 2017), and in the Dalai Lama’s ongoing dialogue with neuroscientists (Harrington and Zajonc, 2006).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Fundamental Problems for a Biological Theory of Mind). The concept of the soul, particularly as outlined by Aristotle, began to be replaced by the concept of mind by the time of the Enlightenment (Vidal 2009) during which key tenets in Western conceptions of the individual were established (Porter, 2003). Nevertheless, mind continued to be associated with transcendental concepts (Dolan, 2007). Descartes (1596-1650) famously postulated that human beings were constituted by a material body and an immaterial mind. At a time when the church held considerable power, opposition to the view of an immaterial mind had serious consequences and heretics could be burned at the stake.

Descartes’ mind, being immaterial, had excluded the possibility of a science of mind (Flanagan, 1991), and his formulation often serves as an example of how the pressures of powerful religious institutions can hold back the progress of science (Damasio, 1994). Yet, Descartes’ theory had important consequences for the way in which irrationality was understood and opened up ways that it could be studied (Porter, 2002). Porter (2002) notes that since the soul or mind, in its divinity, could only be associated with the rational, Descartes’ theory paved the way for madness (now unquestionably associated with mind) to be studied in terms of the body. While he was not himself a materialist, Descartes’ framework gave the materialist the freedom to investigate aspects of the irrational in terms of the body and brain. This freedom allowed for the development of psychiatry as a medical discipline concerned with madness, focused initially exclusively on the body (Porter, 2002). The possibilities for a scientific study of mind per se arose, in part, in the ideas of the philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) who were influential in the way that mind was conceptualised during the Enlightenment. While Plato and Descartes had seen mind (or soul) as possessing inherent qualities, Hobbes and Locke both regarded mind as resulting from experience, and, in particular, sensory impressions (Porter, 2003). This move gave rise to what were known as sensationalist and associationalist approaches in psychology that enabled mind to be studied empirically and treated differently. Sensationalism was the perspective that the senses were the only route to human knowledge, while associationism theorised the relations between sensory impressions and the formation of ideas in the mind.

Hobbes was a staunch materialist and wrote a materialist refutation of Descartes’ theory of consciousness. He considered experience through the senses to shape mind through matter, namely the body and particularly the brain. Locke, on the other hand, while conceptualising human beings as ‘thinking matter’ (Porter, 2003, p. 347), saw the person as consisting of a

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

continuity of consciousness and memory, and separated out personal identity from matter (Vidal 2009, p. 13). In their approaches to madness, while Hobbes attributed experiences of supernatural beings to the hallucination of a diseased brain, Locke, on the other hand, saw the delusions of madness to be an error in cognition (Porter 2002).

The eighteenth century saw a marked turn away from the previously taken-for-granted idea of a soul, and without the need to assume a spiritual aspect that existed independently of matter, the self could be approached scientifically as a whole (Porter 2003). Against the backdrop of Hobbes and Locke’s ideas, and along with Newtonian notions about the possibility of taking a mechanistic approach to understanding natural phenomena, Porter (2003) suggests that the English psychologist, physician and philosopher David Hartley (1705–57) represented a turning point in the approach to understanding mental life in the West. Influenced in particular by both Locke and Newton, Hartley developed a model of human behaviour that was the result of a gradual process of development, a theory of personality that was based in a material reality. Lockean psychology was also medicalised by William Cullen (1710-90) in Edinburgh who applied these ideas to questions of insanity (Porter 2002). By the early nineteenth century, psychiatry, the branch of medicine dealing with questions of madness (Scull 2010), consisted of two largely independent strands, one that was focused on the body, and particularly the nervous system, and another that concerned itself with mental life (Weiner, 2008, p. 256).

Scientific study of mind particularly took off with further developments in the later nineteenth century. Following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) published his influential The Principles of Psychology in 1890. It was during this period, Flanagan (1991) suggests, that the possibility for a scientific study of mind was finally seriously acknowledged. Descartes had excluded reflexes from his conception of mind, and only these, tied to the body, were amenable to scientific study (ibid.). James was able to propose a theory of mind that naturalised higher mental functions, seeing them as consistent with the view that human beings, like other animals, were part of nature (ibid.).

A further departure from Descartes’ conception of mind that, with his cogito principle, was necessarily self-aware, was the notion of a part of the mind that was inaccessible to the individual (Porter 2002). This theorisation of mind was most significantly developed by Sigmund Freud. Freud developed a method, psychoanalysis, in which the unconscious could

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

be studied (Hagner, 2009). However, at the same time as Freud’s method, which focused intently on the interior worlds of patients, was gaining popularity, an anti-mentalist stream of psychology was taking shape in the behaviourism of the 1920s. The brainchild of J. B. Watson (1878-1958), behaviourism would dominate academic psychology in the United States from the 1920s to 1950s (Gregory, 2004). Behaviourism eschewed concerns about ‘mind’ entirely and focused on empirically observable behaviour. B. F. Skinner (1904-90), who advanced behaviourist research in the 1930s and 40s, saw psychologists who dealt with mental life to be dealing with metaphysics in the style of Descartes (Flanagan 1991).

In contemporary neuroscience, what the brain is seen to be able to account for has undergone significant transformations with the neuroscience explosion since the 1990s. Yet, as I have illustrated with this brief overview, the very notion of ‘mind’ is one that itself has shifted in significant ways at different points in time. Core components of what is today unquestionably understood to be issues of the mind, have specific geneses in the ‘situations’ (Clarke and Fujimura, 1992b) in which these ideas are developed. Further, elements of this past that contemporary neuroscience self-consciously sets itself up in contrast to, such as Descartes’ influence, nevertheless have been important parts of the development of the possibilities that are now part of the investigation of the brain in neuroscience.

Imagining mind in biological terms While I have confined myself in the preceding overview to changing ideas about mind and the development of a way of scientifically studying mind, it is impossible to talk about mind without also considering how the brain was understood. The way in which ideas about mind have evolved has been inextricably tied to the way in which the body, in general, and the brain, in particular, has been conceived over time. The idea that answers to questions of mind could be found in the brain is by no means one that is unique to neuroscience. Greek medicine of the fourth century BC mostly sought naturalistic rather than supernatural explanations of disease, including madness (Porter 2002), and located mental activity in the heart or the brain where health (including mental health) was thought to be the result of a balance of humours (Simon 2008). Galen’s ( c. 130–c. 200) system of humours provided a widely accepted theory of the interaction between body and soul, where one’s physical constitution gave rise to one’s personality and abilities via the transformation of blood into spirit (Vidal 2009, p. 12). The brain was a key site where this process was thought to occur.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

The physical makeup of the brain is something that has also undergone various transformations. Understanding the molecular biology of the brain has been important in contemporary neuroscience’s aim of explaining human beings in terms of their brains (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013); similarly, transformations in what the brain was materially understood to be made up of informed ideas about the relation between mind and brain. During the Enlightenment, the body began to be re-imagined in terms of its organs, nerves and fibres, emphasising solids rather than liquids, and came to be seen in mechanical terms (Porter 2002). Where it was once seen to be open and porous, it was increasingly seen to be a bounded entity that was the source of its own internal states (Martensen, 2004). Even though Descartes and Thomas Willis - who is credited with having coined the term ‘neurologie’, and who, along with Descartes, produced the most influential models of the brain in the Enlightenment (ibid.) - continued to see the brain matter that they were trying to work out as activated by animal spirits, they were positing a much more substantial meeting place in the material of the brain rather than in the empty spaces of its ventricles (Vidal 2009). Vidal suggests that this was a key move that led to subsequent empirical studies of the nervous system, and the start of debates relating to the localisation of function in the brain.

The nineteenth century was also when the idea of humans’ place in relation to the rest of nature was reimagined in a substantial way. Changes about human beings’ relation to animals have played an important role in how ideas of mind and biology have developed, a point that is particularly important in contemporary neuroscience’s use of animal models to probe questions about human health and illness. Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, and his theory of evolution would bridge the gap between animal and human, making the practise of extrapolating from animal to human much more acceptable (Harrington, 1987). Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), the pioneering British neurologist and psychiatrist would assert that human beings were ‘part of nature, and like everything in material existence, produced from particles of matter and the same forces and in obedience to the same laws’ (Harrington 1987, pp. 31-32). Maudsley would base his approach to mind on Darwin’s theories (Porter 2002).

Developments during the nineteenth century that provided ways of studying and deciphering brain structure and processes provided compelling ways of imagining the mind in biological terms. Parallel processes of mind and brain could be mapped onto each other. The idea of localisation of function in the brain was a key area in which this occurred. Localisation , where functions could be tied to specific sites in the brain, had existed in the time of the

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

ancient Greeks (Gregory 2004), while the hunt for a physical location of the soul continued into the eighteenth century (Vidal 2009). Localisation, however, is most strongly associated with the work of Austrian anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and his collaborator J. C. Spurzheim. Gall is most famously known as the originator of phrenology (or organology as it was initially called), the study of bumps on the head as indicators of mental faculties. This consisted of the view that the brain was the organ of the mind, and that mental faculties could be correlated to specific regions (or organs) of the brain. The size of these organs was seen to be an indication of the strength or weakness of that particular ability in question. Though phrenology has been long discredited, Gall and Spurzheim made lasting contributions to contemporary neuroscience in the idea that the mind could be found in the brain, and that its functions could be traced to the working of specific regions of the brain (Rose, 2016). Their localisationalist ideas form a core principle in contemporary neuroimaging (Hagner and Borck, 2001, Tallis, 2016).

The work of other nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anatomists and physiologists provided ways of thinking about processes of mind (such as learning or perception) in terms of processes of the brain. It was during this time that the anterior and posterior spinal nerves were observed to be functionally different, and were then identified to be involved in movement and sensation respectively (Pogliano, 1991). This work opened up avenues of thinking about psychological sensations and their motor responses in biological terms (Harrington 1987).

Before the invention of the achromatic microscope in 1820, animal tissue had been thought to consist of tiny globules (Clarke and Jacyna, 1987). This was eventually shown to be the result of distortions produced by earlier lenses. Spanish histologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852– 1934) improved on Camillo Golgi’s microscopy of nerve cells by developing a staining technique that showed that the brain was made up of individual cells (or neurons) rather than an undifferentiated mass, as Golgi thought. Cajal was the first to be able to show the details of the way that neurons were organised in the brain (Rees, 2010) and the role of dendrites in transmitting information from neuron to neuron (Oliverio and Shepherd, 1991). Neuroanatomy and electrophysiology came together in the work of the British physiologist Charles Sherrington (1857–1952) who applied his knowledge of electrophysiology to Cajal’s neuroanatomy in his study of reflexes. Using the term synapse to describe the space between neurons that Cajal had observed in his studies, Sherrington asserted that the synapse was not only anatomical, but also functional: it was via the synapse that neurons communicated with

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

each other, (and thus how the brain could change along with experience). Cajal provided the idea of the neuron as the basic unit of the brain, while Sherrington identified the synapse as the site where neurons formed connections with each other, ideas that are central in neuroscience (Rees 2010). In this way, mind could be imagined at the level of the neuron and mental processes at the level of the synapse 6.

The study of brain and mind was brought together most significantly at the end of the nineteenth century as German and Austrian psychiatry became increasingly influential (Gach, 2008). Psychiatry in Germany had been benefiting from the growing esteem in which medicine was being held as it asserted its scientific credentials. As medicine in Germany began increasingly to be associated with universities and integrated with laboratories, the German psychiatrist Wilhelm Griesinger was able to successfully establish psychiatry as an academic discipline, and advocated a combination of neurology and psychiatry which he called ‘neuropsychiatry’ (Gach 2008, pp. 381-382). Griesinger’s contention that ‘mental diseases [were] brain diseases’ (ibid.) was widely accepted in Germany psychiatry in the second half of the nineteenth century.

While psychiatry elsewhere continued to be of low status, German and Austrian psychiatry took off as an academic science. In this context, the psychiatrists Theodor Meynert focused his studies of mental illness on the structure of the brain (Scull, 2011). Rather than surgically dissecting the brain along straight lines, Meynert took the brain apart along naturally occurring fissures (Borck 2016). He was able, through this, to suggest that sensory information travelled along these fibres from sensory organs to the cortex. This anatomical observation fitted well with associationist theories in psychology (ibid.). Meynert regarded mental functions to be epiphenomena of the brain’s physiological processes that he saw to be heavily dependent on the brain’s anatomy (Gach 2008).

Meynert had a strong influence on biological imaginings of mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, influencing Paul Flechsig, who along with Meynert’s student Carl Wernicke, provided key ways in which mind could be imagined in terms of the brain. With developments in histological techniques over the next few decades, Paul Fleschig was later able to identify the fibres that connected the different parts of the brain. Borck (2016)

6 Clarke and Jacyna’s (1987) Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts provides a detailed account of the development of concepts of nervous system in the nineteenth century including but extending beyond brain (e.g. the cerebrospinal axis, the vegetative nervous system etc.), concepts that are equally important to the biological imagining of mind. Work on reflexes was especially important in the development of the idea of an unconscious.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

suggests that this provided a biological understanding of processes of learning. At the same time, Wernicke was attempting to establish a neural basis for associationist psychology, a model of mind that suggested sensation was the basis of all human experience (ibid.). Porter (2002) writes that Wernicke represented the apex of neuropsychiatry in Germany.

Another of Meynert’s students, Sigmund Freud, would develop a theory of mind based on the physiology of the brain. Freud had famously abandoned his project of explaining mind in biological terms, a point that is frequently cited in neuroscience accounts of how far neuroscience has come methodologically (Rose & Abi-Rached 2013). His studies of the brain with Meynert strongly influenced his thinking and his psychoanalytic theories were deeply rooted in a biological mode of thinking (Gach 2008). As an admirer of Darwin (Porter 2002), Freud had been greatly influenced by the theories of the English evolutionary neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911). Hughlings Jackson theorised that the human brain had evolved into a hierarchy, both structural and functional, with more complex abilities in human beings more recently developed, with the more evolved parts of the brain tasked with keeping the less evolved parts in check (Harrington, 1991). Harrington notes that Freud’s proposed structure of the mind as comprising an id, ego, and superego, reflects the influence of these ideas.

Just as Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) contend that a neuromolecular, plastic view of the brain provides imaginative opportunities for human experience to be understood in brain terms, so too developments in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century understanding of the brain were productive in generating new ideas of mind. These occurred in the context of shifts in societal attitudes, changes in the power of institutions like the church, the growth and strengthening of disciplines, along with the development of new methods and the spread of influential ideas. Contemporary neuroscience, with its methods of genetically modified mice and imaging (which I discuss in greater depth later on), provides very concrete, material possibilities for a scientific study of mind. In the context of the ongoing establishment of neuroscience as a discipline, and its remarkable growth, mind and brain have been collapsed into a single object: neuroscience’s brain. In the same way that behaviourists did not think that they had to be concerned with mind, so too, in conceiving of mind to be what brain does, neuroscientists are able to put aside questions about mind to focus entirely on brain.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Neuroscience and the mind-body problem Central to the materialisation and biologisation of mind have been debates about the relation between mind and brain. The mind and body problem, the question of how mind and brain (or body) relate to each other, is an age-old question that has been debated at least since the ancient Greeks. While it continues to be discussed today in contemporary analytical philosophy of mind in light of the empirical findings coming out of neuroscience (Van Oudenhove and Cuypers, 2010), contemporary brain scientists have largely set this question aside in favour of practical solutions that allow neuroscience work to proceed (see for example Andreasen, 1997, Kandel et al., 2013). The mind-body debate involves a range of positions that fall under the categories of materialism (or physicalism), and dualism (or vitalism) (Gregory, 2004, Van Oudenhove and Cuypers, 2010). Materialists take everything as consisting of some kind of matter, while dualists argue that things such as mind, defy material explanation. Nineteenth-century Europe saw fierce debates between materialists and vitalists, often occurring around questions of the localisation of brain function that Gall brought to the fore in the nineteenth century. Reference to the ‘mind-body problem’ was still common among brain scientists in the 1930s and 40s (Smith, 2001).

For much of history, a dualist perspective has dominated approaches to mind and body, while the situation today is largely reversed. Gach (2008), for example, argues that to assume a non-materialist position in neuroscience today is considered to be suspect. The often-stated assertion that mind is what brain does, or that ‘mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain’ (Kandel et al. 2013, Chap 1, Introduction) can be seen to adhere to a ‘non-reductive physicalism’ within the mind-body debate (Van Oudenhove and Cuypers, 2010, p. 549). In this position, Van Oudenhove et al. note, brain is seen to determine mind, though its properties are not necessarily considered to be identical to it. In contrast the neurophilospher Patricia Churchland adopts a radical physicalist position called ‘eliminativism’ (Van Oudenhove and Cuypers, 2010, p. 548). Within this position, the mental is considered to be a leftover from a pre-scientific view of human beings (ibid.). Churchland has argued that as neuroscience progresses, descriptors of mind will cease to be useful (Churchland 1986 cited in Smith 2001).

While Galenic medicine looked to the body for explanations of health and illness, and generally sought to avoid the attribution of mental ill health to magic or other superstitious causes, it nevertheless maintained space for divine causation and intervention (Simon 2008). For Descartes, logic required that phenomena be separated into two categories: matter and

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

mind (Porter 2002). Descartes is frequently invoked as a ‘bogeyman’ (Martensen 2004, p. 210) for things that are wrong with medicine where mind is left unattended and attention is paid only to the diseased body. Martensen (2004) suggests, however, that Descartes was intent on maintaining a philosophical approach to understanding human nature that could exist apart from what in modern terms would be called biology.

At a point when the church possessed a great deal of power, adopting a materialist position could lead to accusations of heresy. Descartes’ view that human beings consisted of a material body and an immaterial mind was challenged by French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-51). Offray de la Mettrie argued that human beings’ mental faculties arose from physical matter, using the fact that physical things such as drugs could affect the mind (Coulter, 1993). These views were deeply unpopular in France at the time, and Offray de la Mettrie lived in exile in Holland where he wrote his mechanistic account of human beings, L’homme Machine in 1748 (Gregory 2004). Gall’s proposition that the brain was the organ of the mind was similarly denounced since the soul’s independence from the nervous system was seen to be crucial to the prospect of its mortality, and indeed, the existence of God (Clarke & Jacyna 1987). Gall’s theory was seen to be an attempt to ‘materialize the soul’ (p. 277) and this was met with fierce opposition.

One of Gall’s chief dissenters was Jean Pierre Marie Flourens (1794-1867). Flourens was a French physiologist who admired Gall’s contribution to anatomy but realised the implications of Gall’s theory for the doctrine of the immortal soul and sought to challenge his ‘materialistic heresies’ (Harrington 1987, p. 9). Dedicating his refutation of Gall’s work to Descartes, Flourens criticised Gall and his followers for the challenges that their work posed to the ideas of the existence of God, the immortal soul, and its unity (Harrington 1987). Flourens had great influence on physiology of the nineteenth century such that anti- localisation was a more widely accepted theory in physiology. Furthermore, a dualistic approach that preserved the unity and immortality of the soul appealed to the majority of physiologists theologically (Tizard 1959 cited in Harrington 1987).

Neuroscientists today are keen to distance themselves from this dualistic past. In a chapter dealing with consciousness towards the end of the Principles of Neural Science textbook, Kandel et al. (2013, Chapter 17, Consciousness Poses Fundamental Problems for a Biological Theory of Mind) write: ‘In earlier times these features of consciousness led some philosophers to a dualistic view of mind, a view that the body and the mind are very different

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

substances—the body being physical and the mind existing in some nonphysical, spiritual medium.’ Similarly, Cohn (2004) suggests that for his neuroscientist research participants who put aside questions about what mind is, in perceiving their work to involve the mapping of mind onto brain, a dualistic conception of mind was considered to be no longer relevant. Van Oudenhove and Cuypers (2010), however, points out that the dualism that is often referenced is more mythic than actual, based on a radical form of dualism where mind and brain have nothing to do with each other. They note that even the famous Descartian dualism so often explicitly eschewed in statements of neuroscience’s intent would not qualify for this position since Descartes theorised interactions between mind and body.

While in official statements about the mind and brain, neuroscience may be committed, in theory, to a staunch materialist standpoint, this does not mean that such a position is adhered to in the way in which they talk about neuroscience, mind and brain. Nor does it necessarily confine what they do in their laboratories. In fact, van Oudenhove and Cuypers (2010) note that some forms of dualism are entirely compatible with neuroscience research and that neuroscientists may adopt a range of positions simultaneously, including dualist ones. The authors closely analysed the principles that Kandel employed in his influential 1998 essay ‘New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry’, assessing these in relation to the possible positions that one may take within the contemporary analytical philosophy of mind. They found that to make his argument for the importance of neuroscience for psychiatry, Kandel used four different varieties of materialism and dualism. Van Oudenhove and Cuypers (2010) acknowledge that it was not Kandel’s aim to articulate a clear conceptual position in relation to contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, they argue, the different positions that Kandel adopts have vastly different implications for the autonomy of fields such as psychiatry in relation to neuroscience.

Investigations of mind/brain The twentieth century saw incredible technological developments from the electron microscope that allowed neurons to be observed in much greater detail than before to functional technologies like electroencephalography (EEG) which provided an interface between mind and brain (Borck, 2008). As well, the revolution in molecular biology and the development of scanning technologies are seen to be crucial to the development of behavioural neuroscience (Crawley, 2007, Cryan and Holmes, 2005) and cognitive neuroscience (Cooper and Shallice, 2010) respectively, two areas in mainstream neuroscience

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

where the study of mind and brain occur. Behavioural neuroscience, which mainly uses animal research, emerged out of a combination of animal behaviour studies such as those conducted by the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, and developments in genetics that have allowed genetically modified animals to be bred to model human psychiatric conditions (Crawley, 2007). This has allowed scientists to study the brain and its relation to psychiatric illness at the level of cells and molecules that is not usually possible in human beings. In contrast, cognitive neuroscientists who mainly use imaging technologies to conduct research with human beings, study collections of millions of neurons, linking the functioning of such networks to human psychological processes (Bennett and Hacker, 2007).

These have occurred within a formalised effort of neuroscience. The idea that neuroscience is ready to meet the ‘ultimate challenge’ (Kandel et al., 2013, Chap 1, Introduction) of understanding mind in terms of brain provides an important conceptual framework for the direction of neuroscience. Clarke and Jacyna (1987) have shown, through their study of nineteenth-century brain science, that technological developments are not enough for innovation to occur. They show how breakthroughs that have come to form fundamental concepts in today’s neuroscience can be attributed, in part, to the framework of naturphilosophie, a romantic philosophy in which human beings were perceived as being part of nature and the complexity of phenomena was thought to belie an underlying simplicity. Similarly, Harrington (1987, 1991) has pointed out how key concepts such as the localisation of brain function had their antecedents in ideas that were developed ahead of empirical evidence. Gall, for example, saw the brain as the material basis for the philosopher Hume’s characterisation of mind as a ‘heap of impressions’ (Harrington 1987, p. 8). His theories were supported by Idéologues such as Francoise Magendie (1783–1855), intellectuals of the French revolution who were committed to a materialist explanation of phenomena and a rejection of inherited metaphysical frameworks (Clarke and Jacyna 1987, p. 13).

Thus, in the story of neuroscience, brain, mind and human being are the co-construction (Clarke & Fujimura 1992) of concepts, technologies, milieus, objects, materials theories, and so on. The tools that have been developed in the context of a neuroscience explosion shape the discipline as much as they are shaped by them (ibid.). While the anatomy and physiology of other organs in the body can reveal a great deal about their function, in contrast, the brain’s anatomy and physiology reveal only a portion of what it does (Borck 2016). The result of this, Borck (2016) suggests, are increasingly elaborate apparatuses and techniques to allow scientists to bridge what Schmitt referred to as the ‘quantum step’ between mind and brain

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

(Worden et al. 1975 cited in Abi-Rached & Rose 2010, p. 23). In behavioural and cognitive neuroscience, the challenge of connecting mind and brain have been addressed by the use of animals and scanning technologies respectively. Each of these strategies creates possibilities for the study of mind and brain; each also imposes limits (Clarke 1987 cited in Clarke & Fujimura 1992).

Animal experimentation Research with animals has allowed scientists to study things that are not possible to study in living human beings, outside of the chance opportunities afforded by the clinical case study. The use of animals in experimental research was established over the course of the nineteenth century (Heilbron, 2003), and by the start of the twentieth century, a small number of species had become established experimental animals (Logan, 2002). The generality of animal anatomy and physiology, and in particular, the relevance of research on standardised laboratory animals for understanding human beings, has been, and continues to be, a tension in experimental research (see Clarke and Jacyna, 1987, Nelson, 2013, Friese and Clarke, 2012).

Brain research began in earnest at the start of the nineteenth century when laboratory research grew to be an acceptable mode of acquiring knowledge (Borck 2016), while clinical studies were ignored as physiologists asserted professional boundaries between themselves and clinicians (Hagner 2012). Modelling their methods on physics, physiologists regarded clinical case studies to be ‘accidental physiological experiment[s]’ (Hagner, 2012, p. 238), lacking the necessary experimental control that was the epitome of the scientific method.

Research on animals was by no means new to the nineteenth century, nor was it the first time animal brains had been used to extrapolate to human ones. Comparative studies of the anatomy of animals had been practised since the time of the ancient Greeks with Aristotle experimenting on dead animals (Heilbron 2003), and the models of the brain in circulation before Vesalius’ drawings of human brains were based on Galen’s dissection of cow brains (Martesen 2004). It was the French experimental physiologist Francoise Magendie (1783– 1855), however, who first developed a programme of systematic experimentation on animals as part of his research in physiology (Heilbron 2003).

Flourens, a contemporary of Magendie, was also devoted to experimentation with live animals as part of his work (Clarke & Jacyna 1987). To challenge Gall’s theory of the localisation of brain function, as a skilled experimental physiologist, Flourens drew on his

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

experiments on pigeons in which he progressively removed more and more of the animals’ brains. Appropriate methods to systematically test animal behaviour were not developed until the end of the nineteenth century (Gregory 2004), and even Flourens, committed though he was to animal experimentation, did not put much effort into observing the experimental animals’ behaviour after surgery (Young 1970 cited in Clarke & Jacyna 1987). Gall, for his part, not only disagreed with Flourens’ argument for the equipotentiality of the brain, but also on the value of Flourens’ animal experiments. Gall did not think that the physiology of lower animals was dominated by the brain as he thought it was in humans and did not see how the use of experimental animals could contribute to understanding human beings (Clarke & Jacyna 1987).

Those who questioned the applicability of animal studies to human beings were supported by the widespread misapplication of knowledge derived from animal studies to humans (Clarke & Jacyna 1987). It was especially common at the time to dismiss the relevance of animal experiments to understanding questions about mental function. Descartes’ legacy, whether one subscribed to a dualist perspective or not, had been the elevation of the human mind and human mental functions above those of lower animals (Porter 2003). Samuel Solly (1805- 1871), the British surgeon who in 1836 published a book called The Human Brain: its configuration, structure, development, and physiology , in accordance with the prevailing wisdom at the time, suggested that it was useless to try to investigate things like understanding, will and instinct in animals (Clarke & Jacyna 1987).

Evolutionary theories provided support and lent experimental physiology greater justification for drawing conclusions about human physiology from animal experimentation (Mayer, 2008). Experimentation in physiology expanded in the later part of the nineteenth century and by the start of the twentieth century, the use of a handful of experimental animals became commonplace (Logan 2002). By the 1930s, the use of experiments with rats was usual in American psychology, seen to be an objective approach to conduct psychological research that could be applied to human beings (Logan, 1999). Animal experimentation in psychology reached its peak in the behaviourism of the 1950s under B. F. Skinner (Gregory 2004).

The American psychobiologist, Karl Lashley (1890-1958), known for his efforts in the study of memory and the brain, was influenced by the behaviourist J. B. Watson. Although he did not share the behaviourists’ aversion to mind and acknowledged mind as an experiential reality, Lashley adopted behaviourist methodologies in his research on memory through

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

animal experimentation and reliance on observable behaviour (Dewsbury, 2002). Lashley famously trained rats in mazes, lesioned parts of their brains, and then studied the impact that this had on their ability to navigate the same maze, demonstrating the possibility of a physiological psychology without the need to rely on concepts such as mind (Harrington 1987).

The use of animals in biomedical research rests on the idea that species conserve structure and function as part of their evolutionary heritage, and that what is discovered in research on laboratory animals is generalisable to other species. Logan (2002) has shown that prior to a small number of animals becoming established research animals, generality was something that needed to be investigated and established. As a small number of animals became regular fixtures in biomedical research, these animals became ‘carriers of generality’ (Logan 2001 cited in Logan 2002, p. 331). Generality, thus, became something that was assumed from the outset rather than something that needed to be demonstrated (Logan 2002).

Since the mid-1990s, genetically modified mice have been increasingly used in neuropsychiatry, particularly in the development of pharmaceuticals for the treatment of anxiety and depression due to being particularly amenable to genetic engineering (Cryan and Holmes, 2005). The question of how far it is reasonable to extrapolate from animal to human is one that is always present. In a review of mouse models of anxiety and depression for Nature Reviews Drug Discovery which they titled ‘The Ascent of Mouse’, Cryan and Homes (2005) write:

It goes without saying that mice are not simply miniature versions of human beings. We can never fully recapitulate human depression or anxiety in the mouse and, indeed, cannot truly know whether a mouse is depressed or feeling anxious. (p. 779)

For example, the authors note, in mouse models of depression, poor grooming, sleep disturbances, memory deficits, changes in appetite weight, lack of energy and motivation are seen to have analogues in mice, while suicidal thoughts and low self-worth cannot be modelled.

Researchers who have studied the extrapolation of scientific work from animal to human (e.g. Nelson 2013; Friese and Clarke 2012) have pointed to the importance of the making of these claims with an accompanying qualification. Nelson (2013) conducted an ethnographic study

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

of a behavioural genetics laboratory that made use of mouse models to investigate the neurobiology and genetics of addiction. Nelson found that despite needing to make strong claims of what research with their mice could tell them about human beings, it was also necessary for scientists to make clear what the mice could not tell them about human beings. This was necessary to maintain the integrity of what she has calls their ‘epistemic scaffold’ (p. 3), the framework within which mouse to human extrapolations make sense. Research that attempts to push the similarity too far, such as the study claiming that rats were capable of feeling regret, open themselves up to ridicule (Nedelisky, 2014).

However, even while scientists must place confines around what their work on animals can tell them, the very act of making extrapolations from animal to human, Friese and Clarke (2012) suggest, is crucially important to build the infrastructure necessary for work to be sustained. Articulating the rationale of such research and its value for understanding human beings is key to establishing the relationships that will sustain the work (Friese and Clarke 2011). Thus, while Cryan and Homes (2005) point out that human beings’ higher cognitive processes that are thought to occur in the cerebral cortex cannot be reproduced in rodents, underlying these are deeper brain structures that have been conserved in lower animals. Nelson (2013) describes how neuroscientists may write that to model schizophrenia, ‘a uniquely human disorder’ (Powell and Miyakawa 2006 cited in Nelson 2013, p. 25) in mice may be a bad idea, citing the many ways that mice are not like humans, but then go on to make a case for using the ways in which there are overlaps between the two. Thus, she argues, within this ‘epistemic scaffold’ (p. 3), researchers not only make links but break ohers.

Brain imaging research with human participants Though behavioural neuroscience studies with animals could include the study of implied cognitive processes such as learning and memory, the exploration of cognition is limited (Cooper and Shallice, 2010). Electroencephalography (EEG), which records the brain’s electrical activity via electrodes placed on the scalp, was the first significant technology to provide access to the physiology of human beings’ mental life. Borck (2008) suggests that the hype and fascination with neuroimaging today has its precedent in a similar attitude towards EEG in the 1930s. The use of EEG took off after physiologist Edgar Adrian, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1932 with Charles Sherrington for his work on nerve impulses, demonstrated a recording of human brain waves at Cambridge in 1934. EEG, Borck (2008) argues, provided a hybrid interface, ‘anchoring the cultural fabric of human activities in the world of the

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

biological’ (p. 370). Then as now, Borck notes, funding agencies threw their weight behind a technology that promised to provide a way of physiologically accessing the human mind.

The functional brain imaging technologies of the late twentieth century capture both structure and function and allow for the production of compelling images of the mind/brain. These technologies have been celebrated as allowing neuroscientists ‘the extraordinary opportunity of peering into the living, thinking human brain’ (Bear et al., 2007, p. 176) and to be the equivalent of ‘“real time cinema” of the nervous system in action’ (World Health Organization, 2001, p. xiv).

Imaging technologies such as fMRI and PET are part of what Joyce (2008) notes is a ‘broader sociotechnical turn’ (p. 6) towards the visual. In this turn, within the biomedical sciences, visibility is given weight as a way of knowing, and attempts to make the interior of the body transparent are emphasised (Joyce 2008). Dumit (2004) demonstrates the attraction of functional brain imaging for scientists interested in mind and brain in his book Picturing Personhood. For scientists, the advent of neuroimaging was seen to present an ‘unbelievable opportunity’ (p. 54) for the study of mind and brain. Dumit describes the experience of one of his participants who, as a medical student in the 1970s keenly interested in mind and brain, was deciding between psychiatry and neurology as possible specialisations, and who, on hearing about developments in brain imaging, decided to opt for neurology.

The two technologies that have allowed for the functional imaging of the brain are Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), technologies that are seen to be the main driving force behind the development of a cognitive neuroscience (Cooper & Shallice 2010). PET has been used since the 1970s, though it is continuing to be developed (Dumit 2004). Compared to fMRI, PET is far more expensive and invasive, requiring participants to be injected with a solution containing a mildly radioactive isotope (Carter and Shieh, 2010). As a result, PET has largely been replaced in cognitive neuroscience studies with fMRI, which is a comparatively new technology (ibid.). The BOLD (blood oxygen-level dependent) response that fMRI relies on was first described by Seiji Ogawa, an employee the AT&T Bell biophysics laboratory in the United States, in 1989 (Kevles 1997 cited in Rose & Abi-Rached 2013). The first study employing fMRI in human research was published in 1991 (Rose & Abi-Rached 2013). Both PET and fMRI allow scientists to link measures of brain activity in human participants to mental processes through simultaneous scanning and psychological experimentation.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Functional brain imaging technologies have allowed for the investigation of mind and brain within a very specific ‘space opened and mediated’ by them (Borck 2016, p. 113). They have raised questions about the kind of information that these technologies produce (Borck 2016; Hagner 2009; Dumit 2004), the new objects that are created in the process of this work (Borck, 2016, Young, 2011, Young, 2012), and the way in which existing objects are moulded to fit into this space (Cohn, 2008b). Functional imaging in neuroscience combines the study of structure and function since fMRI includes a structural scan in the way MRI does. However, Borck (2016) argues that in the production of images of these scans, in attempting to represent both structure and function simultaneously, scientists conflate two different kinds of representation. One is indexical, reproducing the brain’s physical form, and the other is symbolic, representing data relating to the functioning of the brain in visual form. As Hagner (2009) has pointed out, functional data need not be presented through colour coded images of an anatomical brain, but could also be presented in the form of graphs. The result of the conflation of these two types of representation is a change in the status of mental entities and constructs that are now represented in images of material, organic realities (Hagner 2009; Borck 2016).

Beaulieu (2002) makes a similar argument, suggesting that the images produced combine the graphical and pictorial traditions, and emerge from the interdisciplinary development of these technologies. Beaulieu (2002) notes that there is a paradox in the way neuroscientists relate to brain images, and describes the phenomenon of what she has called the ‘iconoclastic imager’ (p. 56). The ‘iconoclastic imager’ has a ‘love-hate’ relationship with brain images (p. 56). On the one hand, she downplays the significance of the image, recognising the hype and interest that they generate; on the other, she makes use of images at various points in the process of her research.

While acknowledging the important role that these representational conventions play in generating ongoing support (Dumit 2004; Friese and Clarke 2012; Beaulieu 2002), Beaulieu (2002) argues that, in fact, the images also play a substantial role in the epistemics of cognitive neuroscience. The ambiguous relation that cognitive neuroscientists have to the brain images, she suggests, arise from the different valuations in Western science of ways of knowing (Stafford 1991, 1996 & Cartwright 1995 in Beaulieu 2002). Quantitative information, namely the functional information from the scans is considered the most robust form of science, while the pictorial is at the bottom of the hierarchy. Nevertheless, the pictorial tradition, Beaulieu (2002) argues, has been crucial in the development of the

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

standardised brain atlases that have allowed cognitive neuroscientists to be able to say that the functional data they have collected refers to specific spatial locations in a biological brain (ibid.).

The immediacy and clarity (Dumit 2004) of images produced through functional imaging belie the complex, coordinated technical expertise that the development and use of PET and fMRI involve. In his ethnography of PET, Joseph Dumit (2004) demonstrates the difficulty of assessing the epistemological consequences of the information produced by these scanning technologies. PET having come out of an ‘intersection of a number of disciplines and technical paradigms’ (p. 27) has relied on the work of scientists with a wide range of specialisation. Describing the presentation of a PET experiment at a conference, Dumit noted that not a single aspect of the experiment was unquestioned, but that to make sense of the results of the experiment, researchers had to assume that everything in the set-up was appropriate. He writes:

Whether these presenters are psychiatrists who do not know how the brain images are normalized to a “reference brain”, or chemists who are not sure how normal controls are chosen, or computer scientists who do not know how specifically the radiopharmaceutical binds to a particular receptor , questions are often left hanging and questioners are left frustrated by their inability to deconstruct the presented data into data relevant to their own interests. (p. 55)

Dumit suggests that PET experiments involve a level of interdisciplinarity that is unusual. Needing to accommodate the interests of a range of specialists that might include both clinicians and basic scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists, and so on, the experiments test multiple hypotheses simultaneously, and necessarily contain a range of assumptions about the way human beings and brains work. Dumit argues that sorting out the way in which imaging is done and the theories of human beings that these approaches contain is ‘a most elusive and yet crucial’ (p. 173) issue for neuroscience to address.

Brain imaging has generated ‘new ontologies’ (Borck 2016, p. 118) that have allowed for the development of the area of social neuroscience. There is thus a rich social science literature on brain imaging from the early 2000s onwards as social scientists responded to the explosion of brain-based studies of human behaviour during the Decade of the Brain (see Mahfoud, 2014 for an overview of ethnographies of neuroscience). Indeed, social studies of neuroscience have focused almost exclusively on brain imaging, and Rose and Abi-Rached

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

(2013) have pointed to the comparative paucity of social science investigations of animal research in behavioural neuroscience and neuropsychiatry.

Given the claims of neuroscience to be studying mind in terms of brain (Kandel et al., 2013, Adelman, 2010), one area that social scientists have addressed, is just what kind of ‘mind’ is being studied in brain imaging experiments. Ethnographies of brain imaging have shown how, while what is mapped onto the brain is a contained, internal mental event, in the production of the experiment, a much more ‘extended’ and ‘distributed’ kind of mind is engaged with (Mahfoud 2014, p. 4). Cohn (2008a) has shown how in a neuroscientific investigation of empathy, the relationship between researchers and their participants is crucial to creating the mental state that the scientists are interested in. However, in the final product, to meet the requirements of ‘objective fact’ (p. 86) the intersubjective nature of empathy is discounted, and only what can be mapped onto the brain is included. 7

In this way, aspects of mind that can be mapped onto the brain are quite different to what they were before they were anchored in the materiality of the brain. Elsewhere, Cohn (2008b) describes how concepts such as ‘pleasure’ are shaped within the strictures of what the scanning technologies allow. ‘Pleasure’ is redefined to be what can be attributable, visualised, and localised in the brain. In the translation of a complex experience such as pleasure, Cohn (ibid.) notes that neuroscientists are required to isolate ‘pleasure’ both temporally, tying it to a particular event such as an unexpected reward, and spatially, involving only the internalised experience of the participant who is symbolically distanced from researchers behind glass panes. The credibility of the research findings depends on maintaining this semblance of distance, while the successful completion of experiments relies on establishing intimacy with participants (Cohn 2008a).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have provided an overview of the way in which mind and brain have been thought about and studied in Western contexts to provide a basis for thinking about the brain as an object in neuroscience today. These entanglements are part of contemporary neuroscience, and as a result, are part of the figuration of the brain as its object, providing clues to the ability of this object to be many things at once. I began by providing an outline of the neuroscience project of understanding mind in terms of brain to make the case that

7 This has a parallel in animal research where Lynch (1988) makes a distinction between the ‘naturalistic’ and ‘analytic’ animal.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

neuroscience’s brain encompasses the category of mind. With a brief overview of a shifting idea of mind, I illustrated the scope of this category as a container for a range of ideas about human beings’ mental life. In the context of this history, a mind, or indeed a brain, that can contain the environmental and social (Beaulieu 2002) is hardly surprising.

The materials and technologies that neuroscientist draw on go some way to addressing the challenges of their enterprise. These, however, are not enough. Neuroscientists may draw on a number of elements within the ‘situation’ (Clarke and Fujimura 1992) that characterises a neuroscience explosion. In the conceptual workarounds that allow goal, project, material and technology to work together, things are deleted and then reintroduced. Just as the behaviourist B. F. Skinner had to ‘smuggle in’ (Flanagan 1991, p. 116) assumptions about mind in order to make sense of his animal experiments, so too neuroscientists may ‘smuggle in’ shifting concepts of mind and relations between mind and brain in their research practices (e.g. Cohn, 2004) and in their arguments for the centrality of neuroscience to other disciplines (e.g. Van Oudenhove and Cuypers, 2010).

Chapter 3 Method and Methodology

In this thesis, I investigate the expansion of neuroscience into the study of increasingly complex, broad human phenomena. My research question is how does neuroscience sustain an increasingly broad research programme in highly medicalised, industrialised societies like Australia? My approach is primarily anthropological, focused, in the first instance, on neuroscientists’ perspectives and understanding of the field and its areas of research (Hess, 1997b). I have aimed to strike a balance between an emic and etic account (Madden, 2010), maintaining a critical distance that is necessary when dealing with a system that forms an authoritative source of knowledge in contemporary society (Choudhury and Slaby, 2012).

I have employed the strategy of an object-centred ethnography, an approach in social studies of science that aims to understand sociality through objects (Knorr Cetina 1997). The focus on the brain as an object in neuroscience allows me to explore the ways the field of neuroscience is articulated through the brain. It allows me to investigate how the brain as a shared object sustains relations between people, concepts, practices and materials. I make use of the strategy of taking objects of significance within the culture that one is studying to be whatever the people involved conceive them to be (Henare et al., 2007). In the case of contemporary neuroscience, in this thesis, I take the brain to be what Schmitt, founder of the Neuroscience Research Program, referred to as mind/brain (Adelman 2010).

In this chapter, I provide an overview of my method and methodology. First, I describe object ethnography and show how it is relevant to the study of neuroscience as a newly established interdisciplinary field. Second, I describe the process of the data collection of the three different types of data with which I furnish my ethnography. To put together an object ethnography of the brain in neuroscience, I conducted participant observation with two laboratories, the Memory Lab and the Self-Control Lab 8, as well as interviews with neuroscientist key informants, and a textual analysis of popular neuroscience books written by neuroscientists. I have taken this approach in order to produce an account of neuroscience worldmaking through the brain.

8 These are pseudonyms.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

An ethnography of the brain in neuroscience Ethnography, meaning literally writing about people, involves producing a record and interpretation of the activities of a group (Keesing et al. 1998 cited in Sluka and Robben, 2012). It usually rests on description that is inductive, moving from the particular to the general. Ethnography is contextual, often based on some degree of unfamiliarity (Hammersley 1992 cited in Mitchell, 2010), and its strengths lie in providing a method through which another’s perspective can be understood (Grills 1998 cited in Liamputtong, 2009).

Though most commonly associated with anthropology, ethnography is practised in a range of different fields, and what counts as ethnography differs from discipline to discipline (Hess, 2001). Ethnographies of science have been conducted from the 1980s (ibid.). In STS, Hess (1997b) suggests that the term ‘ethnography’ is often used to refer to any kind of observational study. These have usually been restricted to the laboratory (Martin, 1994, Hess, 1997b). In contrast, anthropological studies of science take a much larger view of science, often ‘spill[ing] over’ into non-science (Edwards et al.2007, p. 10). Such studies are concerned with science-in-context, with the aim of ‘contextualizing what one studies as deeply as possible’ (Martin, 1997, p. 145), allowing context to drive methods of data collection (Rapp, 1999).

Hess (1997a) notes that early ethnographic work in STS such as Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life was characterised by a wariness of identifying too closely with scientists. Instead, this work turned the anthropological ‘stranger device’ on its head, approaching science as a taken for granted rational system and made it strange by showing the ways in which it was irrational (1997a, p. 154). In contrast, anthropological studies of science, using the concept of culture to study science, begin with the points of view of the scientist, focusing on the ‘webs of meaning’ that make up scientific worlds (Hess 1997b, p. 111). Even so, the concept of culture connects these webs of meaning to larger structures and values, allowing ethnographers to consider how these permeate social institutions, practices, and discourse (Hess 1997a).

Traditional anthropological ethnographies have been holistic accounts of particular cultures spanning social organisation (such as kin relations, the economy, trade), ecology, life cycle and cosmology (Traweek, 1988); these ethnographies involve the researcher carrying out some form of participant observation over a long period of time. Contemporary

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

ethnographies are likely to be more specialised, to focus on a particular aspect of a culture, have shorter time frames, and to make use of a variety of methods (Madden, 2010, Grbich, 2013). They are also likely to be multi-sited, owing to the changing nature of the kinds of things that ethnographers study (Marcus, 1995).

While participant observation is the cornerstone of ethnography, it also includes a host of other relevant methods that offer a route to understanding another’s point of view (Mitchell, 2010), a point that distinguishes anthropological ethnographies of science from other laboratory studies carried out in STS (Hess, 1997b). Context is the key to being able to understand another’s point of view, and Mitchell (2012) notes that it is context that will often drive the research aims, methods and product.

Sharon Traweek’s (1988) ethnography of a high-energy physics community, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, is a classic example of traditional ethnography of a scientific field (Franklin, 1995). Traweek (1988) spent five years conducting field work with three physics laboratories that were part of this community, studying what, in the world of physics, corresponded to the community’s ecology, social organisation, life cycle and cosmology. Traweek looked at the way the relationships in the laboratories were structured, the funding that sustained them, the physical environment and how it was laid out, as well as the tools that were a key part of the work of the physicists. She studied how student and junior scientists learned to be competent members of the physics community, and the fundamental skills and values that they were required to be proficient in. She looked at the beliefs that the community held and what was valued within it. Franklin (1995) notes that Beamtimes and Lifetimes is unique in its holism and in the way that it conforms to a traditional ethnographic format, though at the time, of a very unusual subject matter. Since Traweek wrote Beamtimes , anthropological studies of science have tended to focus on the interchange between the laboratory and the context that it is situated in (Franklin, 1995, Hess, 1997b, Martin, 1994).

In Flexible Bodies , for example, Martin (1994) takes the field of immunology and changing ideas about the immune system as her topic of analysis. Her research, which included participant observation in an immunology laboratory, also involved participation in the AIDS activist group ACT UP, attending corporate training camps, and the textual analysis of popular magazines. Martin notes that while science studies colleagues advised her to focus on the laboratory, she was interested in disrupting the conventional notion of scientific work where it was assumed that ‘knowledge is produced inside and flows out’ (p. 7). In Flexible

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Bodies , Martin looks at the late capitalist emphases on flexible accumulation and how this focus has led to a parallel evolution in ideas about the immune system, from something that needed to be protected from outside invaders, to the view of a strong immune system as a flexible one.

The early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) adopted methods from anthropology since, through ethnography, anthropology had developed a means of studying people’s beliefs about the world without necessarily taking those beliefs to be true (Thompson, 2005). This allowed scholars to approach science, which was the truth-making machine of their own societies, in the same way that they would have approached any other system of logic or belief; this was a methodological move and not necessarily an epistemological one (Hess, 2001).

Along these lines, my approach to understanding neuroscience in this thesis is based on Byron Good’s approach to understanding biomedicine. Good (1994) argues that in studying biomedicine, questions of belief should be put aside. Instead, biomedicine can be understood to be a ‘symbolically mediated mode of apprehending and acting on the world’ (p. 87). Possessing a folk epistemology and rich cultural language which can be approached interpretively, biomedicine, Good suggests, is a ‘highly specialised version of reality’ (p. 5) that moulds the objects of its attention in culturally distinctive ways. In investigating how neuroscience sustains an increasingly broad research programme involving the study of complex human phenomena, my aim is to understand neuroscience as a particular imaginative world that brings with it specialised ways of seeing, writing, and speaking (Good, 1994).

My theoretical framework drives me to situate my participants’ claims within their broader social and historical context, and to consider how neuroscience achieves its coherence in this context. However, I have kept pulling myself back to participants’ points of view, and I base my analysis and representation of the world of neuroscience on the meanings of my participants (Emerson et al., 2011, Hess, 1997b, Hess, 2001).

Schensul and LeCompte (2012) describe the ‘field’ in ethnography as the natural setting in which the activities of interest occur. In this thesis, my field of interest is the space in which neuroscience is coming to be an explanatory framework that can be applied to a broad range of human issues. While early anthropological studies were often geographically bounded, scholarship in the last twenty years has acknowledged the need for a rethinking of the notion

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

of ‘field’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997), when the shared identities of a globalised world are no longer strictly grounded within particular geographic confines (Appadurai 1991 cited in Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). This is particularly the case in social studies of science, where the development of a scientific field is not confined to a particular locale (Martin, 1997). My focus on the brain as an object in neuroscience is a key way in which I have delimited my field in this thesis.

Ethnographies of objects In his edited volume, The Social Life of Things , Appadurai (1986) makes an argument for studying objects ethnographically. Appadurai suggests that while things are only given meaning by human beings, the movement of things can reveal much about their human context since ‘their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories’ (p. 5). This is the approach that Dumit (2004) takes in his study of positron emission tomography (PET) where his fieldwork involved ‘follow[ing] (PET) images around’ (p. 11), into laboratories, clinics, courtrooms, and popular science magazines. Franklin and Roberts (2006) similarly, discover different versions of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) as they ‘follow’ PGD (p. 92), in interviews with patients who have undergone PGD, into conferences, media and public debates.

This approach provides a way of outlining one’s field when the phenomenon under study is distributed and not tied to a bounded location. In her book Dolly Mixtures , Franklin’s (2007) strategy of ‘following sheep around’ (p. 9) in her investigation of Dolly the sheep and cloning leads her not only into the Roslin Institute in Scotland where Dolly was cloned, but also to sheep farms and agricultural shows in Australia and New Zealand. In doing so, Franklin connected biotechnology to questions of capital, colonisation, and nation building, showing the multiple strands that make up the procedure of somatic cell nuclear transfer.

In their edited collection, Thinking Through Things , Henare et al. (2007), writing from the perspective of the ‘ontological turn’ which I covered in chapter one, advocate a methodology that involves approaching things as one’s participants perceive them. Henare et al. suggest that this allows theoretical insights that would not be otherwise possible. In this thesis, I draw on this in thinking through the mind/brain. This approach sits well with Cassirer’s use of symbolic form, where I understand the brain to be a thing that provides a schematic function, which allows me to understand neuroscience as a particular imaginative world (Good 1994).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Just as I argue that the brain in neuroscience serves as ‘boundary infrastructure’ (Bowker and Star, 1999) that lends neuroscience its coherence, so too the focus on the brain in this thesis serves the purpose of ethnographic connection and consolidation. This focus is a central strategy that I employ to link the different modes of data collection that I have employed, to situate the specific examples of neuroscience work that I have studied within the broader field of neuroscience in general, as well as the context of a neuroscience explosion. Based on STS theories of the object in science, conducting an ethnography centred on the brain has allowed me to highlight neuroscience as a new field that draws together a range of disciplines around this object (e.g. Knorr Cetina, 1997, Knorr Cetina, 2001). As both an object of neuroscience and an everyday object (Daston, 2000), the focus on the brain also allows me to make links between the laboratory and the world beyond it, even as my research remains confined to neuroscientists’ points of view. It allows me to consider the connections between the shaping of neuroscience, brain and human by neuroscientists to an interested public and wider ‘neuroculture’ (Frazzetto and Anker, 2009, Vidal and Ortega, 2011).

Data Collection The start of fieldwork, Madden (2010) suggests, involves ‘place-making’ (p. 39), the construction of the field as a means by which the ethnographer delimits her area of research. Much like the neuroscience work that I portray in this thesis, this involves a mixture of the concrete and imaginative, ‘a synthesis of concrete space and investigative space’ (p. 39) in delimiting the landscape occupied by participants. My data is collected from a number of sources so as to put together an ethnographic account of neuroscience that has allowed me to investigate the field’s relation to the brain and the human being. I have specifically chosen instances where scientists make links between broad human categories and the physical brain, focusing on laboratories, scientists, and neuroscientist writers who investigate human thought, behaviour and feeling in terms of the brain.

As I started to think about a research project trying to understand neuroscience as a particular cultural world, I started to pay particular attention to neuroscience stories appearing in popular media. I regularly looked at the brain-related books that populated the popular science shelves of bookshops, flipped through Scientific American Mind , followed neuroscientist bloggers on Twitter, and listened to podcasts such as Nature’s Neuropod . This gave me a sense of the kinds of things that neuroscientists were studying, the ways that they

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

were communicating their research to the public, and what they were saying about the significance of neuroscience.

My aim was to understand how neuroscience was taking shape as a way of understanding human issues in the context of neuroscience’s expanding research programme. My research design was based on the assumption that neuroscience was a composite field that was made up of scientists of different disciplines. As I was interested in how neuroscience was broadening its research aims, I focused on areas of neuroscience where scientists were studying human thought, behaviour and feeling in terms of the brain. To understand neuroscience as a distinct cultural world, I have used a number of ethnographic methods, namely participant observation with neuroscience laboratories, interviews with neuroscientists, and a collection of popular neuroscience texts written by neuroscientists. These three modes of data collection were carried out concurrently and each has informed the others.

The neuroscience laboratories I conducted fieldwork in two neuroscience laboratories located in a major Australian city. I identified possible sites for fieldwork by looking up neuroscience related research in various universities in Australia. In consultation with neuroscientist advisors, I approached several laboratory heads and discussed the possibility of conducting participant observation with their laboratories. In some cases, laboratory heads were willing to have me observe with their group, but found that their laboratory members were reluctant to take part. I approached a total of eight laboratories and gained access to two of them. The Memory Lab was the first to be recruited, and I began observation with the lab before deciding to also include a cognitive neuroscience laboratory as the project took shape. My fieldwork was conducted over two years from the start of 2012 until the end of 2013. I carried out participant observation with each laboratory at separate times, beginning with the Memory Lab. Over the course of about a year of fieldwork with each lab, I visited the labs approximately once a week. For most of the time, I had a regular weekly visit arranged with each laboratory. This varied at times depending on what was going on with the lab. There were periods of more intensive fieldwork when there were opportunities for me to observe a broader range of activities that they engaged in, as well as periods where laboratory members were away or felt they were too bogged down with work to accommodate me.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

The Memory Lab comprised the laboratory head, John, who was a geneticist by training, as well as a research assistant, a postdoctoral fellow trained in neuroscience, a PhD student, and an undergraduate student who had been working at the lab as part of a third-year placement. The lab had several projects that they were working on simultaneously including an Alzheimer’s study and a study on genetics and stress. Their main project involved the identification of neurons that were involved in fear learning. The second laboratory was a cognitive neuroscience laboratory, the Self-Control Lab. The lab comprised of the laboratory head, Simon, a psychologist by training, as well as two postdoctoral fellows, three research assistants, and for a period of time, a visiting scholar from overseas. The lab’s work involved the investigation of self-control in drug-using populations and learning in older adults.

Table 1 Profiles of laboratory members Pseudonym Position Disciplinary background The Memory Lab John Laboratory head Genetics Sarah Research assistant Applied biological science Clare Postdoctoral fellow Neuroscience Michael PhD student Biotechnology (undergraduate studies) Elizabeth Undergraduate student on placement/ Neuroscience (undergraduate studies) research assistant The Self -Control Lab Simon Laboratory head Cognitive psychology Patrick Postdoctoral fellow Cognitive neuroscience (via psychology) Alison Postdoctoral fellow Cognitive psychology Henry Research assistant Psychology Ben Research assistant Cognitive neuroscience (via anatomy and physiology) Amy Research assistant Neuropsychology Rose Visiting fellow Pharmacy

The structure of my fieldwork with the two labs was quite different, in each case influenced by the nature of the lab, the set-up, and what was feasible in each context. Fieldwork with the Memory Lab was more intensive for a number of reasons. First, I had begun fieldwork there nine months before the Self-Control Lab. As is usual at the beginning of fieldwork, anything and everything seemed like it could be significant. There was a lot more movement and activity in the Memory Lab than there was in the Self-Control Lab: training mice, enriching them, killing them, fixing their brains in preparation to be sliced, slicing, staining, mounting,

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

counting cells under a microscope, not to mention a host of other activities related to their two other projects, as well as the work of simply maintaining their population of mice. The day-to-day activities of the Self-Control Lab were less varied and were mostly desk-based. The lab members did not come together regularly in a central space and spent the majority of their time spread out in three different offices.

In both instances, there were a couple of people who, because they were the ‘core’ members of the lab, or were more willing to engage with my project, were my main teachers in terms of learning about the laboratories’ respective projects. However, I spoke at length with all lab members about their work in semi-structured interviews. I was able to participate to some extent in the lab work, helping with various basic tasks such as data entry, filing, cleaning, recording of mouse behaviour, assisting with literature searches, and occasionally with the second lab, as a research participant. While this allowed me greater insight into the work of the labs, it also enabled a sense of reciprocity by allowing me to make up in some way for slowing the researchers down when I required explanations, or by initially being an uncomfortable observing presence that made them feel like ‘dancing bear[s]’.

As the participants were used to having students watching them at various times and having them take notes of what they were saying, it felt entirely appropriate to have my notebook out at most times, and to be quite clearly making notes. Only on a handful of occasions where a casual conversation turned into a contemplation of work practices did I have to later jot down important phrases that would assist me in recreating the encounter afterwards when I typed up my notes.

Consolidated fieldnotes based on a combination of in-the-field jottings and recall are a strategy of ensuring the quality of ethnographic data (Madden 2010). I wrote up my fieldnotes as soon as possible, expanding on my jottings to fill in the details of the day’s observation. Emerson et al. (2011) write that understanding an ethnographic situation is a process and that it is helpful for researchers to document this process. In my consolidated fieldnotes, I included my understanding of what was happening to capture my thinking about what I was observing at the time. I added to these notes as I revisited them, writing comments about how my understanding had changed.

As well as informal ethnographic interviews, I conducted more formal semi-structured interviews with laboratory members. The content of these interviews was similar to my key informant interviews that I describe more fully below, though these included more detailed

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

descriptions of the work that they were doing with their laboratories. With the Memory Lab, I conducted interviews over the course of the fieldwork. In the case of the Self-Control laboratory, to work out opportunities for observation, I conducted some interviews prior to beginning fieldwork.

Towards the end of my fieldwork with the Self-Control Lab, a new PhD student began to occupy a space in the small office, making the continuation of observation difficult. To complete my data collection, I supplemented the observation with follow-up interviews with the postdoctoral fellow and research assistant whose work I had been primarily observing. I also conducted follow-up interviews with the heads of both laboratories at the end of each period of fieldwork. This was primarily a way of ‘checking in’ to make sure that I had a good understanding of the research, and to test out my preliminary analyses with the participants.

With the Self-Control lab, my understanding of the way in which functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data were analysed and how images were created came from a combination of sources. Before my first visit to the lab, I looked up AFNI (Analysis of Functional NeuroImages), the programme that the lab used, which had been described to me in an interview. As AFNI is open-source, there is a great deal of material available online, including detailed training videos on YouTube. My visits were confined to once-weekly visits, and the piecemeal nature of my observations was dependent on what they were doing at the time. I continued taking notes that initially made little sense to me, writing down things as I heard them, then cross-checked these with AFNI’s online resources. This assisted in my developing understanding of the lab processes. My understanding was greatly helped by Patrick and Henry running through the processes with me in recorded interviews that I could revisit.

With the Memory Lab, I also benefited from two occasions of presenting my research to the lab and getting their feedback. There was a difference in the access that I had to the two laboratory heads. In the Self-Control Lab, the postdoctoral fellows were my go-to people to arrange to go into the lab. With the Memory Lab, the very experienced research assistant was my primary host, showing me around, making suggestions as to what I might look at. The Memory Lab had weekly lab meetings that I attended. The Self-Control Lab’s meetings were ad-hoc, held when necessary, and usually one-on-one occasions, and I was not able to attend any of these.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

While I learned about all the projects the labs were working on, I focused on one particular project from each lab. These form the basis of my analysis, although my understanding of their work overall is informed by all projects. For the Memory Lab, this was the project that occupied most of the time: the fear learning project. For the Self-Control Lab, it was a project on inhibition of habitual responses.

The neuroscientist key informants Not long after I began my fieldwork, it was clear that most of my time in the field would be spent with early to mid-career researchers: students, postdoctoral fellows, and research assistants. These researchers provided crucial information about the day-to-day workings of the laboratory and the practical difficulties that each project presented. From the semi- structured interviews that I conducted with laboratory heads, it was clear that there was a difference in the extent to which the laboratory heads and their more junior lab members had thought about the evolution of the field of neuroscience, questions about its scope, and where the field was heading. For this reason, key informant interviews with other senior researchers who ran their own laboratories were a crucial addition to understanding how neuroscientists understood neuroscience, and how they approached their work.

I approached a total of twenty-four potential key informants and eventually carried out a total of eleven interviews. Of these eleven, there were four women and seven men. Four were professors, four associate professors, a senior research fellow and a senior lecturer and one lecturer. A number of these key informants were laboratory heads (Thomas and Steven) with whom I had previously met to discuss the possibility of observation with their labs. I identified the remaining key informants through their publicly available websites and the contact details that were available on these. As with the laboratories I approached for observation, to recruit key informants, I approached neuroscientists who were conducting research on some aspect of human thought, behaviour or feeling. I invited them to participate, attaching the same plain information sheet that I had used in my recruitment of the laboratory members.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Table 2 Profile of neuroscientist key informants

Pseudonym Area of neuroscience Trained in Areas of interest and mode of research 1. Ann Cellular neuroscience Endocrinology Worked with neurons. Was beginning learning and memory research in collaboration with behavioural neuroscientists 2. Thomas Behavioural Molecular and Plasticity in various brain neuroscience cellular disorders and mental neuroscience illnesses, research on mice. 3. Steven Behavioural Pharmacology Addiction , research with rats neuroscience 4. Belinda Cognitive neuroscience Neuroscience Perception , psychophysics 5. George Neuropsychiatry Psychiatry Schizophrenia , imaging studies 6. William Neuroimaging Physics Imaging techniques , scanning experiments 7. Nick Cognitive neuroscience Neuropsychology Connectivity analysis , neuroimaging 8. Bry an Behavioural Psychology Anxiety research , research neuroscience with mice 9. Scott Cognitive neuroscience Psychology Autism , transcranial magnetic stimulation Karen Neuropsychology Neuropsychology Auditory neuroscience , brain imaging Emily Neuropsychiatry Psychology Adolescent mental health , imaging, social neuroscience

I conducted a total of eleven key informant interviews (excluding the interviews with John and Simon, from the Memory Lab and Self-Control Lab), comprising neuroscientists at various universities in Australia, in a range of areas. My key informants included other cognitive and behavioural neuroscientists working in areas similar to John and Simon. In addition, I interviewed neuroscientists with specialisation in other areas such as molecular and cellular neuroscientists and neuroengineers, but who were nevertheless involved in some kind of behavioural or cognitive work. These specialist areas included the molecular cell biology of development, neural plasticity in brain and mind disorders, addiction neuroscience, the neuropsychiatry of schizophrenia, the neurobiology of anxiety, neuroimaging and neuroinformatics, connectivity analysis, autism and transcranial magnetic stimulation , music neuroscience, and social neuroscience. Questions posed to the key informants included their background in the field, their current research, the ideas that

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

informed their research, and the significance of neuroscience. Ten of the interviews were conducted face-to-face at the key informant’s office and one was conducted over the phone. The interviews ranged from thirty-five minutes to an hour in length. All were audio recorded and transcribed.

The popular neuroscience books by neuroscientists The inclusion of an analysis of five popular neuroscience books written by neuroscientists was an important way of constructing the field in this study, providing a site to study neuroscience beyond the laboratory, while still confining my analysis to the perspectives of neuroscientists. The popular neuroscience genre provides neuroscientists with a space in which they are not confined by the strictures of academic writing, and it offers them the opportunity to be much more speculative regarding what they take the work of neuroscience to mean. Though certainly not confined to popular neuroscience books, the need to appeal to a popular readership makes these books a site where discourses about neuroscience beyond the lab are constructed. As Jaworski and Coupland (2014) notes, these discourses both reflect and shape social order, forming the ‘conditions of possibility’ under which future action may occur (Clarke 2005, p. 149).

These popular neuroscience books provide another way in which to observe the development of neuroscience in a ‘natural’ setting to some extent. As existing data, they provide a way of studying what people do without the intervention of a researcher (Silverman, 2006). Popular books are not only the products of their authors but also require interested publishers and a receptive public; therefore, the books further locate the perspectives of neuroscientists in the context of neuroscience’s popularity (Prior, 2003).

Johnson and Littlefield (2011) note that the genre of popular science writing involves a shift from conveying fact, as is the case in neuroscience academic journal articles, to making an argument instead for its value, in a way that corresponds with a wider readership’s existing framework of understanding. For this reason, claims can be overblown and speculative rather than factual. They cite the vast difference between Watson and Crick’s original journal article on their discovery of DNA with the subsequent public discourse about genes. Johnson and Littlefield found that despite this difference between academic and popular writing, researchers in developing neurofields, keen to incorporate neuroscience into their work, often cite this popular literature rather than academic papers.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

The popular neuroscience books were another way of exploring neuroscience as a culture. I have used the popular books, not only because they construct for lay people the relation between the brain and the person, but also because the genre is a space where neuroscientists are able to be a bit more playful about the ideas that emerge from their work, to bring these together in particular ways, and to articulate their imaginings of the significance of brain- based facts for a general audience. A key criterion for shortlisting the books’ authors was that they were considered broadly by other neuroscientists to be a reasonable representation of the discipline, and that the authors were not making claims about the relevance and application of neuroscience beyond what neuroscientists thought the science allowed.

I used several different methods for choosing the five popular neuroscience books analysed. Bestseller lists, Amazon sales rankings, lists on the social book cataloguing site Goodreads and regularly perusing the popular science sections of bookshops gave me some idea of the main neuroscientist writers. However, relying solely on sales figures can give a skewed impression of influence since these might reflect successful promotion and marketing (McGee, 2005) rather than influence. I thus wanted to include books that might not have been bestsellers, but that were considered within the neuroscience community to be seminal. To do this, I looked at reviews in neuroscience journals and editorials.

My first criterion was that the books be written by neuroscientists whose academic work is generally considered to make a valuable contribution to neuroscience; second, the books explored some aspect of human thought, behaviour and feeling. In short-listing the books that I chose to study, I started with the Dana Foundation’s list of ‘The Great Brain Books Revisited’ (Goldberg, 2010), an updated version of a list first published in the foundation’s online journal Cerebrum in 1999. The Dana Foundation is a US philanthropic organisation whose aims are to promote neuroscience and inform the public of the benefits of neuroscience research in a ‘responsible manner’ (The Dana Foundation, 2017a). One of its key approaches is the promotion of scientist-public dialogue. This list was compiled via a survey of Cerebrum readers, as well as a survey of members of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. The Alliance is made up over five hundred neuroscientists who are committed to promoting public awareness of neuroscience research. It describes its membership as comprising ‘the world’s foremost authorities on neuroscientific research and clinical neurology topics’, including seventeen Nobel laureates (The Dana Foundation, 2017c). The recommendation of readers and alliance members were then reviewed by Cerebrum’s scientific advisory committee. To make sure that I was picking the key neuroscience writers

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

of popular texts, I checked my choice with the neuroscientists that I was working with. I also consulted the well-known neuroscientist blogger called ‘Neuroskeptic’ on whom he thought the main neuroscientist writers of popular neuroscience books were.

The authors were Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on learning in the sea slug; VS Ramachandran who is most well-known for his work on phantom limbs; Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux whose research has centred on different aspects of emotion and the brain; and Oliver Sacks who was a neurologist. Except for LeDoux, all the authors have medical training, while only Sacks and Ramachandran had continued clinical work alongside their research work. Once I had short-listed the authors whose books I would analyse, my choice of book was narrowed down by delineating a ten-year period from 2002 to 2012, the suitability of the subject matter for the aims of this thesis, the popularity of the book, and the presence of favourable reviews, particularly in neuroscience journals (Snyder, 2006, Dolan, 2003, Gray, 2002, Baron-Cohen, 2011, Garwin, 2007).

Table 3 The popular books written by neuroscientists that were analysed Year of Title and book description Author Publication 2002 Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Joseph LeDoux Become Who We Are In this book , LeDoux draws on LeDoux is professor of neuroscience at the neuroscience research, particularly Centre for Neural Science at New York work from his area on emotion to University and director of the Emotional Brain answer the question of ‘what Initiative, a group of scientists who are makes us who we are?’ (LeDoux, committed to understanding emotions in the 2002, p. 1). LeDoux uses the brain and in promoting the neuroscience of operations of the synapse to draw emotion to the public. The EBI laboratories together his presentation of facts focus on fear and anxiety research. LeDoux also about how the brain works in order sings about the mind and brain as lead singer of to provide a cohesive picture of a band of scientists called the Amygdaloids . brain-based selfhood. For LeDoux, the ‘synaptic result’ of learning, namely memory, is the glue that holds together the self, providing a ‘coherent personality’ that is sustained throughout life (p. 9). 2003 Looking for Spinoza: Joy , Sorrow , Antonio Damasio and the Feeling Brain In Looking for Spinoza , Damasio Damasio is professor of neuroscien ce and (2003) describes work in the psychiatry at the University of Southern neuroscience of feeling and California (USC). He is known for his work on the emotion, an area of neuroscience neuroscience of emotion and feeling. He is in which he is a key player. Damsio director, along with his wife Hanna Damasio, of

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

draws on the philosophy of 17 th the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. The Century philosopher Baruch institute’s aims are to understand the neural Spinoza, particularly what Spinoza bases of well-being, and research includes had to say about feeling, emotion music, storytelling and meditation. Damasio was and purpose, in order to provide a trained as a neurologist. picture of how human beings work and how they can thrive. 2006 In Search of Memory: The Eric Kandel Emergence of a New Science of the Mind In Search of Memory is an Eric Kandel is a professor of neuroscience at autobiography and history of Columbia University in New York. He won the twentieth-century neuroscience Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000. from the perspective of one of its His co-authored Principles of Neural Science is key players. It describes Kandel’s the primary textbook used in neuroscience (2006) journey from history major university teaching. His other recent popular to aspiring psychoanalyst to neuroscience books include The Age of Insight: psychiatrist and practising The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, neuroscientist. Kandel describes Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the the adjustments of his goals as a Present, published in 2012, and Reductionism in neuroscientist, initially hoping to Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two study the neuroscience of Cultures , published in 2016. He qualified as a psychoanalytic concepts, to his psychiatrist while also training in elegantly simple Nobel Prize- neurobiological research. winning work on memory processes in a sea slug. Kandel connects big questions of his autobiography as a Jewish refugee from Vienna to reductionist neuroscience. 2007 Musicophilia: Tales of Music and Oliver Sacks the Brain Musicophilia is a book of clinical The late Oliver Sacks was a neurologist who was case studies recounting Sacks’s best known for his books recounting clinical (2007) experiences with patients stories about brain injury and malfunction. He who experienced some music practised as a physician and was professor of related dysfunction, or a sudden neurology at the New York University School of onset of musicality after a Medicine. neurological event. Through these, as well as letters he has received from readers, he explores a propensity for music in the absence of any known function (distinct from birdsong) as a unique capacity of the human brain. 2011 The Te ll -Tale Brain: Unlocking the V. S. Ramachandran Mystery of Human Nature In The Tell -Tale Brain , Ramachandran is professor of psychology and Ramachandran (2011) tackles the neuroscience at the University of California, San question of human nature, asking Diego, where he is director of the Center for what it is that makes us human. Brain and Cognition. Conducting research

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Ramachandran draws together his mainly in the area of behavioural neurology , own research and those of others Ramachandran was trained in medicine and on the neuroscience of sensation then obtained a PhD. Ramachandran is well- and perception, mirror neurons , known for his work on phantom limbs, the language and aesthetics to phenomena where patients who have lost limbs speculate on the question of what continue to feel sensation in that limb. He wrote accounts for humanness. about this work in his book Phantoms in the Brain (published in 1999) .

Analysis One of the benefits of ethnography is that it allows for a degree of flexibility and allows the researcher to respond to context and the conditions that they find in the field (Rapp 1999; Mitchell 2012). Preliminary data analysis allows the researcher to take stock of the data that has been collected and to assess the direction that subsequent data collection needs to take (Grbich 2013). I describe my analysis of each mode of data collection in separate sections below: the participant observation, key informant interviews, and analysis of neuroscience texts, followed by my analysis of all three types of data together. I used qualitative analysis software as an indexing tool for my observational and interview data, using it primarily for its code and retrieve functions to do initial, first order coding (Ezzy, 2013). Apart from highlighting and making use of coloured flags on hard copies of the popular books, I made use of a proforma which consisted of a series of questions derived from various sources to guide my reading and note-taking. Once the three types of data were analysed individually, I made extensive use of conceptual maps and writing to deepen my analysis.

Analysis of data from laboratories As Madden (2010) notes, fieldnotes are never ‘raw data’ and are always ‘cooked’ (p. 140) to some degree in the choices that the researcher makes in note-taking and writing up their notes. Emerson et al. (2011) note that writing fieldnotes is an important part of the analytic process and that keeping track of the interpretive moves that one is making is vital. As I wrote up my consolidated fieldnotes after each day of observation, I often wrote short commentaries at the end of the notes or made comments in bracketed asides. To keep track of the data that I was collecting, I wrote brief summaries of each day of fieldwork, highlighting potentially important events, as well as summaries of laboratory interviews. These initial reflections guided my sense of key events that eventually came to be significant in my analysis (Grbich 2013).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

When I started fieldwork with the Memory Lab, I took notes on everything: the process of fixing, titration, slicing etc., and my initial notes consisted of a collection of fragments that made little sense to me at the time. As the fieldwork progressed, I was able to write more coherent and meaningful accounts of what I had observed, and key events started to stand out as being worth indexing and keeping track of. By the time I started observation with the Self- Control Lab, I had begun to be far more targeted in the things I recorded. Analysis of the fieldwork was further developed through a number of attempts at articulating the story of each lab and outlining the steps in each lab’s primary projects.

I began more systematic thematic analysis once fieldwork with each laboratory was complete. I managed the first order (Madden 2010) or initial coding (Charmaz, 2006) with qualitative software, creating files for each laboratory that contained the consolidated fieldnotes and transcripts of interviews with laboratory members. This involved a descriptive, close-to-data coding (Madden 2010; Charmaz 2006) such as descriptions of processes in the laboratory, references to mice in the case of the Memory Lab, or participants in the case of the Self-Control Lab, as well as some of the themes that I coded for in the key informant interviews that I describe below.

While qualitative data software packages are useful for handling large amounts of data, they have the potential to lead to a decontextualised analysis since the data is separated into smaller chunks (Ezzy 2013). To address this problem, I regularly made use of the function that allows the researcher to view the document from which the fragment was coded, and continued to refer to full interviews and fieldnotes in the subsequent steps of my analysis

Analysis of Interviews To enable analysis, I first transcribed each of the interviews. I analysed the laboratory and key informant interviews in similar ways, although the laboratory interviews were also analysed alongside my fieldnotes, and in the context of the work of each lab. To keep track of my interpretations of what participants were telling me, I wrote up brief notes after each interview, as well as jotting down thoughts during the process of transcription (Charmaz 2006). Once I had finished transcribing the interviews, I analysed these thematically, coding the interviews by staying close to the text while trying not to make significant interpretive leaps in the initial stage of the analysis (Charmaz 2006). The overarching codes that I developed through this early coding included:

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

• the field of neuroscience, such as participants’ thoughts on its scope and significance, and the disciplines that made up neuroscience and their collaborative links;

• knowledge creation, such as the type of knowledge being created, how it was different from other ways of understanding human beings, what its effects would be, and the sorts of questions being posed;

• understanding the public appeal of neuroscience and whether neuroscience was able to do what it was represented as being able to do ;

• laboratory practices, including translational processes to address research questions.

Textual analysis My analysis of each of the neuroscience books was done with hardcopies of the texts, highlighters and sticky notes, after which I filled out a standard proforma of questions for each book that covered structure, content, language and so on (see Appendix E); this was followed by a comparison of the five books. I also collected information about the authors, their disciplinary backgrounds, and the kind of research that they did.

The questions that I asked approaching the texts are based on the guiding principles that I brought together from Prior (2003), Clarke (2005) and Grbich (2013). The questions I asked included: who the author was and how they presented themselves, who the intended audience was and how this audience was addressed, what the substantive area of each book was, what was referenced in the text, and what metaphors and imagery were employed. I also considered what work these books were doing beyond the laboratory and how they were presenting the field of neuroscience.

In the analysis of the texts, I was concerned with the way in which neuroscientists were making sense of the work coming out of their disciplines. Prior (2003) has suggested, however, that attempts to study meaning are complicated by the fact that meaning is methodologically difficult to arrive at. Searching for the meaning of a text raises a slew of issues regarding whether meaning is solely the domain of the author or that of the reader, whether it is to be found more in the reading of the text than in the writing, or at the point where author and reader meet (ibid.). For Prior, what is more methodologically useful is to look at what is being done in the text. Levi-Strauss (cited in Prior 2003) wrote that rather than

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

ask what something means, a more pertinent question would be to ask how something is said and how it is ordered. Prior suggests instead that the researcher should look at what is referenced (i.e. the content of the document) and how links are made between the things referenced.

Once I had a preliminary set of themes, I then made use of concept maps to bring the data collected from the five books together and to consider the relationships between the themes that I had developed for each. I then returned to the data to follow up on key ideas that I explore in this thesis, for example, how the authors talked about the benefit of studying various phenomena in terms of the brain, what they considered a neuroscientific understanding to contribute; the way in which they talked about the brain as an object of neuroscientific work; the way in which authors were able to bring together neuroscientific insights with considerations of larger questions of human existence.

Bringing all three together To build on my initial analysis of the data, and to be able to deal with the data from my observations, interviews and textual analysis at the same time, I made use of conceptual maps which allowed me to visually represent the relevant data (Grbich 2013) and allowed me to explore the relationships between the various aspects of the data (Charmaz 2006). Though I was not conducting the ‘situational analysis’ that Adele Clarke (2005) develops and describes in her book Situational Analysis , I made use of the steps that she outlines as a way of producing ‘situational maps’. Clarke developed this approach as a response to updating grounded theory to be able to respond to concerns of power, positionality and situatedness. She describes the purpose of situational maps as ‘elucidating the key elements, materialities, discourses, structures, and conditions that characterize the situation of inquiry’ (p. xxii). The prompts that Clarke (2005) provides for filling out initial maps of a situation include thinking about the human, nonhuman, spatial, temporal, symbolic, sociocultural, local, global, organisational, institutional, and political-economic elements, as well as the discourses, major contested issues, and discursive constructions of actors that may be relevant to the situation being researched. Once these are laid out on the map, Clarke suggests that researchers then move systematically through the map, thinking about the relationships between the various elements represented on the map, including things that may seem, at first glance, to be unrelated.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Using these guidelines, I created multiple conceptual maps, some specifically to aid in thinking about the work of the individual laboratories, and later on, thinking about these in the context of neuroscience overall. The maps were a key way in which I worked out the brain-centred approach and its relation to neuroscience, the neuroscientist, human beings, and an interested public. Writing up an ethnography is a continuation of the process of sorting and collating the data, and an important process of interpretation (Madden 2010). I used ‘freewriting’, a process of writing fast for oneself, which as Charmaz (2006) notes, is an effective way of generating analytical ideas formed in the process of integration. Charmaz (2006) presents freewriting as one of the strategies in the grounded theory practice of memo- writing, as a way of keeping track of one’s analysis from the start of the process.

Ethics I applied for and gained formal ethics approval through the University of Melbourne’s Human Research Ethics Committee. I prepared a plain language statement (see Appendices A to C) to give to research participants explaining the project, what would be required of them if they chose to participate, and provided details about the way and extent to which their anonymity would be preserved.

While the laboratory heads had consented to my presence in their laboratories, in practice, most of my time was spent with research assistants, postdoctoral fellows and students. I had gained written approval from the laboratory heads of the Memory and Self-Control Labs and these stated that laboratory members had agreed to take part in the research, However, gaining actual consent of laboratory members who had agreed to participate on paper, was something that had to be worked out in the process of conducting the research (Chenhall et al., 2011). I was mindful as I started fieldwork that while the postdoctoral fellows and research assistants with whom I was going to be doing observations had verbally agreed to participating in my research, as junior researchers, it was possible that they may have felt obliged to take part at the request of their laboratory heads. In some cases, I was welcomed by these junior researchers enthusiastically. In others, my intrusion was accepted initially with some reservation, and in one instance, barely tolerated. Where there was initial reservation, participants’ willingness to have me ‘hang around’ over an extended period was helped by offering to assist with various tasks where possible. Tasks such as timing mice in a maze or helping with literature searches proved valuable not only in helping me gain entry to the laboratories but also in helping me to better understand their work. In the instance where

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

it became clear that a junior researcher was a less-than-willing participant though they had given their formal consent, I did not contact this participant further for visits to the lab. Since the laboratory had several projects that they were working on simultaneously and the researchers worked in different offices, I was able to meet with other lab members. This, like many other moments in the research process that have lead me down one path and not others, has inevitably shaped the kind of account I have been able to produce here.

The research rests on the generosity of interested laboratory heads who were willing to welcome a student researcher into their laboratories. It is shaped by the views and experiences of participants who were interested in, or at least open to, the project in some way; whether they took part because they too relied on human participants or felt it to be no skin off their teeth; or out of a conviction for the value of a neuroscience explanatory frame for an understanding of the human, or of concerns about the hype surrounding neuroscience. Some of these reasons will have been more consequential to the story I tell than others. As far as possible, I have tried to provide the reader with as much information as possible about how this account was assembled; I have made a point of including the few divergent views that I encountered though they may sit uncomfortably in the overall story that I am telling.

Preserving participants’ anonymity is a standard of qualitative social science research. In ethnographic writing, Bickford and Nisker (2015) note that there is a tension between this standard and the need for Geertz’s ‘thick description’. When it comes to high-stakes, sensitive areas that deal with human suffering or marginality, various strategies to mask the identities of the participants beyond employing pseudonyms and omitting identifying information are used. Where the research deals with less sensitive subject matter, it is often a matter of striking a balance between protecting participants’ anonymity and presenting meaningful information about the subject matter.

In some ethnographies of science, and in high-profile science, in particular, it is common to use scientists’ real names. For example, in Making PCR , Rabinow (1996b) accounts for the development of a specific technique (polymerase chain reaction), at a particular institution (Cetus Corporation), by particular individuals (lead by Kary Mullis). In these cases, anonymity is not only impossible but also undesirable when the aim is to describe the world of a particular scientific culture where these individuals are central, prominent figures (Franklin & Roberts 2006). More often, a combination of strategies is taken. For example, in

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Joseph Dumit’s (2004) ethnography of the development of Positron Emission Tomography (PET), key individuals who were known as the inventors of the technology were identified in quotes, while quotes from interviews with others involved in PET scanning were unattributed to preserve participants’ anonymity. Franklin and Roberts (Franklin & Roberts 2006) took a different approach in their study of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). While they chose not to introduce patients with identifying details, professional staff were presented using their real names as a way of constructing the ‘world of PGD’ (p. xiv).

Description of my neuroscientist participants’ work is an essential part of this project, and while I have followed the usual steps in qualitative research of making use of pseudonyms and in not revealing the precise context in which I carried out my fieldwork, participants are not only potentially, but almost certainly identifiable by the projects that they are working on. This may not matter with readers outside of neuroscience, but has the potential to cause harm to participants with respect to other colleagues. The amount of detail that is provided in an ethnography is a key aspect of its rigour (Bickford & Nisker 2015), and concerns with anonymity and confidentiality throw up difficult questions of what to do when presenting data that may present participants in an unfavourable light. Furthermore, participants in a single study are not homogenous (Edwards 2007 cited in Bickford & Nisker 2015), and some can be in a less powerful position than others, such as in the case of students and junior researchers.

In this thesis, I have adhered to the standard practice in social science research with human beings to ensure as far as possible the anonymity and confidentiality of participants to protect them from harm. Simpson (2011) argues for an ethics in research that is focused on a social rather than individual ethics, and I have used this as a guiding principle in making decisions around what detail to include or exclude, asking in each instance whether it is necessary and for what reason.

A note on my position in relation to neuroscience In this thesis, I emphasise the situatedness of neuroscience and the brain that is taken to be the object of neuroscientists’ work (Haraway, 1988). This situatedness applies as much to my own research as it does to that of my participants. In the 1980s and 90s, anthropologists and sociologists turned their attention to their roles as researchers in shaping the accounts that they produced, both in the process of data collection as well as writing up (Clifford and Marcus, 1986, Clarke, 2005). As Haraway (1988) had argued in relation to science, and

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

which Clifford and Marcus (1986) similarly asserted in relation to ethnography, the idea that a researcher can produce a pristine account of what is out there in the world, devoid of her own fingerprints, is a fallacy. Haraway described this as a ‘god trick’ (p. 582), a view from nowhere, while Clifford and Marcus pointed to tropes in ethnographic writing that created the illusion of distance and objectivity. This led to shifts in conventions of writing research accounts in ways that made the role of the researcher more explicit, even if this meant displaying the ‘cuts and sutures’ (Scheper-Hughes, 1992, p. 30) through which a coherent account is assembled. In the interest of providing the reader with context for understanding my research design and the conclusions that I come to in this thesis, I provide a brief statement of where I am positioned in relation to neuroscience and the neuroscience explosion, and how I came to be interested in the topic of neuroscience and its expanding scope.

The ethnography that I have produced is one of an interested neuroscience outsider. As an undergraduate student in psychology (along with anthropology and sociology), learning about the brain and its processes had been illuminating to me. The brain seemed to have a life of its own, mostly unknown to the vast majority of us. What happened when these previously unknown processes were pulled into the story of how things worked, of accounts of the complex tangle we call a human being? Or into accounts of two or three complex organisms interacting in the company of still others? I took an elective in physiological psychology and enthusiastically read Oliver Sacks’s books such as An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , amazed that damage to tiny portions of the brain could lead to what seemed to me to be entirely bizarre deficits in function, functions that it had not even occurred to me that I had. I was fascinated by the imaginative world that having some understanding of how the brain worked seemed to lead one into.

A core anthropological methods subject 9 during my honours year at university had been taught by a lecturer who had been a student of Derek Freeman. Freeman (1916-2001) was a New Zealand anthropologist most well-known for his refutation of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Mead (1928) had argued that the ‘storm and stress’ that was a taken-for- granted part of teenage-hood in the West was a product of culture since Samoan teenagers did not experience the same difficulties. The dispute between Mead and Freeman was captured in the play Heretic by Australian playwright David Williamson. The play depicted Freeman and

9 A seminar on the crisis of representation in anthropology (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) had been the other core subject.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Mead as players in warring sides of the nature-nurture debate, Mead representing the side of nurture and Freeman of nature (Fox, 2002). During the 1960s, Freeman had undergone an about-turn in his approach to anthropology, adopting a more scientific approach drawing from the ideas of the philosopher of science, Karl Popper (Fox, 2002, Heppel, 2002). At this time, Freeman wrote that he had ‘set about reading in such fields as ethology, evolutionary biology, primatology, the neurosciences, psychology and genetics’, envisioning a ‘unified science of anthropology’ (Freeman 1986 cited in Caton, 2006). In this seminar, we studied Freeman, as well as Popper, and Pascal Boyer on the evolutionary psychology of religion. Brains, our lecturer said, were going to be increasingly important in understanding culture. Several years later, I ran into a classmate who had taken this to heart and had begun work on a doctoral thesis bringing together neuroscience and anthropology to investigate aspects of an old-school anthropological concept, kinship, and its associated neural processes.

As neuroscience became more prominent in popular culture, I was interested in understanding the kind of imaginative world that neuroscience might be, in the same way that Good (1994) understood biomedicine, and wondered about shifts in the way people thought about themselves and each other in this neuroscience explosion. Yet, in the interdisciplinary neuro-field rumblings that I encountered at university, I wondered too if things were being combined in ways that changed the kind of knowledge that was being produced and if these changes needed to be accounted for more fully. Perhaps, as Strathern (2004b cited in Street and Copeman, 2014) has argued, the results of bringing two different bodies of knowledge together were not as inconsequential as they seemed.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have detailed the approach of ‘object ethnography’ that I have taken to understand the expansion of neuroscience and its appeal as an explanatory framework. The theories that I have drawn on, and which I elaborated on in chapter one, provide tools for thinking about the confluence of people, ideas, and technologies that have the brain as their focal point. The methods that I have used to come to an understanding of neuroscience’s expanding scope form an object-centred ethnography of neuroscience through the brain that focuses on these entanglements. My approach has allowed me to examine what the brain in neuroscience is: in the work of neuroscience laboratories, in the way in which neuroscientists articulate what the tasks of neuroscience are, and in the way that neuroscience authors shape narratives of the scope of brain-based explanations of human beings. In this single object of

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

the brain that neuroscience investigates are multiple versions that each combine material, practice and imagination, and that each serves a specific function in holding together an enterprise that spans the study of molecules to the processes of human consciousness. In the following three chapters, I present these versions of neuroscience’s brain: the tangible, projected, and material brains.

Chapter 4 The Tangible Brain

Before the brain had a century, it had a decade. In 1990, Oliver Sacks’s 1973 book, Awakenings , was turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Robin Williams as a fictionalised version of Sacks. The film recounted Sacks’s discovery that the Parkinson’s drug, L-DOPA, could be used to treat his catatonic patients who were thought to be irreparably brain damaged from the effects of sleeping sickness. What its discoverer George Cotzias called ‘a true miracle drug…of our age’ (Sacks, 1982, p. 26) seemed to demonstrate a powerful, transformative neurochemical action that caused Sacks’s patients to ‘awaken’. In the 1990s, Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux were consolidating their contributions as two of the key figures in a burgeoning affective neuroscience. LeDoux and his lab were expanding their work on the role of the amygdala in fear learning while Damasio and colleagues were proposing their somatic marker hypothesis, the theory that the brain included affective information from the body as part of its process of decision-making (Dalgleish et al., 2009). At the same time, V. S. Ramachandran was developing his famous low-tech mirror-therapy technique 10 for treating phantom limb pain. This was pain experienced in a limb that had been amputated, a phenomenon which Ramachandran would write about in his first popular science book, Phantoms in the Brain (published in 1998). Eric Kandel, with his Nobel prize-winning work on the simple memory processes in the Aplysia behind him, was ‘finally gather[ing] the courage’ (2006, p. 281) to tackle complex memory in the mammalian brain. The reasons for Kandel’s new found confidence were the developments in the understanding of spatial memory in the brains of rodents, as well as possibilities in the genetic engineering of mice.

In the Decade of the Brain, Simon, the head of the Self-Control Lab, was graduating with a PhD in psychology. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) had taken off overseas, allowing scientists to measure processes in the living, functioning human brain. Simon was keen to acquire skills in this area. His doctoral work had been on executive function: higher cognitive processes such as reasoning, self-control, and decision-making. This had been a purely psychological thesis and did not deal with brain processes, except perhaps in the neuroscientific sense of mind as what brain does. Simon organised a postdoctoral fellowship

10 . This involved using a box and mirrors to create a visual illusion of the missing limb. Therapy for the phantom limb is then applied via the intact limb (Ramachandran and Altschuler, 2009).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

overseas to begin including brain scanning in his research, studies that could be stand-alone psychological experiments, but for which fMRI technology would add a critical edge in the following decades.

As noted by key informant William, the older PET scanning technology had been developed from work in nuclear particle physics, a fact that had facilitated his own entry into neuroscience. In the 1990s, William, now a specialist in neuroimaging, was working overseas as a particle physicist. He was coming to the conclusion that he did not want to keep doing ‘suitcase physics’, constantly moving and having to live away from Australia to continue his work. The factors in his becoming a neuroscientist included the potential to apply his skills to medical research, as well as the shift he saw in funding priorities away from military research with the end of the Cold War. At the same time, the Memory Lab’s head, John, was a geneticist who had begun work on neural development in the late eighties, his first work that could be classified ‘neuroscience’. In 1994, he says, an opportunity arose for him to pursue his interest in the genetics of behaviour. Changing tack, he decided to move from the ‘two- dimensional’ work of neural development to the ‘multi-dimensional’ work of behavioural neuroscience, eventually breeding a genetically modified mouse that he could use in his studies. As key informant Ann observed, ‘Back in the 1990s, everyone was calling themselves a neuroscientist because there was more money and [there was] more interest generally in the fundamentals of the field.’

The Decade of the Brain, no doubt, provided opportunities and enticements for scientists from a range of backgrounds to become involved in the neuroscience enterprise. As for all researchers whose work requires infrastructural provisions, material supplies, and expensive tools and technology, the ongoing problem of funding is a significant driving force. At a basic level, whatever their intellectual aims, researchers must continually try to ‘keep themselves and the lab employed’ (Simon, Self-Control Lab). At a department meeting that I attended during my fieldwork with the Memory Lab, the department’s head acknowledged that while medical research in Australia had suffered from funding cuts, they were in a better financial position than their colleagues in other areas. Interest in neuroscience was continuing to grow, clearly demonstrated by enrolments in the undergraduate neuroscience course. In contexts where neuroscientific ways of approaching questions of human behaviour, thought

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

and feeling are favoured by funding bodies 11 , there are clear material benefits to engaging in neuroscience work.

The work of neuroscience involves the production of concrete, material evidence for the various phenomena that neuroscientists deal with. Outside of the laboratory, the sort of evidence that neuroscience produces is seen to count for more than other forms of knowledge. For example, when neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould and her lab found that early life stress hampered neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in the brain (Gould and Reeves, 1999, Mirescu and Gould, 2006, Mirescu et al., 2004), this was reported in the media as evidence of the impact of disadvantage. Gould and her laboratory had demonstrated neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons not previously thought to occur beyond infancy. They showed that stress in early life resulted in diminished neurogenesis in the brains of adult rats. The researchers reasoned that this could account for the evidence of impaired management of later life stressors and a lower capacity for learning new tasks (Mirescu et al., 2004). In a SEED magazine article about Gould’s work, it was reported that ‘the rat might have forgotten its pain, but its brain never did’ (Lehrer, 2006, p. 61):

Gould’s work implies that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. Because neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise above them, the monotonous stress of living in a slum literally limits the mind. (p. 62)

Thus, the impact of deprivation, now shown to have an impact on material, biological (albeit rodent) brains, has a tangible existence that it did not have before. Similarly, the products of brain imaging experiments transform the nature of what is mapped onto the solid space of organic matter (Borck 2016; Hagner 2009) and provide the basis for explanations of human thought, behaviour and feeling that is rooted in biology (Beaulieu 2002).

This chapter deals with what I have called the ‘tangible brain’, one of three boundary objects that I suggest forms the boundary infrastructure that holds neuroscience together and facilitates its ongoing work. I have used the word ‘tangible’ to describe this boundary object to capture what the biological brain is for neuroscientists: ‘material, externally real, and objective’ (Oxford English Dictionary). As Borck (2016) has argued, the existence of single, coherent brain that is the focus of neuroscience work is a ‘fiction’ (p. 114). In fact, Borck

11 In the United States, divisions of the National Institute of Health (NIH) that fund psychological research have, in the last ten years, shifted their funding priorities from social science based research to neuroscience (Schwartz et al., 2016).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

argues, in the varied approaches and techniques of the disciplines that make up neuroscience, many different ‘brains’ exist as the objects of specialised neuroscientific work. I will show that the ‘biology’ of the biological brain in the Memory Lab is quite different from that of the Self-Control Lab; a cellular neuroscientist’s biological brain is quite distinct from that of the physicist neuroimager’s. What is common for neuroscientists is what the biological brain stands for: the material, the concrete, the tangible. The term also denotes, in its figurative sense, things that can be made substantial (OED), capturing the processes and products of neuroscience work that takes the biological brain as the goal of action (Star 2010).

I begin with my key informants’ perspectives on who is a neuroscientist. I show how active engagement with the biological brain in some way is what makes one a neuroscientist. I demonstrate how the way in which scientists relate to this object informs their professional identities. Next, using the example of a beginner neuroscientist, Michael, in the Memory Lab, I illustrate how the specific object of the laboratory is far from a given and that a newcomer must become acquainted with it as part of his practice. I then describe the work processes of the Self-Control Lab to illustrate the role of the tangible brain as a product of the laboratory’s work, and as something that the lab members ‘act towards’ (Star 2010, p. 603), knowing that it is there to be captured. Finally, I explore what the tangible brain means for neuroscientists, how it plays a key role in addressing their work and informational needs (Star 2010), and how it constitutes a particular approach to understanding and acting on human behaviour, thought and feeling.

I argue that, for neuroscientists, the tangible brain is foundational in this infrastructural formation. It is what draws together scientists from a range of disciplines. The tangible brain serves as the meeting place (Knorr Cetina 1997) that allows scientists to come together under the banner of neuroscience, providing the actual physical proximity as well as the symbolic space of mixing and exchange (Galison, 1999). In the way that Star et al. (Bowker and Star, 1999 , Star, 2010) understand boundary objects to both facilitate work and be made in the process, the tangible brain provides neuroscientists with the task of materialising the phenomenon that they study, and itself takes shape in the material products of their trade. While the brain accommodates different relations to it and draws in different approaches and modes of operation, it also serves basic informational and work needs for neuroscientists (Star 2010). The brain is seen to provide a genuine understanding of the phenomenon that neuroscientists study and to represent tangible, targetable sites of action.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

The brain and who is a neuroscientist In this section, I explore the way that neuroscience is taking shape through Karin Knorr- Cetina’s (1997) notion of the object in science as an ‘embedding environment’ (p. 9), providing a space for neuroscientists within neuroscience. Neuroscientists are scientists who have formed a collective around the object of the biological brain. Following the widely- acknowledged definition of science, neuroscientists, like other scientists, produce information by ‘directly confronting the natural world’ (Sismondo, 2010, p. 1). Thus, neurophilosophers like Patricia and Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett who apply neuroscientific knowledge to the philosophy of mind are not normally referred to as neuroscientists. Bear et al. (2007) divide neuroscientists into two types: clinical and experimental. In their introductory textbook Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain , Bear, Connors and Paradiso write: ‘Neuroscientists of all stripes endeavour to establish truths about the nervous system. Regardless of the level of analysis they choose, they work according to a scientific process, which consists of four essential steps: observation, replication, interpretation, and verification’ (p. 15).

As Knorr Cetina (1997) points out, what neuroscientists do within this space will endure beyond their own careers, creating the conventions of their trade. My participants were all neuroscientists and were all involved in making what is contemporary neuroscience. They differed greatly in the degree to which they embraced the term ‘neuroscientist’ or thought they qualified as one. These considerations were based on how they thought about the brain as an object of their work. Membership in this community involved a relationship with this object at some level (Bowker & Star 1999). An official version of how to relate to the brain is apparent in the syllabi of neuroscience courses, recent inventions that did not exist in a comprehensive form before the 1990s (Abi-Rached, 2012). Yet, the tangible brain accommodated a range of relations, in the true sense of the boundary object (Bowker & Star 1999).

Since neuroscience majors at university are of relatively recent vintage, the majority of participants in my study had their beginnings in the broad range of disciplines that form neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field including genetics, molecular and cell biology, psychiatry, physics, pharmacology and psychology. Only two junior researchers, members of the Memory Lab, had come through undergraduate neuroscience majors. The junior researchers in the Self-Control Laboratory had mostly trained in psychology and then neuropsychology or cognitive neuroscience, while one had a background in pharmacy.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Neuroscience courses cover the brain across different levels such as the molecular, cellular through to systems in the body, functionally, as well as behaviourally; this is reflected in the organisation of neuroscience textbooks such as Bear et al.’s (2007) and the Principles textbook by Kandel et al. (2013). These texts were the ones that were being used at my own university; Bear’s as an introductory text for a second-year introduction to neuroscience course that I audited as part of my preparation for fieldwork, and Kandel et al.’s as the basic text for all the subsequent neuroscience subjects that formed an undergraduate major.

The way in which a neuroscience major was taught, where the brain was covered at different levels, was reflected in participant’s perspectives on who was a neuroscientist. A full-fledged, card-carrying neuroscientist knew the brain at all these levels. The Memory Lab’s PhD student, Michael, had studied biotechnology as an undergraduate, and later worked as a research assistant on a project related to brain injury; although it was technically ‘neuroscience’, he did not feel that he was able to claim to have been doing ‘neuroscience’:

It was. It was neuroscience but, well, it was called neuroscience because we worked on neurons. I was working on neurorepair, brain injuries and spinal cord injuries, but I mean, I didn’t need to know any classical neuroscience, I mean, I consider neuroscience to be about action potentials , neurophysiology sort of stuff. Really what I was doing was just cell culture, immunohistochemistry, which you can do in any other research. There wasn’t really anything specific to neuroscience that I was doing. It’s a bit tricky this year because I have to learn a lot of new stuff.

In the context of his work as a research assistant, while he was working on the physical matter of the brain in the shape of the nerve cell, at this point for Michael, it was a cell just like any other. Here, his work was focused on technique, and there was no need to engage with the object of neuroscience, the brain. Joining the Memory Lab as a PhD student, Michael took a course covering neuroscience for PhD students who did not have a background in neuroscience.

Michael’s description of the cells that he was working on stands in stark contrast to established cellular neuroscientist, key informant Ann. Ann described herself as being fascinated by neurons from the time she had begun working on them. She said that she had ‘[found] it hard to leave neurons because they’re so interesting.’ They were ‘a more complicated version of a standard cell’, ‘so crucial to our whole being’. Even while Ann could definitely have been said to be doing neuroscience, was clearly a neuroscientist, and certainly thought of herself as one, others might have described her as less of a neuroscientist than themselves. Key informant Thomas was one of these. Like Ann, Thomas had specialised

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

in molecular and cellular neuroscience. However, he said, because he had made an effort to learn about the brain at a number of different levels during his postdoctoral fellowship overseas, he considered himself to be more of a neuroscientist than many of his colleagues. He said: ‘I worked hard to get myself trained with some very good people in behavioural neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience and a bit of systems neuroscience. So I’ve kind of spanned technically from molecules to mind I guess if you think mice have minds’; Thomas laughed.

Thomas now used mouse models to study cognitive and psychiatric disorders. Referring to his study of mice with genetic mutations that resulted in brain disorders, he described his work as ‘trying to understand how this cascade moves from molecules to cells to behaviour’. He thought that he was quite unusual in this way as many people, in ‘most areas of science’, were ‘very reductionist’. For Thomas, reductionism meant confining oneself to one’s small area of study and not reflecting on its connection to the whole. Molecular biology was a tool, an approach, brought into the fold of what is ‘neuroscience’ for a specific purpose of understanding the brain, an organ in its totality which included mind.

Through his description of what it entailed to be more of a neuroscientist than most, Thomas was articulating a vision, similarly reflected in Kandel et al.’s (2013) textbook, of what neuroscience is supposed to be. This is captured in Thomas’ description of his knowledge and training on different levels. Neuroscientists are scientists who are potentially able to engage with the object of the brain at multiple levels. They endeavour, collectively, to explain the full scope of the brain, spanning consciousness to the molecular processes in the brain.

In contrast to Thomas, Simon, the head of the Self-Control Lab, and key informant Emily, who worked on research related to adolescent mental health, both said that they tended to see themselves more as psychologists than as neuroscientists. Emily described her interests as starting ‘from the other end’, in ‘psychology, psychiatry, mental health, environment’. Simon acknowledged that the field that he worked in was called ‘cognitive neuroscience’ and said that when people identified him as a neuroscientist, he did not correct them. Additionally, on his online academic profiles and social media, he identified himself as a ‘cognitive neuroscientist’. Nevertheless, he tended to see neuroscientists as scientists interested in the brain for its own sake. He said:

I don’t find brain anatomy in and of itself the interesting aspect of the research I do. Or the neural function in and of itself particularly the relevant aspect. I’m interested in how behaviour results from neural activity so without the behaviour I don’t really find

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

it interesting; whereas many neuroscientists would not necessarily be interested in any resulting behaviour, whatever, from the neural function that they look at. Now I’m not sure whether that does or doesn’t make you a neuroscientist, I’m just saying that’s why I kind of consider myself more of a psychologist than a neuroscientist.

Thus the degree to which one thought of oneself as a neuroscientist could be seen as an orientation toward the anatomical brain as an object. In the ‘shared space’ of the boundary object, ‘here and there are confounded’ (Star 2010, p. 603). Boundaries are blurry, and one can be both a neuroscientist and not a neuroscientist, more of a neuroscientist, or less of a neuroscientist. The object, as an ‘embedding environment’ (Knorr Cetina 1997, p. 25), accommodated neuroscientists who engage with the brain at the levels as outlined in neuroscience courses, at the very specific level of the molecular, or at the level of the psychological.

My participants all brought different things into the shared space of neuroscience and the ‘embedding environment’ (Knorr Cetina 1997, p. 25) of the tangible brain. This is in keeping with Galison’s (1999) metaphor for exchange where values are not necessarily shared. Like traders hawking their different wares, my participants each brought their particular orientation to the object of the brain. The Memory Lab’s head, John, brought with him an interest in personality, and an understanding of it as a combination of genes and environment. Being a geneticist, John saw the processes of memory formation in the brain as a way to study the interaction of genes and environment, and he was able to breed transgenic mice that made this possible. Simon, on the other hand, brought an in-depth understanding of the processes of executive function , and the skills in employing fMRI technologies to discover the neural correlates of these processes.

Key informant William’s background in physics informed his methodological approach to using the scanning technologies that he worked with, and shaped what he thought the ultimate aim of neuroscience should be. He described how his previous work in particle physics led him to think about maximising the potential to learn from neuroscience experiments, particularly in the context of rapidly improving imaging capabilities:

In that field [particle physics], what would happen was that, you know, you’ve probably seen photos of these massive detectors that they build underground. And so, the idea is that [with] the collision between particles, [there are] all of the products of this collision that you then have to detect simultaneously in as many ways as you possibly can to identify all the particles. And if you do that accurately, you can then sort of back project it all to figure out what actually happened at the point of the

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

collision. So that sort of emphasis on measuring as many different things as possible simultaneously around a phenomenon is something that I’ve always brought into my neuroscience research.

Because of his expertise in neuroimaging, William had been involved in projects that brought together other disciplines, such as those in the social sciences and humanities, and neuroscience. He saw the ability to measure multiple things simultaneously to be a contributor to the ability to study increasingly complex things in neuroscience.

The approaches, values, and techniques that each neuroscientist contributes are all part of the way in which the brain is coming to be known. As part of the boundary infrastructure of neuroscience that keeps the work of neuroscience moving along (Bowker and Star 1999), these methods and approaches become incorporated into the way of doing things (Knorr Cetina 1997). As objects grow more sophisticated (Miller, 2005), or ‘more richly real’ (Daston 2000, p. 13), neuroscientists are able to see ‘more complex possibilities’ (Miller 2005, p. 8) within them, involving further avenues of investigation (Knorr-Cetina, 1997). Neuroscientists who initially find a place through association with this object, are integrated more deeply; whether through an investment in the use of sophisticated technology and analytic methods, or in the possibilities that technological developments allow. Emily, the adolescent researcher, for example, saw possibilities in the growth of social neuroscience and in the development of two-person scanners that allowed neuroscientists to study the interaction between two people. A key question for Emily as she developed her research was how she could ensure the ‘ecological validity’ of her experiments, and how closely her experimental design reflected the processes she studied as they would occur in real life.

Since his background was in physics, a field that aimed for a ‘mathematically rigorous self- persisting theoretical framework’, William’s hopes were for a ‘grand unifying theory’ that went beyond merely taking ‘different snapshots of brain function’. He said:

I guess, being a scientist I would have the view that you don’t just investigate or describe things for the purpose of describing them. And what you’re trying to do is understand how they actually work. What the mechanisms are, and ideally, what the sort of unifying principles are, which, in a more theoretical, conceptual way, explain how many, many more things work.

In this way, the tangible brain is a unifying boundary object that accommodates a range of backgrounds, approaches and aims. It facilitates ongoing work by providing new possibilities

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

and avenues of research, as part of its role in the boundary infrastructure that the brain in neuroscience provides.

The neuroscience neophyte and the brain in the Memory Lab For the newcomer, a community’s shared objects have an anthropological strangeness and they are not taken to be givens (Bowker and Star 1999). Michael was a PhD student in the Memory Lab. In his twenties, Michael had moved interstate to take up the PhD opportunity with the Memory Lab. While he had not majored in neuroscience as an undergraduate, he had ‘always been interested in kind of the cognition side of neuroscience, the thinking, and feeling, learning and memory’, and no one in his home city was working on the kind of laboratory science that he was interested in.

Michael began his studies just a few weeks into my fieldwork. Michael would be working closely with Sarah, the laboratory’s main research assistant, a woman in her early fifties with considerable experience who oversaw most of the day-to-day practical running of the laboratory. Having worked for two years as a research assistant after completing his undergraduate studies, Michael was, Sarah noted, not as ‘clueless’ as most newbie PhD students. ‘Someone,’ she said, had already done the hard work of ‘polish[ing] him up for [her]’. Even so, for Michael, the brain that neuroscience dealt with, and the brain that was the Memory Lab’s object, in particular, were not yet apparent. In the work that he was doing on understanding memory and the brain, he had to learn to know what he was looking at, following instructions while not being quite convinced about the reality or the boundaries of what he was looking at, nor of the importance of the work he was doing.

The Memory Lab, headed by John, the geneticist, was involved in identifying fear learning neurons in the mouse brain. John was interested in making contributions to uncovering the engram , the physical location of memory in the brain. This broad project involved a series of steps. First, the lab aimed to identify the neurons that were responsible for fear learning, and second, to then describe the changes that occurred in them. John hoped that eventually they would have identified nodes of cells that would link up into circuits.

The Memory Lab’s worked with genetically modified mice whose neurons produced a protein when activated that could be made visible under biochemical assay, provided the mouse was killed within a certain time frame of the cell’s activation. The experiment that they were carrying out during my fieldwork involved pairing a tone with giving an electric shock to a mouse’s feet to create a fear memory. They tested the mice by playing the tone a

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

few hours later to confirm fear learning (i.e. the mouse would freeze) and then counted the neurons activated by the fear learning event. The mice were habituated to a fear learning chamber over a period of a few weeks, to ensure that on the day of ‘training’, it was the paired tone-shock that was responsible for the fear learning rather than the experience of being handled by a human being, or being put in an enclosed box.

The laboratory members worked in different spaces depending on the task that they were doing. John, as a senior academic, had his own office away from the main laboratory, and Michael had a desk-space in an office with other PhD students. Since Sarah was central to coordinating the work of the laboratory, most of the laboratory’s activities centred on her office and the large laboratory in which it was located. Other work occurred in the behavioural lab where the mice were trained, the animal house on the top floor of the building that housed many of the faculty’s research animals, or in the histology lab on the ground floor where the laboratory members made use of a cryostat with which they sliced their frozen mouse brains.

Sarah was in a medium-sized office with four work spaces that she shared with another research assistant who worked for a molecular biology laboratory. The office sat just off a large laboratory that comprised a series of connected rooms. On the left-hand side, as one entered the laboratory, was a room that was little bigger than a generous-sized cupboard, housing an electron microscope, a computer, and two computer screens. The laboratory was a somewhat cramped, chaotic space, lined with shelves of lab supplies arranged haphazardly, and benches strewn with equipment. The main corridor of the laboratory served as a thoroughfare for researchers moving through in single file. The members of the Memory Lab dis not interact with many of these people as the laboratory was a shared space for other researchers in the school. A row of laboratory benches ran along the left-hand side of the first room, while the right hand side was lined with a fridge, lockers, and a large sink. This corridor lead into a second room housing large machinery that the laboratory members did not make use of. The end of the corridor opened into another laboratory space, with work benches at the far end, and a fume hood near the entrance where the Memory Lab members prepared mouse brains to be frozen. This involved first killing the mouse within fifteen minutes of its ‘training’, perfusing the carcasses with saline to flush out the blood and then with paraformaldehyde as a fixative, before removing the mouse brains and placing them in a sucrose solution.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

This research on fear learning neurons formed Michael’s PhD research. Once he had habituated, trained, killed the mice, sliced up their brains, stained the slices, and mounted the slices onto slides, Michael’s task was to look through the slides using a microscope, and count each activated neuron. The project consisted of experiments with five groups of mice: ones that did not have anything done to them (the ‘home cage’ control group), ones that had only been habituated to being handled and to being in the fear conditioning chamber, ones that also heard a tone in the chamber, ones that heard both a tone and experienced an asynchronous shock in the chamber, and ones for whom the shock and tone coincided so that a fear-based learning event was created in the mouse’s brain. Slides from the different groups of mice had to be compared to look for differences in areas of activation. For the parts of the mice brains that had already been identified as possible areas, the activated neurons in those areas had to be counted, and the evidence confirmed.

The brains were sliced from front to back (anterior to posterior in anatomical terms), and finally mounted onto slides that could be viewed through a microscope, amplified and projected onto a computer screen. As the lab members viewed the series of slides, an area of interest, in this case, a part of the amygdala, the almond-shaped structure known to be involved in fear, would show up as a discernible shape as the lab members moved through the series of slides. Sarah, the laboratory’s very experienced research assistant, knew exactly where in the collection of slides she would find the neurons of interest. From years of experience, Sarah did not have to scan each slide slowly to work out where she needed to start counting neurons. Michael would have to learn to recognise where he was in the brain and to know where, in the collection of slides from the brain of a single mouse, the amygdala started and where it ended. It would take time, Sarah said, but before long he would be able to ‘fly through a brain’ in the same way that she could.

I watched one day as Michael was looking at an area in the amygdala that had a triangular shape. Scanning through the slides, he had to decide where he would start counting and where he would stop. He showed me a slide. ‘Sarah said to stop here’, he said. ‘You can see before how the lines were really clear but now they are softer. To me, I can still see a definite shape’ he said. Nevertheless, Sarah had years of experience doing this work, Michael noted. She knew what she was talking about.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Figure 1 Print-outs of Michael’s slides that he pasted on the wall of the laboratory. The shape he marked on the sheets (indicated by orange arrow) represents the area of interest and the point in the collection of slides where counting will start.

When Michael got to the point in the collection of slides where he would start counting, on each slide, he marked the individual dots that made up the area of interest with a red dot in the computer programme he was using. These represented activated neurons. In some instances, the dots in the area were ignored. What was the difference, I asked, when Michael had skipped several dots that appeared to me to be clearly there. ‘I’m looking for activation,’ he said, ‘so I’m only counting the ones where the reagent has gone all the way to the axon .’ He pointed to a faint line protruding from the blob. ‘See?’ Sometimes, when there was a particularly large blob, he only made one marking. ‘You get to know when a blob couldn’t possibly be just one neuron’ he said.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Figure 2 The screen on which Michael would count neurons, housed in the small room off the main laboratory. Activated neurons had spindly extensions from a darkened spot.

Just as Michael was taking a crash course in neuroscience for PhD students who had not previously studied neuroscience, he was simultaneously getting to know the object of his laboratory, via the tools of his trade: the mouse, its brain, a mouse brain atlas, the activated neurons viewed through a microscope and so on. Michael also had to come to accept that the work that he was tasked with was relevant and important. In a recorded interview I conducted with him, he wondered if neuroscience could really be applied to human behaviour. From what he knew of neuroscience, he said, he would be hesitant to make claims about what was happening in human beings. He qualified his assessment by emphasising that he had not studied neuroscience previously. From his perspective though, ‘what we know about

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

neuroscience doesn’t really apply to human behaviour yet. Psychologists would know more about that than I would, I think.’

The question of the value of the experiments he was working on would arise during one of the lab’s meetings as John, Sarah and Michael discussed his progress. These meetings were held in John’s spacious office, around a meeting table with a whiteboard at one end. During one of my presentations to the Memory Lab about my research, John had taken careful notes as I spoke. He probed many of the points that I was making, and got me to write my key ideas down on the whiteboard. John explained that he always made a great effort to make sure that he understood people. Communication with colleagues was a perennial problem. At the last neuroscience conference he had attended, he could barely understand what others in a learning and memory session had been talking about, even though it was his own area of research. The problem was even worse with neuroscientists who did not work in that area. A few weeks before, he had presented a grant proposal to other neuroscientist colleagues in his department. He had been unable to make them see the value in something that he had considered to be crucial and obviously important. Mid-way through his first year, Michael also expressed some of these doubts about the value of what he had been doing. Why was there a need to identify the individual cells? They already knew which areas were linked with what. Why did they need to know which specific neurons? It was a question frequently asked by other neuroscientists who did not work on learning and memory.

To understand how memory worked, John said, they had to identify the neurons involved. ‘This pertains in every area of biology’ John said. ‘There is not an area in cell biology where you wouldn’t want to know the answers to these questions.’ Their job as neuroscientists was to discover the physical changes that accounted for memory, to find out what the ‘physical underpinnings’ of memory were. It was, John said, the ‘most fundamental question of a neuroscientific approach to memory’, one that set them apart from psychologists, sociologists, and historians. John noted that Eric Kandel, in his Nobel prize winning work, had worked out what molecules were involved, so they knew how the NMDA receptors worked. However, before they could begin to talk about how memories were stored, John emphasised, they had to locate the circuits that were hypothesised to be responsible for encoding memory.

The introduction of new members to a community such as postgraduate students or new collaborators can provide examples of the process of how a neophyte is socialised into a

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

particular social world revealing important aspects of the organising principles that structure work in a particular area (Traweek, 1988). Part of acquiring membership is becoming familiar with the objects that mediate practice (Bowker & Star 1999). Just as Michael needed to learn about the brain, doing a crash course in neuroscience designed for doctoral students who had not done neuroscience majors, he also had to come to know and relate to the brain in other ways. Michael had to get to know the brain in terms of the questions that he was exploring, and in relation to his subject area of fear learning. He had to learn the brain through the techniques that he was engaging in, to recognise the staining that they created as ‘activation’, and to count it as evidence of the location of a fear-related memory.

I previously described the way in which neuroscience, through the object of the brain, provided a ‘home’ for neuroscientist identities (Knorr Cetina 1997, p. 9). Bowker and Star (1999) write that a newcomer’s relation to a community often centres on their relationship to the community’s objects. They describe a newcomer’s increasing familiarity with the shared object as a process that involves ‘stripping away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated nature’ (p. 299). As the object becomes a more natural part of a newcomer’s work, the extent to which they take it for granted increases. In the first year of Michael’s PhD, neuroscience’s brain, and particularly, the brain of the Memory Lab, was not yet a given for him.

A tangible brain in the Self-Control Lab: product and process

The images of brain activation produced by cognitive neuroscience neuroimaging have been some of the most compelling and most misused products of the explosion in neuroscience (Pickersgill et al., 2011b, Littlefield and Johnson, 2012). They are produced with the use of technology that is designed to record physiological processes that are an indirect indication of function (Carter and Shieh, 2010), in experiments where participants are given tasks to elicit certain mental processes and states. Though often downplayed by scientists (Beaulieu 2002), these images are a key factor in the materialisation of a broad range of mental phenomena in the brain (Beaulieu 2002; Borck 2016; Hagner 2009; Cohn 2008b).

The images are compelling in their apparent transparency and in the recognisability of what they seem to convey, appearing to allow a peek into the otherwise hidden (Dumit 2004). However, neuroscientists remind us that to read them as they appear, as transparent depictions of brain activity, is to read them incorrectly (Beaulieu 2002). For neuroscientists, the evidence of brain activity, and

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

the basis of the work’s scientific credibility, is in the quantitative data gathered by the scanner and processed in a long series of steps that can take several months (Beaulieu 2002). Yet, the images that they produce are vital in garnering the funding and the very material support that sustains ongoing work (Friese and Clarke 2012; Dumit 2004). In the way they have been developed to translate digital space onto the biological brain, as discussed in chapter two, they are also crucial to the claims of having located function in particular regions of the brain (Beaulieu 2002).

In contrast to the slices of mouse brain and stained fear learning neurons that the Memory Lab worked with, the brain that was part of the Self-Control Lab’s work was an altogether different sort. Rather than working directly with organic matter, the stuff of much of the everyday work of lab members was made up of numbers and digital coordinates. The technology that the Self-Control Lab’s work relied on, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) 12 , exploits the magnetic properties of hydrogen atoms in haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in the blood. Participants in brain scanning experiments lie in a tube- shaped enclosure surrounded by electrical coils used to generate a magnetic field around them. When a radiofrequency pulse is applied, the hydrogen protons are excited and this activity is recorded by the scanner. The fMRI signal that is taken to be an indicator of relative neural activity is known as the BOLD (blood oxygen-level dependent) signal, which indirectly represents oxygen metabolism in the brain. The data is captured in voxels (volume pixels), three-dimensional digital representations of brain space.

The successful materialisation of phenomena onto a piece of neural real estate involves a variety of elements that must all work together correctly. Much effort goes into identifying the right participants for studies. Psychology students, for example, though often used in psychological research, were not considered to be ideal as they often tried to ‘second-guess’ the aims of the study and did not allow the experimental design to do its work (Cohn, 2004). Being able to find the right candidates for brain imaging studies is so important, Dumit (2004) found in his study of PET, that successfully recruiting these participants can allow a researcher to claim first authorship on journal articles produced from these studies. While participants are often thought to make or break a study, machinery malfunction and computer programme errors are always also possibilities (Cohn 2004). Processing of the data from scanning experiments is carried out on an open source mainly script-based suite of programmes called AFNI (analysis of functional images, pronounced ‘Aff-nee’), aspects of

12 I have used Carter and Shieh's (2010) Guide to Techniques in Neuroscience as my main source for technical explanations of fMRI.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

which can present a steep learning curve for researchers without a background in programming (Cox, 2012).

The purpose of the material and processual setup of the Self-Control Lab is to accomplish the linking of a mental state to the brain. This materialisation is not in question, and by the time expensive scanning technology is involved, it is almost guaranteed (Cohn, 2008b). For the Self-Control Lab, at the cost of $650 per participant, a non-result was not usually an option. Any experiment that had made it to the scanner was known to work, and the participants recruited were known to be able to perform adequately. The use of the fMRI machine was to capture the brain in the act, accomplished through a series of tasks that were designed to give rise to a particular cognitive process.

At the desk: materialising the real

The members of the Self-Control Lab were acutely aware of the life that brain images had beyond the laboratory, particularly of the way in which neuroimaging was portrayed in popular media. I was frequently reminded that the images were far from immediate and by no means transparent. Just as Beaulieu (2002) found that cognitive neuroscientists downplayed the role of the visual in their work, I was told impatiently by one participant when I asked about the images that their work rarely involved looking at images at all. Most of the time, they would be staring at spreadsheets and windows of script that was used to run the analyses of fMRI experiments.

The images, participants emphasised, represented ‘relative activation’; these were merely correlational, and that what they in fact indicated, was much less sensational than regularly depicted in media stories about brain scanning. Patrick, a postdoctoral fellow with the Self- Control Lab, compared popular depictions of fMRI on television to the reality of work in the lab: ‘I’ve got you in the scanner, I’m looking at your brain, and I can tell exactly what you’re doing now. You’re having a hallucination, or you’re thinking about cheese or something like that. It’s not like that at all. It’s all about statistics, and it takes two months to find out if you are thinking about cheese.’ These statistics, as Beaulieu (2002) has shown, forms a key aspect in the establishment of neuroimaging as a scientifically credible exercise.

Pre-processing (preparing the data for processing) and processing formed a large portion of the researchers’ time. Most of my time with the Self-Control Lab involved sitting in the small

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

office shared by Patrick and Henry, two of the Self-control Lab’s members, . Patrick was postdoctoral fellow in his thirties who was from the UK; Henry was an older man for whom a return to university to study psychology was a second career. In the middle of a master’s degree in clinical psychology, Henry had done his honours research with the Self-control Lab and was working as a research assistant with the lab while he completed his studies. Their office was a few doors down from Simon, the laboratory head’s office, while the rest of the Self-control Lab members shared a larger office on a different floor. With Patrick’s guidance, Henry was processing data from a project examining the roles of reward and distraction in self-control.

Figure 3 Example of the AFNI GUI and windows of script. 13

There were only a small number of things that could be done via the AFNI GUI (graphic user interface, pronounced ‘gooey’), one of which was to generate images of the brain. During the time I spent with the lab, Henry would work on processing their experimental data in AFNI with Patrick supervising. Patrick was mostly busy writing up journal articles of earlier studies.

13 Source: Screen grab from Andre Jahn’s (2013a) YouTube ‘AFNI start to finish tutorial Part 1’ video.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

Occasionally, to check that the data was looking right, Henry and Patrick would open up the AFNI GUI to generate an image of the brain (see example in Fig 3). This served as a visual check to alert them to any mistakes they might have made in the processing. Most of the time, they worked with multiple script based windows like those depicted in Figure 4. Scattered amidst AFNI ’s staid looking super script (prepared standard script for researchers to run) were quirky comments such as ‘ AFNI is very user-friendly. We are just selective about who our friends are’, hinting at AFNI ’s reputation for being difficult to use (Cox 2012).

Figure 4 AFNI Start To Finish Tutorial, Part 4: Execute Script, Andrew Jahn 14

The Self-Control Lab had to combine two sets of data: the functional data from the scan and data collected from the behavioural task that participants carried out in the scanner, which would then be laid over a third set, the structural data from the scan. To bring the two sources of data together, they had to create a ‘timing file’ that would tell AFNI when the mental events they were interested in occurred. These had to be lined up with the timing of the machine’s scans which occurred every two seconds. Since these tasks were timed, the lab members knew that if a task began at the end of one scan, it would take all of the next scan and a portion of the third. All this information had to be entered into a spreadsheet that would be used in their analyses.

14 Source: Screen grab from Andre Jahn’s (2013b) YouTube ‘AFNI Start To Finish Tutorial, Part 4: Execute Script’ video.

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Before they could do anything with the data from the scanner, Henry needed to delimit and clean the data they were interested in. The scanner provided information from all the space within the fMRI chamber, and one of his first tasks was to ‘get rid of all these voxels around the brain’. The data was then ‘blurred’. This involved correcting for individual spikes in activity so that participants could be compared with each other. To further make the data comparable, Henry then ‘scaled’ the data from each participant, converting each to a percentage of a baseline reading, instead of the participants’ actual BOLD signals which would vary from person to person. After this, he had to apply a ‘Talaraich transformation’, adjusting both the structural and functional information from the scan with reference to a standardised coordinate system from the Talaraich Brain Atlas that mapped brain space (Talairach and Tournoux, 1988). Additionally, each voxel contained a lot of ‘noise’, superfluous information that was not relevant to the small percentage change that made up the BOLD signal. ‘Nuisance regressors’ statistically modelled the ‘noise’ that could obscure a ‘pure’ response i.e. the response related specifically to the task. These included a participant’s movement or other physiological or machine related interference. These are applied to each voxel to ‘regress out’ this unwanted information.

One day in the office, Henry, Patrick and I were gathered around Henry’s computer looking at an image of the brain that he had generated in AFNI after processing a few of the participants from the self-control experiment they were running. Henry wanted Patrick to look over what he was doing, to make sure he was on the right track.

‘It’s very dotty, isn’t it?’ Patrick said. ‘Looks very random’. The image of the brain was scattered with multiple small dots, indicating areas of relative activation all over. Henry asked if he should increase the cluster size. The cluster size represented the minimum percentage of change in activity that they were interested in. When the cluster size was set too low, too many areas showed up as being significant, making it difficult to make sense of. They were looking for Regions of Interest or ROI s. Henry and Patrick had a good idea what they needed to be looking at. Because any one task a participant performed involved a range of functions and processes, some areas were automatically discounted. The cerebellum , for example, the mini brain at the tip of the brain stem, was an area that was involved in any kind of movement. For this reason, the cerebellum would always be involved and was thus not of interest.

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In the experiment, Patrick and Henry had tested the impact of having a salient distractor on a participant’s ability to withhold a habitual response. Henry pointed out that it seemed that when the participant was distracted, an area in the brain thought to be involved in withholding this response did not have to work as hard as it did under normal conditions.

‘It seems like you don’t have to engage the IFG as much,’ Henry said. ‘That’s a really interesting finding.’ ‘We just have to make sure it’s real’, replied Patrick. He sat down in Henry’s spot and began looking over the different scripts that Henry had been working on in AFNI , making sure that he had not made an error in the processing somewhere along the way. The products of the Self-Control Lab’s work are concrete numbers and images that depict the workings of mind (Beaulieu 2002; Borck 2016; Hagner 2009). As researchers have shown, this brain, constructed in a series of complex steps that the researchers were keen to emphasise, has a very tangible impact in the way in which it functions as an arbiter of human action, being used in attempts to identify individuals at risk of criminality (Rose 2010), in early childhood education (Howard-Jones 2014), and in understandings of self (Dumit 2004; Rose & Abi-Rached 2013). In the complex series of steps that involve statistical analysis, the aim is to transform the real into something tangible. Yet, there is always a risk that something not ‘real’ is transformed into the very concrete and solid.

Figure 5 The kind of images produced by the Self Control Lab through the AFNI GUI 15

15 Source: Analysis of Functional Neuroimages (AFNI) Wikipedia entry (Wikimedia, 2017).

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In the scanner: things that obscure the material

As a portion of the work that the Self-Control Lab did, time spent running experiments in fMRI scanners was small. The lab did not have ready access to a scanner on site and often made use of a scanner at another university. In the time I spent with the Self-Control Lab, I observed only one occasion of scanning, a formal and tightly managed affair, the tone of which marked it out as a significant one in the life of the laboratory. There was a sense that this was high-stakes research, making use of expensive and potentially dangerous technology (Cohn 2004). It involved a central process of the laboratory, namely, the transformation of a cognitive state into something tangible and concrete.

To investigate the role of distraction in self-control, Patrick and Henry had designed a series of computer-based tasks for participants that first created a habitual response in participants, and then required them to withhold that response. These tasks required them to variously respond to, or refrain from responding to, pictures of target objects (e.g. vehicles) with specific characteristics (e.g. type of vehicle; whether its headlights were on or off). Sometimes a correct response was associated with a monetary reward, and sometimes not. The intricate manipulations involved in these tasks were designed to build up habitual responses to certain objects, make some objects more attractive than others, some responses associated with a reward and others not.

The task needed to be designed in a way that it accommodated the capabilities of the fMRI machine and the physiological processes being measured. The temporal resolution of fMRI, its ability to separate out mental events that occur close in time is low compared to techniques such as EEG and magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Carter & Shieh 2010). This is due, in part, to the time lag of up to ten seconds between a mental event and the increase in oxygenated blood flow to the relevant area (ibid.), making the use of fMRI unsuitable for some tasks that required precisely timed events. Patrick explained:

So you want to bring out the behavioural effect because that’s what you’re examining. But you also want to have the task amenable to a scanner environment, so there are certain considerations that you have to make in that, which are mostly related to the temporal component in designing the task because the temporal resolution of MRI scanners isn’t great at the moment. So you have to slow down tasks. Like, you can’t have it rapidly occurring. Slow it down so that you can acquire the events and you have enough separation between the events, and you don’t get any crossover. So, for instance, in this task, we tried to build that in from the beginning so that there are long

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enough gaps between events while still maintaining the necessity of a speedy response from the participant.

In the second part of the experiment, participants were required to refrain from responding to something that they had previously built up a response to. The lab was testing the hypothesis that adding a distractor in the background of these images would improve the ability to withhold a response. A distractor is an object that attracts their attention.

For this behavioural effect to manifest, it was crucial that participants followed instructions so that they were adequately prepared for the experiment. When Henry was piloting the study back in the office, a recalcitrant psychology undergraduate had refused to press the button when she knew that her response would not influence the amount of money she received. She would not be a suitable candidate for running the experiment in the scanner. Many international students participated in these studies, keen for an opportunity to earn a bit of money. Lucas, an exchange student from Latin America, and Sylvia, an exchange student from Eastern Europe, had been short-listed to participate in the scanning task as they had both participated in the pilot study and had performed well.

On the day of the scanning, I met Henry, Lucas and Sylvia in the lobby of a building at another university, where the Self-Control Lab had access to an fMRI machine. Henry, who was normally dressed quite casually on the days he was in the office, was more formally attired than usual, and in contrast to his usual laid-back friendliness, he shook all our hands in greeting, adding to the sense that this occasion was different from the other occasions when we had met. Henry then led us through a series of security doors into an anteroom, a lounge that had a couch, a water cooler, and adjoining toilet and small sroom with a desk and computer. There were two double panelled security doors covered with various warning signs on either side of this room, an MEG machine on the left, and the fMRI machine on the right. The security door that led to the fMRI machine had a control room that was separated from the scanner by a large window pane.

Henry’s unusual formality lent an air of seriousness. I would be allowed to stay and watch Lucas’s and Sylvia’s scans, but that was all, as Henry said he needed to manage the number of people in the control room, and they were expecting an honours student in the afternoon. Henry ran through what would be happening and said that we would each have to fill out a safety form to be able to enter the section where the fMRI machine was. We were instructed to remove all metal objects and leave them in the lounge.

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Henry took Lucas and Sylvia into the small computer room and ran the experiment on the computer so that they could practise what they would have to be doing in the scanner. In the first round of the task, Henry asked them to respond by hitting a button every time they saw a vehicle with its lights on. In the next phase, they had to respond to ones whose lights were off. When they responded correctly and within the allowed time frame, ‘$1.00’ would flash in green across the screen. When they respond too slowly or incorrectly, ‘$0.00’ appeared in red. In addition to the $40 base amount that they got for showing up, they would receive one- twentieth of the amount they accumulated in the task. Flashing the actual amount that participants would get, e.g. ‘$0.05’, had not had the same impact as a reward of ‘$1.00’ did. This was despite the fact that participants knew they would receive one-twentieth of the amount.

It was very important for them to respond to the cars, Henry stressed to them. This was one of the responses that did not receive a reward. If they did not, the experiment would not work. ‘It’s not easy’, Sylvia said. She also voiced her concern about having to spend an hour in the scanner. Henry said that he had done it and that when you were doing the task, you hardly notice the time it takes. It was only during the structural scan when you had nothing to do that it could get a little boring.

It was Lucas’s turn first. I was not yet allowed to go into the scanning control room as Greg, the technician, had to run through the safety questions with me. He was calibrating the scanner. While they were setting Lucas up in the fMRI machine, Henry gave Sylvia a questionnaire to fill out. Sylvia remarked that it was the ‘standard boring stuff’ and was the same every time. She had done many of these studies as it was a good way to earn a little pocket money as an exchange student. She read out some of the questions to me which seemed to be mostly about impulse control and drug use. She was talkative and lively and chattered away, and again said that she was worried that she would not be able to handle a whole hour in the scanner as it would be incredibly boring.

Eventually, Greg came out of the control room and ran through the safety questions with me. I did not need to be as safe as Lucas and Sylvia, he said, because I would not be going into the scanner. I would only be allowed into the control room, which was separated from the scanner by a large window pane. Patrick and Henry had had to have a lot of training to be able to go into the scanning room. I would be able to see everything that was happening through the glass window.

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The first task that Lucas had to complete in the scanner was a facial recognition task that would allow Patrick and Henry to pinpoint where in Lucas’s brain the area for facial perception was. Faces of celebrities flashed on the screen two at a time, and Lucas had to respond by pressing a button whenever the two faces were the same. As the task progressed, Patrick and Henry remarked that he was a ‘model participant’ and that he had managed to stay very still. In the next segment, pictures of vehicles were shown, followed by blank slides with placeholders with the same instructions.

Henry was able to communicate with Lucas via an intercom, checking in to make sure he was ok after each segment. Lucas was then shown a series of vehicles and had to withhold his response for cars. Some of these were interspersed with a ghosted out face in the background, a scrambled face, or nothing in the background. The faces in the background were supposed to make it easier for Lucas to hold back a response. He was doing extremely well and was building up points quickly.

Greg, the technician, came back into the room having run through safety issues with Sylvia. Confident that Lucas had got the hang of things, Patrick sat back and chatted with Greg about upcoming holidays while Henry went out to prepare Sylvia for her turn.

Sylvia was up next. She followed Henry into the scanning chamber. She looked uncomfortable, her shoulders shrugged, and her arms folded tightly across her chest. ‘Have you taken off your bra?’ Greg asked. Sylvia nodded silently. Metal objects, such as the wire in an underwire bra, could interfere with the working of the fMRI machine. Earlier, Lucas’s braces had to be cleared; after a discussion, Greg and Patrick decided that because the region they would be looking at was not close to his jaw, the small wires that ran along the insides of his teeth would not affect the scan. Greg and Henry helped Sylvia into the machine and Henry handed her a set of earplugs to put in as it would be very noisy in the scanner. He continued to give her instructions which frustrated her as she could not hear what he was saying with the earplugs in. Greg reminded him to speak up. Henry showed her the buttons that she would need to press to make her responses. Henry told her which button to press if she needed to speak to them at any point as Greg and Henry lowered the cover which enclosed her in the scanner.

‘Ok, I will press this if I need to, yes?’ Sylvia said in a shaky voice. Then she asked to be let out. She was not feeling good. Greg and Henry quickly lifted the hood to release her from the scanner.

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‘It’s ok. You don’t have to do it’, Henry told her.

Sylvia said that she might be ok after having a little rest and that she wanted to try again in a while. Her eyes were red and she rushed out into the lounge.

‘She’s claustrophobic,’ Greg said. ‘She probably did not realise it until just then’.

Patrick and I had been watching from the control room. ‘Oh, this is going to be dodgy,’ he said.

The experiment had been set up, as Patrick had said, to demonstrate a compelling behavioural effect. It had been tested rigorously prior to arriving in the scanner and was known to successfully produce this effect. The participants who were asked to be part of the scanning experiment were known to be able to perform the tasks as instructed. This development did not bode well for Sylvia’s performance on the tasks. Henry and Patrick discussed what they should do. She was far too stressed out. She might not be able to do the task. She would be trying to hold it together and was not going to perform well.

Sylvia was ready to try again in a few minutes. This time, Greg instructed her to keep her eyes closed until he told her to open them. Once the hood of the scanner was in place, there was a mirror that would allow her to look out and it would feel less closed in. When Sylvia finally opened her eyes, she said that she was ok.

Henry started up the task from the computer in the control room. Sylvia was not responding properly. Henry checked in with her to make sure she knew what she was supposed to do.

‘She’s not in a good place’, he said. She had really wanted to do it as there was money involved, and although they could not tell her that she could not do it, they were not going to be able to use the data that they gathered in her experiment.

In the event of scanning, the biological brain orientates the action of the laboratory, being something that they ‘act toward’ (Star 2010, p. 603). The experimental set-ups in the Self- Control Lab’s scanning work were organised to produce processes in the biological brain that the fMRI machine would be able to capture. Cohn (2008) has argued that the creation of this state rests on the social processes of establishing trust between participant and researcher, while the organisation of the event enforces a separation to reassert the internality and non- sociality of the aspect of mind being mapped onto the brain. Cohn’s work illustrates that much goes into the creation of a state or processes of mind that can be mapped onto brain.

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This occasion of scanning represented a success, a participant who had ‘really built [the numbers] up’, as well as a failure. The event shows how processes of mind require much more beyond being a naturally occurring thing in someone’s head. Sylvia’s lively personality, her possible discomfort at having to remove her bra, and ultimately, the claustrophobia she experienced inside of the scanner illustrate that the materialisation is hard won and by no means inevitable.

Sense-making through the brain I have shown so far how the biological brain is a thing of consequence for the neuroscience community. Some relation to the biological brain is thus a key part of being a neuroscientist, and acting towards it as the goal of one’s work guides the material and processual configurations that facilitate neuroscience work (Star 2010). In this section, I explore what role the biological brain’s concreteness and tangibility serve in neuroscientists’ efforts to understand human behaviour, and how the tangible brain presents an orientation to the phenomena that neuroscientists deal with (Good 1994).

For my participants, the brain was seen to provide a thoroughgoing, genuine explanation for psychological phenomena. An undergraduate student, Elizabeth, who was doing a research placement with the Memory Lab as well as some casual research assistant work, explained her decision in her first year of university to switch her major from psychology to neuroscience. In psychology, she had been frustrated by what she experienced as a ‘step of removal’. Elizabeth wanted to ‘see exactly what led’ to a particular behaviour or psychological phenomenon. Neuroscience was able to provide the kinds of answers that she was seeking. She enjoyed her work with the Memory Lab as what they were trying to do involved the ‘linking of behaviour to something physical’. Similarly, key informant Scott, who was now an autism neuroscience researcher, had also studied psychology as an undergraduate and found that it did not ‘have the concrete factor that [he] would have liked it to have’. He said that he had wanted to be able to ‘draw fairly firm conclusions’ about what he was studying, and he did not perceive that psychology allowed him to do that:

On the one hand, I was being taught yes, psychology is a science. We use the scientific method like anybody else. But then, on the other hand, I was seeing that a lot of the techniques we were using relied solely on behavioural observation or behaviour report, have so many alternative explanations and so many mitigating factors and confounds that I just found it quite dissatisfying. Interesting, but I thought, if I’m doing that, I’d much rather have a firmer understanding of what’s going on. And I think that neuroscience affords that, that we can combine the psychology with

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the neuroscience and get more objective measures of functions than we can with behavioural report or behavioural observation.

In this way, the answers that neuroscience provided were seen to have a realness beyond mere psychological explanations of behaviour, and to be able to arrive at genuine answers.

In their approach to understanding human behaviour, explanations in the absence of tangible, biological mechanisms were seen to be vague and indeterminate. By working out the neural substrates of a particular phenomenon, something that was previously ‘nebulous’ would become ‘clear’ (John, Memory Lab). My participants often described a desire to work out how something ‘actually’ worked, rather than being merely satisfied with understanding as it stood. This was something that they considered to be a defining characteristic of themselves as scientists. John, for example, described this approach as ‘going underneath the hood’. With his lab studying memory and the brain, he was first trying to identify the neurons that were involved in fear learning in the mouse, and then hoped to identify the changes that occurred in those neurons. Doing this, he said, would ‘[make] it concrete’. It would ‘[mechanise] the memory’ which before was a ‘black box’, an unknown. Similarly, in The Tell-Tale Brain , in a chapter on seeing and knowing, Ramachandran (2011) presents an overview of how vision and perception work in human beings. Having laid out some of the ‘underlying laws’ on which vision and perception were based: ‘...sooner or later one wants to know how these laws actually arise from the activity of neurons. The only way to find out is by opening the black box - that is, by directly experimenting on the brain’ (p. 55). How the brain can be ‘directly experiment[ed] on’ includes imaging, neurophysiology, and Ramachandran’s own method of neurology. Of his patients, he says: ‘I interview them, observe their behaviour, administer some simple tests, take a peek at their brains [when possible], and then come up with a hypothesis that bridges psychology and neurology - in other words, a hypothesis that connects strange behaviour to what has gone wrong in the intricate wiring of the brain.’ (p. 5)

Ramachandran recounts how the process of discovering the neural bases of behaviour helps to make sense of otherwise ‘bizarre and incomprehensible’ (p. 66) phenomena that patients present with. He tells the story of a stroke patient who, post-stroke, was still able to see, but unable to recognise what things and who people were. He could intellectually infer what something might be by its physical characteristics, but he could not readily identify objects. By understanding the anatomical pathways through which visual information travels, and that

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seeing and recognising are anatomically different brain processes, this phenomenon, Ramachandran suggests, ‘begin[s] to make sense’ (p. 69) in a way it did not before.

The ‘going underneath the hood’ appeal of neuroscience included not just a way of understanding, but also a way of intervening. For example, for Steven, an addiction researcher, the possibility of tailoring treatments to individuals via personalised medicine would take the ‘black magic’ out of treatments for brain diseases. Similarly, Patrick, the postdoctoral fellow at the Self-Control lab, drew an analogy between kicking a TV to get it to work again: ‘If a TV doesn’t work, you can kick it and hope it works. And sometimes it does work. But if you actually know the real mechanisms behind it, then, you know, you’re more able to actually go in and fix it. And it’s the same with the brain.’

Neuroscience, according to autism researcher Scott, had been crucial in furthering the understanding of autism. It had provided the ‘first window into what actually might be happening from a biological perspective’: ‘And biology’s not everything, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s pretty damn close. Biology underpins psychology, you know, for something like autism, you know, if we didn’t have the neuroscience techniques that we have today, it would just be this behavioural mess that we had no idea about.’ Ramachandran (2011) expresses a similar view in The Tell-Tale Brain ; he argues that the deficit in Theory of Mind idea of autism put forward by psychologist Nick Humphrey and primatologist David Premack, while on the right track, did not go beyond ‘restating the observed symptoms’ (p. 139). What was required to really explain autism were ‘candidate neural structures in the brain whose specific functions precisely match the particular symptoms that are unique to autism’ (p. 139).

My participants commonly spoke about the therapeutic benefits that their research would have and the value of knowing precisely where in the brain to target. Simon thought that most of the benefit of his work would come from identifying sites for intervention in drug users. He saw the benefits of his work as occurring down the track from the development of drugs for treatment. The Self-Control Lab’s work had shown particular regions of the brain that were implicated in relapses in drug use, and others had used these findings to attempt to develop suitable medication to increase activity in these areas and prevent recovering addicts from relapsing. His research assistant Amy, who had a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience and had gone back to do clinical training to practise as a neuropsychologist, said that she ‘look[ed] at neuroscience as a way of helping people’. They were not, she said, as many

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people seemed to think, ‘experts at figuring out exactly what’s going on in a person’s brain at a particular period in time’ but rather, were merely trying to ‘discover where in the brain different processes are occurring’. Amy saw the Self-Control Lab’s work on addiction as important in discovering the ‘neurological regions responsible for craving’ with the hope that it might be possible to develop ways in which to ‘override these impulsive responses’. Patrick had a similar suggestion. Since research had shown the relation between attention and craving and that people who were able to distract themselves by looking away were better able to withstand the allure of an object of desire, if they could find the neural correlate for this, it might be possible to find a way to ‘look away’ neurally.

Neuroscience as a way of understanding human issues through the brain, thus provides, as Good argued of medicine, a ‘distinctive reality system’ (1994, p. 71), one populated by things that are not part of a layperson’s everyday world. Key informant Steven’s work was also related to addiction, though at the molecular and cellular level in rats. He described how addiction neuroscience could have an impact on the way in which addiction was understood and treated:

If we can understand the exact physiological underpinnings of a particular system, then we know the mechanism behind it and we know the molecular identity of the various points in the cascade, and that gives us, I guess, a blueprint for how the system works, in health, and so then, in a disease situation, we can go back to the blueprint and systematically interrogate that blueprint and work out, at which point in the cascade is the dysfunction occurring. And again, that gives you insight not only into the pathophysiology of the disease but it also gives you a molecularly identifiable target that is the presumed causative factor which can be potentially manipulated for a therapeutic purpose.

Thus, studying the brain not only provided concrete explanations of various phenomena but also led to concrete sites for therapeutic action whether in ‘neurological regions responsible for craving’ or in a ‘molecularly identifiable target’.

Making sense of health and illness through the brain did not necessarily mean pharmaceutical intervention. Like Steven, key informant Bryan who was based in a psychology department, and who worked on the neuroscience of anxiety through the use of mouse models, thought that understanding the brain circuits involved in various psychological disorders meant that they could be ‘targeted specifically’. This was not necessarily only by pharmacological means but also behaviourally as well as through other psychotherapeutic modalities such as mindfulness meditation (Davidson et al., 2003). A frustration he had with some of his

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colleagues in the department was the reluctance to acknowledge the role of the brain in the conditions, processes, or therapies they studied or taught. The changes that they as psychotherapists achieved was through ‘changing the physical structure of someone’s brain’.

In the same way that Good (1994) argues that medical students learn to interpret a range of human experience in the terms of biomedicine, so too neuroscientists through a tangible brain that extends from molecules to mind, bring a particular neuroscientific way of understanding human activity. The tangible brain’s materiality serves an important role in the informational needs of neuroscience (Star 2010), providing the concreteness that was a shared value among my participants despite the many differences in their aims and approaches. The tangible brain plays an important interpretive role in the way in which neuroscientists understand human beings. In this way, neuroscience can be seen, as a particular imaginative, cultural world, where reality is given shape through the object of the brain (Good 1994).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have used the concept of the ‘tangible brain’ to explore how neuroscience is an object-centred collective (Knorr Cetina 1997) focused on the biological brain. I began by situating this exploration in the 1990s, the Decade of the Brain, when the rapid growth of neuroscience in highly medicalised, industrialised societies such as Australia brought many into the neuroscience fold; when new techniques and methods provided the material means to address the goals laid out by Schmitt in the Neuroscience Research Program to investigate mind in terms of brain (Adelman 2010).

I have begun with the tangible brain in my presentation of the brain as a series of boundary objects in neuroscience because, for neuroscientists, it comes first. It forms a key part of the reason that they are called neuroscientists at all and serves an important role in the way understanding is achieved. It is in this sense that I suggest the tangible brain serves as the foundation for the ‘boundary infrastructure’ (Bowker and Star 1999) of the brain in neuroscience. The tangible brain provides a place for neuroscientists, first drawing them together, then accommodating a range of ways of engagement that encompasses their various interests and expertise. Mind already being what brain does, it provides the goal and direction of their work (Star 2010), being already there to be linked to the aspect of mind that they investigate.

Finally, in Awakenings , Sacks found that while remarkable and certainly transformative for some patients, the impact of L-DOPA on the whole patient group was limited and individual

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(Sacks 1982). Even when the physiology of the patient’s brain damage seemed to suggest how L-DOPA would work, this information did not count for much in the absence of the full human story (Sacks, 1991). Contemporary neuroscience, far from being confined to the mechanics of processes of the brain, incorporates more of this human story into the object of the brain (Pickersgill, 2009, Beaulieu, 2002, Beaulieu, 2003). In the following chapters, I explore how neuroscience is able to successfully encompass the study of broad phenomena. While the tangible brain may be foundational to neuroscientists, in the following chapters, I show how this material takes on abstracted and pliable forms, no less important in allowing neuroscience work to occur, and in particular, to address increasingly complex human issues.

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Chapter 5 The Projected Brain

The story of the patient H. M. is a mainstay in accounts about the acquisition of knowledge about the brain, and in particular, in accounts of the neural underpinnings of memory. H. M. was a patient of the Canadian neuropsychologist Brenda Milner. After undergoing surgery for epilepsy in which portions of his hippocampi were removed, H. M. was no longer able to form new conscious memories, though his memory of events of the past and his ability to acquire new motor skills remained intact. Milner observed and studied H. M. for thirty years starting in the 1950s. Despite meeting her monthly over this time, H. M. would greet Milner each time as though he was meeting her for the first time. The amnesia that he suffered for the rest of his life would show that these seahorse-shaped structures were crucial to the formation of long-term, explicit memories.

The story of H. M. is recounted in four of the five popular neuroscience books that I analysed 16 Joseph LeDoux (2002) in The Synaptic Self describes H. M. as ‘probably the most famous case in neurological history’ (p. 100). Ramachandran (2011) writes that Milner’s study of this ‘single patient’ had advanced the study of memory more ‘than in the previous hundred years of purely psychological approaches to memory’ (pp. 312-313).

For Kandel (2006), Milner’s account of H. M. in 1957 was a pivotal point in the neurobiology of memory and for him in his career as a neuroscientist. Milner had demonstrated through H. M. ‘three important principles of the biological basis of complex memory’ (p. 129), Kandel writes. First, Milner showed that memory was clearly distinguishable from other mental functions such as perception or cognition since H. M. only had trouble with memory. Second, she showed that long- and short-term memories were not stored together and that the destruction of the hippocampus prevented the conversion of short-term memory into long-term memory. Third, that in the case of one kind of memory, at least, there was a particular location in the brain in which this was stored. Kandel writes:

Whenever I return to Brenda Milner’s papers on H. M., I am impressed yet again by how much these studies clarified our thinking about memory. Pierre Flourens in the nineteenth century and Karl Lashley well into the twentieth century thought of the cerebral cortex as a bowl of porridge, in which all regions were similar in how they worked. For them, memory was not a discrete mental process that could be studied in isolation. But when other scientists began to track not only cognitive processes but

16 The exception was Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza .

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also various memory processes to distinct regions of the brain, the theory of mass action was dismissed once and for all. (p. 133)

By correlating deficits in H. M.’s function with parts of his brain that were damaged, Milner was able to separate memory from other processes that make up mind and to further break memory down into different processes. Kandel suggests that this challenged both theories of the mind as well as theories of the brain.

On top of this, H. M. was, for Kandel, an indication that the study of the biology of the brain was relevant to questions related to the psychoanalytic questions that interested him. H. M. illustrated that the acquisition of skills involved different parts of the brain than the formation of explicit or declarative memories, memories that required one’s conscious awareness, showing that there was a difference between conscious and unconscious memories. When asked to trace a star in a mirror over a number of days, H. M. clearly improved in his ability to do so, but never consciously remembered having practised drawing the star. Kandel describes the way in which this shored up support for Freud’s theories:

While Freud’s ideas were interesting and influential, many scientists were not convinced of their truth in the absence of experimental inquiry into how the brain actually stores information. Milner’s star-tracing experiment with H. M. was the first time a scientist has uncovered the biological basis of a psychoanalytic hypothesis. By showing that a person who has no hippocampus (and therefore no ability to store conscious memories) can nonetheless remember an action, she validated Freud’s theory that the majority of our actions are unconscious. (p. 133)

While historians of medical science identify work on the reflex in the nineteenth-century as foundational to the idea of the unconscious (Clarke & Jacyna 1987), for Kandel, it was Milner’s discoveries that provided the physiological justification of Freud’s theories. They provided what was once theoretical and abstract with a solid, material basis in the processes of the biological brain.

The value of studies of patients such as H. M. captures a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. To make links between processes of mind and processes of brain, mind and brain must first be taken apart before they can be put back together again. H. M. provided Milner with such an opportunity. He provided her with the ability to correlate damage to his hippocampi with the dysfunction that he experienced. Through testing H. M., Milner also had

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the chance to study the role of the hippocampus in memory. Abstract theories of mind and brain met the material realities of neurosurgery and amnesia.

Antonio Damasio (2003) describes how neurological patients like H. M. help scientists to understand the workings of mind and brain. In Looking for Spinoza , a book in which he outlines his understanding of the neurobiology of feeling, Damasio writes about the difficulty he initially perceived in trying to study scientifically something like feeling. Feelings were not ‘concrete entities’, they were ‘intangible’ (p. 4). Feelings were a person’s private, subjective experience, and thus, Damasio thought, impossible to access. Working as a neurologist, however, changed his view. The symptoms of brain damaged patients who had lost the ability to feel embarrassment or fear, for example, due to damage to particular parts of their brains, convinced him that a neuroscience of feeling was not only possible but also necessary. The happenstance of neurological dysfunction performs an important act of taking apart things that are normally indistinguishable. He writes:

The cruelty of neurological disease may be a bottomless pit for its victims, - the patients and those of us who are called to watch. But the scalpel of disease also is responsible for its single redeeming feature: By teasing apart the normal operations of the human brain, often with uncanny precision, neurological disease provides a unique entry into the fortified citadel of the human brain and mind. (p. 5)

This chapter deals with precisely this ‘fortified citadel’ of mind and brain, the ‘black box’ of mind and brain (John, Memory Lab). It deals as well with the other ways that neuroscientists conceive of the relation between mind and brain in the context of the challenges that an object like mind/brain presents for them in their work. Neuroscientists who investigate human thought, behaviour or feeling must deal simultaneously with the categories of mind and brain, even while they may conceive of their work as being focused on a single object, the brain. Whether they work with human subjects through the use of imaging technologies, or study processes in the brains of rodents, they must find ways to breach this ‘fortified citadel’ and open this ‘black box’.

At work in neuroscience’s bid to biologically understand the mind are, in the words that Donna Haraway (1997) used to describe gender and race, ‘entwined, barely analytically separable, highly protean, relational categories’ (p. 30). The brain in neuroscience, as I showed in chapter four, stands for the concrete and material, and in the study of mind in terms of brain is a perceived translation of the abstract, immaterial, or less material, into something solid and tangible. Thus far, I have taken a straightforward approach to questions

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of materiality. However, scholars whose work deals with materiality in depth such as Ingold (2007) and Miller (2005) have noted that while materiality is widely theorised, it is notoriously difficult to define.

As Ingold (2007) points out, material exists at different registers, and is open to different modes of perception. This is particularly the case with scientific objects that may require special devices to be detected (Daston 2000) such as the structure of a neuron with a microscope, or a particular cognitive process with specially designed psychological tests. As Miller (2005) and Langwick (2011) point out, what is material is relative, with some things being ascribed materiality when others are not, and as a result, are given greater value; something that is immaterial to one person may be quite material to another. A neuroscientist trained in genetics might understand personality to be something ‘ephemeral’ and ‘hard to pin down’, as John of the Memory Lab did. However, a neuroscientist trained as a psychologist would see personality to have quite a concrete existence. For the psychologist, personality’s material evidence might be seen in the patterns of behaviours, emotions, and styles of thought that take shape over the course of a person’s life (Mischel et al., 2008).

For scientists, materiality is what matters. In contrast, Miller (2005) points out, many religions place immateriality above the material, conceiving of the immaterial as the truth that is masked by the material. Scientists, on the other hand, seek truth in matter. The material and the immaterial, however, are intimately and inextricably intertwined (Ingold 2007; Miller 2005). Miller (2005) notes that despite emphasising immateriality, many religious rituals and practices make use of the material to reach the immaterial. In this chapter I explore how the inverse is true of work in neuroscience: how immateriality is as important in scientists’ emphases of the material, and how the material, concrete and tangible mingle with the immaterial and abstract in a single object, neuroscience’s brain.

In social studies of materiality, Miller (2005) argues that while researchers may have philosophically overcome a dualistic approach to material and immaterial, the challenge is to strike a balance between the theoretical benefits of this insight and the experiences of one’s participants. Human beings must grapple with the material and immaterial in practice, and are likely to think in terms of these qualities and to arrange them in hierarchies. The brain, traditionally material, and mind, traditionally immaterial, though inextricably intertwined, must, in some way, be disentangled. As I show, ‘brain’ does not line up neatly with the material, nor ‘mind’ with the immaterial. Indeed, scientists, as I have illustrated with the

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vignette of H. M., move between materiality and immateriality, the concrete and the abstract, the known and the unknown, as they manage categories of mind and brain.

Bowker and Star (1999) describe boundary objects as coming out of the challenges of having to manage different categories and meanings. Boundary objects do not resolve these tensions in favour of a particular truth but manage them in a way that allows work to move forward. The notion of a ‘dialectic’ is useful here to capture seemingly opposing parts that are equally necessary for a totality (Miller, 2005, Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001, Sunder Rajan, 2006). In his analysis of genomics and the emergence of ‘biocapital’, for example, Sunder Rajan (2006) explores the co-emergence of a particular economic structure with an epistemological one. He considers how genomics is ‘animated’ by ‘relationships…between different forms and registers of materiality and abstraction’ (p. 15). A boundary object is dialectical in the sense that it is a whole that encompasses tensions and contradictions (Bowker and Star 1999). In a dialectical whole of two seemingly opposing parts, both parts are essential (Sunder Rajan 2006), existing in a dynamic relationship where each shapes the other (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001).

In this chapter, I explore the idea of a boundary object that I have called the ‘projected brain’, arising out of neuroscientists’ need to juggle categories of mind and brain. It is ‘projected’ in the sense of an object of knowledge being a ‘projection’ (Knorr Cetina 1997), an unfinished object that is still in a process of being defined in material terms (Knorr Cetina, 1997, Daston, 2000, Rheinberger, 1997). Objects of knowledge, Knorr Cetina (2001) contends, are made up of ontologically different parts: the part that has been substantiated by the work that has already been done, and an imaginative component that represents the work that there is still left to do. In the neuroscience enterprise’s bid to understand mind in terms of brain, I suggest that its knowledge object can be understood via a consideration of a dialectic between mind and brain, the abstract and the concrete, the substantiated and the imagined.

To help to understand how these oppositions and tensions are productive in neuroscience, I draw on Maurer’s contribution to Miller’s edited volume Materiality where he considers the different roles of equating (what he calls ‘adequating’) and substituting as different ways of thinking about how people relate the material to the immaterial (Miller, 2005, Maurer, 2005). While Maurer’s analysis deals with the prohibition against usury in Islamic finance, it provides a helpful way of thinking about how human beings arrange the material and the immaterial in ways that maximise the potential of each category. Maurer conducts a ‘thought experiment’ (2005, p. 142) inspired by Strathern’s work where she argued that exchange in

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Melanesia was based on substitution 17 rather than commensuration (Strathern 1992 in Maurer 2005). Maurer imagines what it would mean if Islamic financial processes were about substituting rather than equating. Equation and substitution do different things: equation, Maurer argues, imposes higher order meanings to substance, while substitution allows two opposing systems to work alongside each other. The distinction that Maurer draws attention to sheds light on the way that mind and brain are used by neuroscientists. In the way that neuroscientists manage mind and brain in their practical and conceptual work, what looks like equation can also be thought of as substitution. Neuroscientists may equate mind with brain as they look to uncover the mind’s underlying physiology. Considering instead how neuroscientists may ‘substitute’ mind for brain and vice-versa in the way that they imagine their object of knowledge provides a way of thinking about how the concrete coexists with the transcendental.

I go on to describe how a ‘projected’ brain is an important boundary object that facilitates neuroscience’s expansion into the study of increasingly broad phenomena. First, through key informant interviews, I show how neuroscientists who study human thought, behaviour and action must manage both mind and brain. I describe the particular problematics created by this need (Bowker and Star 1999) and show how my participants imagined the relation between mind and brain, drawing on their disciplinary backgrounds and the kind of research they were engaged in. I then move on to an account of work in the Memory Lab situated within the laboratory head John’s vision. I contrast John’s aims with the laboratory’s more specific goals, and then further contrast these with the realities of everyday work in the lab. Through this account, I illustrate the interplay of the material and the immaterial in the way John and the Memory Lab conceptualised their object of study, as well as in the practical processes of their work. I explore how a ‘projected’ brain facilitates and provides direction to the Memory Lab’s work, and discuss, through Maurer’s ideas of equation and substitution, the conceptual moves that allow this object to be at once material and immaterial. Kandel’s (2006) In Search of Memory serves as a way of demonstrating a representation by a notable neuroscientist of such a ‘projected brain’ as neuroscience’s object as he deals with questions of mind and brain. Here, in a similar process as with the lab, I show how through his narrative, Kandel introduces neuroscience as an interpretive scheme (Good 1994) for a broad range of human issues. I then explore how the projected brain is

17 Chapter six on the ‘versatile brain’ developments the idea of substitution further making use of Strathern’s (1992) theories.

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an articulation of neuroscience’s scope, and how it represents a crucial boundary object that the field has an interest in maintaining.

Managing mind and brain in the mind/brain Imaging technologies and the use of rodents in behavioural neuroscience have been the main ways in which neuroscientists navigate the ‘fortified citadel’ (Damasio, 2003, p. 5) of neuroscience’s stated object, the mind/brain (Adelman 2010). The field of neuroscience collectively orientates itself to this single object, and mind being what brain does is shorthand for a complex set of issues to do with the relation between mind and body. Individual neuroscientists, however, bring with them a range of ways of thinking about the components of mind/brain, and the relationship between them. How do neuroscientists conceptualise mind and brain in the context of the neuroscience enterprise, with its technological and conceptual developments that can both facilitate and mould their practice in particular ways (Clarke & Fujimura 1992)?

As my participants pointed out, the brain is a complex biological organ. Like other behavioural neuroscientists, key informant Thomas, who studied brain and mind disorders through mouse models, was deeply embedded in this complex biology. Thomas described what, for him, was the brain’s already densely textured materiality, quite apart from any considerations of what might be called ‘mind’:

There are three billion base pairs of DNA in each of our cells with over twenty thousand genes probably encoding hundreds of thousands of different proteins. Depending on how you define a protein, it could be millions of different proteins. So that’s then integrated into, you know, over a trillion cells in the body, over a hundred billion cells, neurons in the brain, trillions of synapses connecting neurons in the brain.

Demonstrating the intimate way in which he knew the brain’s biology, he implied that the material of the brain is quite enough complexity as it is. He continued:

And then at the next level how that relates to action and thoughts and emotions and mind. There’s an incredible challenge of how you go from molecules to mind which doesn’t face any other area of science really.

Thomas positioned what was not brain (‘action and thoughts and emotion and mind’) in a different realm of phenomena, existing on a separate ‘level’ removed from the materially defined processes of brain that he worked with. In his expression of the relationship between

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mind and brain, Thomas articulated a similar unity of science arrangement of phenomena that Schmitt did in his founding of the Neuroscience Research Program in 1962 (Adelman 2010).

Neuropsychiatrist George expressed a similar approach to thinking about mind and brain. George studied the neuroscience of schizophrenia, and he described the challenge of study for neuropsychiatry, imagining a hierarchy of phenomena (Hess 1997b) emanating from the physicality of the brain. As a part of a discipline that has traditionally been centred on studying the mind, George was much more involved in the nuances of questions of mind. Nevertheless, in his hierarchy, he similarly moved out from the brain, though he extended his vision into further domains than Thomas, and expressed, similarly, the challenge of the movement from brain to mind:

The way that I think about it, you’ve got the brain and whatever is going on in the brain relevant to these disorders. And then that relates to cognitive abnormalities and neuropsychological abnormalities that you see. And you can get some traction between the brain abnormalities and the cognitive deficits. But as you move further and further away from the brain, you move towards symptoms and then to behaviours, and then to functional outcomes, the relationship of what’s happened in the brain to these more distant outcomes, like, getting people employment, functioning in the community, being able to cope socially, you know, in a social context in their lives. That relationship is harder to map between the brain abnormalities and more distant outcomes if you like. So the challenge is how to draw the links between the functional and the behavioural outcomes.

In Thomas’s case, he described it as making a movement, ‘go[ing] from molecules to mind’, having to traverse a gap. In George’s case, cognition, which he envisioned as close to the biological brain, allowed more ‘traction’, a more solid, tangible grip than things that he conceived as being further out and less easy to be grasped in the context of the brain. For both Thomas and George, in these accounts at least, what might be categorised as ‘mind’ was positioned outside of brain.

In contrast, key informant Bryan, who was a behavioural neuroscientist like Thomas, talked about mind and brain in his work in quite a different way. While Thomas’s background was in molecular biology, Bryan had realised as a psychology undergraduate that ‘the way to understand human behaviour is by thinking about the brain’. Bryan also talked about the complexity of dealing with brain and mind, something that he found incredibly exciting. He described his decision to go down the neuroscience route after his studies in psychology:

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It was just so complex, so complex, and there were so many problems that were waiting to be looked at. And that was just really exciting for me…But I think that’s what it is, it’s the excitement of the complexity and the scale of the problem, and the complexity of the thing itself. The eighty-six billion neurons and the same number of supporting glia cells . What are they all doing? Sometimes I can’t believe that people wouldn’t be doing this. It’s so – it’s so extraordinarily interesting.

‘What are they all doing?’ drove Bryan’s work that was focused on ‘unravelling the circuits’ that played a role in emotional behaviour and ultimately psychiatric disease. It was once thought, Bryan said, that the neurotransmitter serotonin produced a general, brain- wide modulating effect in states of anxiety. What Bryan’s research was showing instead was that anxiety was a combination of different behavioural, the result of the processes of specific groups of neurons: For example, there is a population [of neurons] that is involved in the control of anxiety states, and there’s another population located anatomically in a very close region that are involved in the inhibition of panic. But, if you didn’t know where to look, you would miss those subtle differences. There are populations that are involved in somatic motor control, and there are populations that are involved in anti- depressant like behavioural effects. And so it’s by looking very, very carefully.

In Bryan’s description, mind was not positioned outside of the materiality of the biological brain, but is right there in the circuits of neurons that he studied. ‘Knowing where to look’ is a function of what has already been materially defined.

While Thomas and Bryan emphasised the complexity of the biological brain, key informant Nick, a researcher who specialised in studying brain networks and connectivity, emphasised the complexity of the relationship between mind and brain. During his PhD, Nick realised that the brain was ‘a very interconnected system’ and that an understanding of its connections was crucial. In the early work on connectivity that made use of mathematical techniques to look at brain connections, one journal article, in particular, seemed to him to be ‘how the brain works’. Referring to the newness of brain imaging techniques, he said:

For the first twenty odd years, it was all about trying to develop appropriate analysis frameworks for mapping patterns of brain activity. So for each region, you ask people to perform a task and for each region you say is this part of the brain activated in response to the task, and that’s ok to a certain point, but you miss out on a whole lot of information because the brain is highly interconnected and if you’re doing that kind of analysis, you’re not understanding anything about the way different brain regions are communicating. And so this article was the first to present a sort of brain wide map of connections, and I guess one of the first early insights how the different

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regions are communicating with each other, so, I thought, yeah, that’s where things have to go.

Scanning technologies have been the most significant way in which the study of mind and brain have been brought together. However, as Nick points out, the brain (and mind) that is accessed through these technologies is a flat, one-dimensional object that fails to capture the full complexity of the biological brain in its relation to mind. Thus, the material technologies that facilitate a look into the living brain can only go so far. Nick pointed out that this had led to the generation of vast amounts of data. Like other areas of biology, he said, neuroscience was ‘data rich’ but it tended to lack ‘good models’. He credited the increasing involvement of physicists, engineers and mathematicians in neuroscience with the push to develop better models of the brain:

If you think of something like traditional physics where they’ve got theoretical physicists that are able to predict the existence of a new particle and then go out and test it. It’s very rare that you find something like that in neuroscience where you’ve got a good model of how the brain works and then you make predictions that you can then go and test. It kind of often works the other way. You run some experiments, get some data, then try to make sense of it. So I think, increasingly, we’re seeing more physicists, engineers, mathematicians coming into the field, which is kind of pushing forward this attempt to develop better models. Yeah. Still a ways to go.

Connectivity research is part of the area of theoretical neuroscience which involves the use of mathematics and computational techniques to create models of brain networks (Kandel et al. 2013). Based on a ‘biological reality’, a model ‘necessarily involves an abstraction of that reality’ (Kandel et al. 2013, Appendix F, Network Models Provide Insight into the Collective Dynamics of Neurons). At the time of my fieldwork, connectivity analysis, how to model the brain’s connections, was a particularly hot topic in theoretical neuroscience. The Human Connectome Project, a coordinated effort to accumulate data to map the neural connections in the human brain was launched in 2009 (National Institutes of Health, n. d.) with the aim of capturing this graphically in a way that scientists could visually explore. The Human Connectome Project’s brochure promises to allow researchers to ‘Navigate the brain in a way that was never before possible; fly through major brain pathways, compare essential circuits, zoom into a region to explore the cells that comprise it, and the functions that depend on it’ (Human Connectome Project, n. d.).

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In connectivity research, there is a clear thoroughfare between the concrete and the abstract. Material conditions facilitate the discovery of tangible, physiological processes in a biological brain, and these are fed into mathematical models that theorise the ways that different parts of the brain (whether neuron to neuron or brain region to brain region) communicate with each other. This could then, as Nick suggested, be tested to acquire empirical evidence of these models. Thus, for Nick, while the complexity of the relation between mind and brain could not yet be captured empirically in the ways that neuroscientists studied human brains, the aim was to capture it in abstracted models of brain function.

Karen, who worked as a clinician as well as a researcher, was faced with the challenge of concreteness in a different sense. Karen described her research work as falling within clinical neuropsychology and behavioural neuroscience. In her clinical work, she frequently saw patients with epilepsy who had been referred for surgery. Karen needed to work out what impact surgery in the affected area of the brain would have on her patients, and whether they risked losing critical functions. The challenge, she explained, was that there were ‘thousands and millions of different things that we can do cognitively’ while there were only a small number of neural networks, functionally specialised networks of neurons thought to be involved in particular cognitive processes. Karen explained that when an area of the brain is affected by epilepsy, it is common for the brain to adjust to this and for adjacent areas of the brain to take over the function of the affected areas. To assess the risk of neurosurgery against its benefit, Karen had to work out precisely how the removal of that part of the brain would affect the patient. She described the difficulty involved in doing this:

So at the moment, we tend to use fairly broad multi-determined psychological tests, because psychological and cognitive states are quite complex phenomena, and the way we measure them captures that complexity. But then, if we want to correlate that to specific brain networks, the data can be quite noisy and quite messy. A performance on a psychological test score is multi-determined, and so it may be picking up the functioning of more than one network.

Here, theories of the brain’s networks did not line up with theories of cognitive function or behaviour in a clinically useful way. The concrete realities that Karen had to deal with: the potential damage to a part of the patient’s brain, and the associated effects that it would have on a patient’s life, clashed with the more abstract, theoretical understandings of networks, cognition and behaviour. There was a need, she said, to develop ‘specific neurocognitive or neuro behavioural markers of network disruption’, to develop, in other words, strategies that

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would allow clinicians to ‘reliably map’ cognitive and behavioural functions onto these networks.

The neuroscience enterprise may be founded on the assumption that neuroscientists study the mind/brain, and that mind may be thought of as a ‘series of processes carried out by the brain’. Yet, as scientific objects, these were not yet fully defined and remained open-ended (Daston, 2000, Knorr Cetina, 1997, Knorr Cetina, 2001, Rheinberger, 1997). My key informants all had to manage mind and brain in their work, and positioned the relations between the two in a variety of ways. While mind in neuroscience may have been swallowed up into neuroscience’s brain, my respondents continued to talk about mind as qualitatively different from brain.

In the way that neuroscientists manage these categories within neuroscience’s single object are dialectics of the material and the immaterial, the known and the unknown, the abstract and the concrete. Here I have illustrated some possibilities for thinking about mind and brain, highlighting differences between individuals. I emphasise that these are things that participants have said in specific instances at specific points in time, rather than positions that they necessarily hold firmly all of the time. As van Oudenhove and Cuypers (2010) have shown, it is possible as Kandel does, to express multiple positions at once about the relationship between mind and brain. I next explore how the management of mind and brain works in the practice of a neuroscience laboratory.

The ephemeral and the concrete in the Memory Lab

The head of the Memory Lab, John, had been trained as a geneticist. What interested him overall in his work as a scientist was ‘personality structure’; how people have different personalities that give rise to different behaviours. To John, personality and its associated behaviours were things that he considered to be ‘ephemeral’ and ‘hard to pin down’.

The Memory Lab’s primary project was to discover the ‘engram’, the representation of memory in the biological brain, a search that Karl Lashley had begun in the 1920s (LeDoux 2002). The lab’s main task at the time I conducted my fieldwork was the identification of neurons in the brain that were responsible for fear learning. For John, this was situated within a larger project of understanding personality, one that he had arrived at through conceptual transformations and adjustments made within the practical confines of his work.

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As a geneticist, the way in which John made sense of what he considered to be the immateriality of personality and behaviour was to break them down into parts that made sense to him. He equated personality and behaviour to a combination of genetics and environment, with genetic variation ‘account[ing] for fifty percent of the personality differences of a given population’. Rather than situating these outside of the scope of his research, John sought to turn these into things he would be able to measure. He said:

Originally, I had this idea that if you learn something and remember it, then there must be something happening in the brain which changes. So, I saw that as a bridge between our behaviour, which in one sense is ephemeral, it’s very hard to pin down, our behaviour, and its mechanistic causes, which is a clear change in the brain. So, I reasoned that if you looked hard enough, you would be able to find the brain changes that account for memory and therefore you would be able to cross that bridge.

By transforming personality and behaviour into genes and environment, John related the immaterial to the material. What Damasio (2003) described as a ‘citadel’ (p. 5), John described as a ‘black box that we think mind and brain is’. His understanding of ‘what [they were] doing in neuroscience’ was opening this ‘black box’ and working out the mechanics of how it worked. John’s training in genetics had given him insight into the genetic processes that laid down the physical material of the brain, and an interest in how genetic variation might influence how the brain worked. As is common in behavioural neuroscience (Crawley, 2007), the area of neuroscience in which the Memory Lab’s work is situated, John and his lab had bred genetically engineered mice 18 that would allow them to overcome some of the difficulties of opening up this ‘black box’. Memory, the mark the environment made on the physical material of the brain, was for John the vehicle or ‘bridge’ through which he was able to transform the immateriality of what he was interested in, into something solid and tangible. Although in the projects that formed the basis of the laboratory’s work John was not, in fact, studying personality per se, his interest in personality was what, he said, kept ‘driving him’.

In this section, I explore John’s vision and goal as neuroscientist as it directed the work of the Memory Lab. This is juxtaposed with a description of the practicalities of conducting behavioural neuroscience research with mice in the day-to-day work of the laboratory. The obstacles that the work presented butted up against John’s vision, creating a tension between what was imagined and what was doable. I suggest that while the members of the Memory Lab were committed to ‘equating’ what John calls the ‘ephemeral’ to the neural, considering

18 I describe the lab’s transgenic mouse in chapter four.

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how instead they could be seen also to be ‘substituting’ the ephemeral for the neural provides some perspective of how the intangible and the concrete are able to work simultaneously in contemporary neuroscience to their fullest extents (Maurer, 2005).

Managing a mouse’s experience – making use of and overcoming the concrete The Memory Lab initially tried to study memory in mice by training mice in a maze. This proved ‘too complicated in terms of what was happening in the brains of these animals’, John said. When they looked at the brains of the mice, there were too many changes in the brains that could be associated with the task of learning a maze. ‘We just couldn’t get anywhere with it’.

Learning a maze is not a simple process. For a rodent, it involves visual, olfactory and motor learning, all occurring in different parts of the brain. John and his lab needed to find a type of learning that was ‘very, very simple’. The fear conditioning model that had been used in other studies fitted the bill. This model relies on Pavlovian fear conditioning where a tone is paired with a shock to the rodent’s foot (LeDoux, 1993). The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, most famous for his identification of classical conditioning that caused dogs to salivate with the ring of a bell by repeatedly pairing the sound with the provision of food, identified a range of different kinds of learning that are regularly used in behavioural neuroscience.

In the Memory Lab’s work, materiality facilitated the study of what to John was ‘ephemeral’, but it could also pose a hindrance. The fear conditioning model created a simple one-off learning event that was not entangled in a host of other systems, such as those responsible for movement, smell, hearing and so on, that were involved in the complex learning of a maze. Yet, the practical problem of isolating this fear learning event was anything but simple. A host of factors had to be managed as these all potentially would leave its mark on the brain and make the event of interest indecipherable in the brains of the mice.

The study had involved a long process of trial and error to ensure that what the lab eventually produced on the brains of their mice were clear, distinct markings that they could be sure had been a result of the fear learning incident. This involved employing a range of strategies to shape and manage the temperaments and behaviours of the different groups of mice 19 . Just as the brains of the mice in the experimental group needed to show the clear marking of a fear

19 I describe the experimental and control groups in chapter four.

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learning event (i.e. activated neurons in the amygdala), so too those in the different control groups had to demonstrate an absence of fear learning.

Training the mice was done in the ‘behavioural lab’ on a floor below the main laboratory. The behavioural lab comprised a small anteroom filled with boxes, a desk, and clothes stands laden with white lab coats. The anteroom was closed off from the main lab by a wooden door that had a glass panel that could be peered through. At the base of the door was an aluminium barrier, designed to thwart the escape attempts of any mice that had managed to get out of their small cages. The main room was lined with tables on which sat shoebox-sized cages that housed the mice that were to be used in the Memory Lab’s experiments.

Figure 6 Mouse cages in the behavioural laboratory.

In the righthand corner of the room next to the entrance, there was a desk with a computer to the right, and a strange toaster-like contraption sitting on the left. This toaster-like contraption (see Fig 7) was the fear-learning chamber, a piece of equipment that could deliver mild electric shocks to a mouse’s feet. In the centre of the room was a large table that could accommodate a maze, or the open field test 20 equipment used to assess the levels of anxiety in mice.

Each day over several weeks, Sarah, the Laboratory’s senior research assistant, along with PhD student Michael and undergraduate student and occasional casual assistant Elizabeth, would put the mice into the fear conditioning box so that the mice would grow comfortable

20 This is a common test used in animal studies. It involves placing the animal in an open space where it is not able to seek cover from potential predators, a stressful experience for small animals such as mice.

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with being handled by the researchers and would grow used to the box. This would allow them to be sure that the fear related brain activity they were looking at was not attributable to being handled or placed in an unfamiliar environment. As the researchers also needed to be sure that it was not the electric shock per se that was contributing to the brain activity, a mild electric shock had to be calibrated so that it was insignificant enough for learning not to take place when not paired with a tone.

Figure 7 A mouse in the Memory Lab’s fear learning chamber.

Getting the mice to do what they wanted, namely, to learn when they were supposed to, and not learn when they were not, was no mean feat. The mice had to be, in Sarah’s words, ‘chilled out’ enough that the experiences of being handled and placed in the fear-conditioning chamber, would, over time, no longer stress them out. Furthermore, the control group that was given the shock that was not paired with a tone was not supposed to form a fear memory in association with the box or tone. This meant that gradations of mouse quality were needed for the experimental and different control groups.

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One of the things that Sarah had to do constantly, and a task that she was teaching Michael to do, was sort the mice into these groups. Those in the experimental condition needed to be ‘Grade A mice’; the ones that received the unpaired tone and shock had to be just as good. It was immediately clear to her from the outset (i.e. birth) that some mice would not be suitable for the experiment at all. The smaller mice, in general, were unlikely to be good candidates. These were the ones that Michael should not use, Sarah told him, or use only for the home cage control group that did not receive any training at all. In fact, it was best not to use any of the litter that the unhealthy mice came from: ‘You really want to be using top shelf mice’, she emphasised. Although it was more economical to use females - they fought less and could be housed together which reduced the cost of keeping them - because they were smaller than males overall, they were more prone to stressors, and it was difficult to calibrate the shock to account for their smaller size.

Afterward, Sarah explained her ‘cut-throat’ approach that Michael would have to learn. It was easy to tell early on which mice were ‘NQR’: Not Quite Right. They just did not behave the way that they were supposed to and there was an obvious correlation between ‘how well they were born’, meaning the conditions of their birth, and the quality of the mouse. Low birth weight was the first bad sign, and more often than not meant that the mouse could not be used. There were many things that went into ensuring the quality of their mice and into getting good results from them. ‘Raising [the mice] well’ was important, Sarah said. The mothering that they got was important. The mice had to be separated early enough that they did not start fighting and forming a hierarchy as the mice at the lower end of this hierarchy would not be usable. But they could not be separated too early either as isolation would be a stressor.

For the lab, this was an economic decision as each cage cost them $8 a week, not to mention the further wasted time and effort in training mice that would not be used in the end. ‘There is attrition at every stage,’ Sarah said. The mice were habituated for three weeks, and every seven days, she observed their behaviour while they were in the fear conditioning box. She took note of freezing, grooming, peeing and defecating, all signs that being handled and put into the fear conditioning chamber were causing them stress. Behaviour here was operationalised into concrete, observable and recordable phenomenon, a strategy that allowed Sarah to assess a mouse’s temperament or ‘personality’, and make decisions about their suitability for the project in a similar way that the Self-Control Lab, as I discussed in chapter four, identified good participants.

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A mite infestation, that happened at one point, would make an entire batch of mice unusable. Sometimes it came down to extraneous factors that might affect the mouse’s performance on the day: the weather, for example, or noise from the construction site across the street. Peanut butter could sometimes convince a mouse that the fear learning chamber was nothing to fear. Elizabeth made it a point to talk to the mice as she handled them. It seemed to her to really calm them down. John pointed out how difficult it was to get the mice not to learn. He said, ‘We did amazing things to these animals so they won’t remember’.

During my time with the laboratory, an issue arose about the extent to which they should go to produce their results and to balance this against the requirements of their science. Sarah had been experimenting with ‘enriching’ as an added strategy to enhance the abilities of the mice to perform in the way that the lab required. Enrichment was based on the findings that enriched environments (as opposed to the standard, drab cages that experimental animals were usually housed in) boosted brain plasticity in rodents (van Praag et al., 2000). This would create ‘smarter’ mice that were more able to learn when they were supposed to and not learn when they were not. Sarah had a box of ‘what look[ed] like recycling’: empty yoghurt cartons, cardboard boxes and the like. ‘Mouse toys,’ she told Elizabeth who was helping her with the enrichment. ‘It might not look like much,’ she said, ‘but to a mouse, it’s heaven.’ The mice would spend an hour a day in the enrichment boxes.

At a weekly lab meeting when they were running through what needed to be done that week, Sarah told John that she was thinking of introducing a pre-habituation enrichment week for the mice. Enrichment, she said, seemed to ‘really [clean] up the brain’ and tone down the extraneous ‘noise’ that made it harder to observe the neurons they were looking for. John, however, did not like the idea of changing things. Why change things if they’re already working, he asked. It would just add extra variables to the situation. ‘Well,’ Sarah responded, shrugging, ‘we’ve actually had a mouse do exactly what we wanted it to.’

Through these material processes, the Memory Lab managed what was otherwise immaterial, namely the temperaments or ‘personalities’ of the mice and their resultant experiences and behaviours. For a mouse to do ‘exactly what [they] wanted it to’, it had to be free of general fearfulness. It had to not learn to fear things that it was not supposed to learn to fear. Finally, it had to learn to fear a tone that was paired with a shock so that clear, distinct evidence of this fear memory (i.e. activated fear learning neurons) was observable in its brain.

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A Projected Brain

Knowledge objects are not ‘definitive things’, Knorr Cetina argues, but ‘processes and projections’ (2001, p. 190) that guide the direction of a laboratory’s work. The incompleteness of a knowledge object allows it to prompt new questions, give direction to research, and provide possibilities for moving forward; it is defined as much by what it is not yet as by what it currently is (Knorr Cetina 2001). The ‘projection’ of the Memory Lab’s specific project of identifying fear neurons was the ‘engram’, the physical existence of memory in the brain, which they hoped to eventually characterise and decipher the mechanisms of. There was also the larger projection of the processes of the biological brain that accounted for behaviour and personality. While both were some way off from being ‘materially defined’ (p. 190), as objects of knowledge, they were central in guiding the work of the laboratory. John described the contribution that the Memory Lab work was making:

In the past, nobody really found out where the neurons were, which were involved in the memory. So they thought, well it’s in this spot because they thought: if you follow where neuron pathways intersect, that’s a good place to look. And you do the lesion studies, and you knock out the memory and so on. But they didn’t know what else was contributing to the memory. And you didn’t know how many neurons were involved, you didn’t know what sort of connections they made, didn’t know exactly what the changes were, which actually coded for the memory, because you couldn’t identify where the changes were.

While John acknowledged that the Memory Lab had not ‘done [much of] that either yet’, he identified what the work of his laboratory would be in the future. The Memory Lab’s key contribution so far had been to identify the neurons involved in fear learning. Objects of knowledge take on many forms, Knorr Cetina (2001) argues, and the more complete object is an imaginary projection that is ontologically different from the object that can rest on present- day evidence. In the projected brain of the Memory Lab, the brain that is responsible for personality and behaviour, concrete processes of a biological brain mingle with the ‘ephemeral’ and ‘hard to pin down’.

Just as Kandel saw Milner’s work as having broken down memory into distinct processes that matched specific parts of the brain, John saw neuroscience to be doing the same for the way he understood personality. It broke down what for him was an undifferentiated entity like ‘personality’ into verifiable, brain-based components. Even though the Memory Lab was not

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yet able to explain the mechanisms of personality and behaviour that he was interested in, the work still allowed him to come to some understanding of human behaviour. ‘What the neuroscience tells you’, John said, ‘is it starts to compartmentalise brain structure and function’. This helped him to understand that ‘there are probably clear parts of the brain which have got relatively clear functions’. This compartmentalisation of brain structure and function then allowed him to ‘compartmentalis[e] behaviour’. His work in fear was focused on the amygdala which was involved in emotion, while the cerebral cortex, he knew, was the ‘information processing centre’ of the brain. This formed for John ‘a view of how people work’, their personalities being a combination of emotion and cognition, the work of different brain structures and regions.

During my fieldwork, PhD student Michael had been in the process of working out what the main aims of his project would be and this was a topic of discussion at several laboratory meetings that I attended. At one such meeting, referring to a group of neurons that they had already identified, John said: ‘We know it’s part of the engram, but we have to go into the proof. We have to look at what the underlying difference is. Otherwise, we’ve just got a correlation. But we know better than these correlative people’. The ‘correlative people’ were cognitive neuroscientists like the Self-Control Lab, whose work allowed them to correlate a cognitive process to an area of the brain. While John admitted that at the stage they were at, the Memory Lab’s work itself was ‘still correlative’, he emphasised that they would not be content to leave it there. The purpose of discovering these correlations was so that they would eventually be able to delve into the ‘mechanisms’ of these processes. He said:

Hopefully, well, the changes must be on those neurons. So I hope the next step will be to identify the changes. Of course, what we think, simplistically still, you know, because we haven’t done all the work, is that these six or seven areas will be all connected up with each other. So we’ll be able to draw a circuit, and we’ll be able to say, ok, this goes to that, that goes to that, and that goes to that, and say oh right ok, I’ve got that, and then you’ll say, ok, the changes within the circuit are here and here and here. So, nobody’s been able to do that. So you end up with – the idea is that you end up with a circuit comprising nearly six to seven different nodes all linked up together, and you know the function of each one, and how it’s contributing to the memory process.

‘Equating’ for neuroscientists, following Maurer (2005), involves the translation of a concept such as memory, behaviour, or personality into its neural components. For the ‘correlative people’ like the Self-Control Lab, linking the psychological processes that they knew in a much more nuanced and complex way than behavioural neuroscientists like the Memory Lab

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might, a link to a brain region was sufficient, since their ‘calibrating metric’ (ibid., p. 142) was psychological 21 rather than the molecular. For the Memory Lab, ‘equating’ needed to go further, to translate ‘memory’ into its cellular and molecular processes.

Like other key informants who emphasised that neuroscience was in its infancy in terms of understanding the brain (a point I expand on in a later section), John too, emphasised how much there was still to discover. Developments in technology, and particularly in molecular biology, had contributed to increasing ‘accuracy about what goes on’: ‘And the accuracy ended up in the clarity of ideas’, John said. ‘Hopefully’, he added, laughing:

Sometimes it takes a while for the clarification to come around. You have so much stuff coming out that you, like I said before, it might take years for you to figure out, oh yes, here I can see, this is the pattern of a particular, say, mental state or what regulates a particular emotion. When you’re starting and doing the experiments, other people all around the world are doing different experiments which are contributing. When you’re right in the middle of it, you sometimes can’t see it. I mean, years later, you see, oh yes, hopefully, a clean, coherent picture emerges out of all that.

John’s hope for such a ‘coherent picture’ was also articulated by other participants as I show later in this chapter when I discuss how neuroscientists perceive neuroscience’s scope. The ‘projected brain’ is exactly this imagined ‘coherent picture’ where mind can and will eventually be fully mapped onto brain. Chipping away at small pieces of the problem of how the brain accounts for the mental states that they are interested in, neuroscientists are able to envision themselves as progressively filling out this space for which there is a clear outline. John acknowledged that while his dream was to ‘redefine’ personality according to its ‘neural correlates’, it was ‘sort of probably beyond [his] research’. ‘I’m answering these questions because I can’, he said.

In his discussion about money, Maurer (2005) argues that the pragmatics of money leads to a focus on equating the abstract (namely, value) to the material. Similarly, the ‘pragmatics’ of neuroscience, the day to day realities of being a neuroscientist, draw attention to equating as being what neuroscientists are doing. From John’s perspective, the work that the Memory Lab was engaged in involved the transformation of the ‘ephemeral’ into neural terms. Imagining instead, as Maurer (2005) recommends, that the ephemeral is ‘substituted’ for the neural, provides clues about how the qualities of ‘ephemerality’ are preserved despite the compromises that were necessary to arrive at the neural. In his example, Maurer shows how

21 At what participants described as the ‘psychological end’ of the brain, discussed in chapter four.

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the idea of ‘substitution’ is able to explain more fully how Islamic banking is able to serve the real-world needs of its customers while adhering to Quranic principles. For John, the scientist, the ‘ephemeral’ and the ‘hard to pin down’ were categories of phenomena normally outside the scope of his work (Langwick 2011). Equating the more intangible to the neural were central to the aims of a behavioural neuroscience laboratory. As I have illustrated in this account, to meet this criterion, the Memory Lab’s main project went through several iterations that involved a narrowing down of its scope into something that was achievable with the tools, techniques, and animals that they had available to them. Substitution is able to preserve the ‘ephemerality’ of personality, memory, and fear, while allowing them to be entirely concrete within a different system, namely that of genetics and neuroscience, even while the translation is not yet complete.

Human behaviour ‘one cell at a time’ While I have discussed the role of the projected brain in guiding the work of a particular laboratory, the Memory Lab, in this section, I present the projected brain of the field of neuroscience more generally, articulated by one of the neuroscience enterprise’s key players. Kandel has been at the forefront of arguments for the relevance of neuroscience to a broad range of human issues, a point he particularly highlights in his book In Search of Memory . The autobiography, that began as Kandel’s Nobel essay, focuses on his career as a neuroscientist that has spanned the 1950s up until the present. The brain that Kandel articulates through this narrative is a powerful object in neuroscience, being the articulation of a ‘renowned neuroscientist’ (LeDoux 2002, p. 298) of ‘colossal status’ (Costandi, 2006). In Search of Memory was the most highly regarded popular neuroscience book among neuroscientists in the Dana Foundation’s survey of its members in 2009 (Goldberg, 2010). The projected brain that I suggest is evident in Kandel’s book is one that the neuroscience enterprise is particularly invested in.

Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for his work on the cellular and molecular processes in learning and memory (Nobel Media AB, 2017). This work, which Kandel began in the 1960s, centred on Aplysia . The Aplysia is a marine sea slug with a simple nervous system of 20, 000 neurons compared to a human’s 86 million. It has helpfully large neurons, some visible to the naked eye. In a profile of Kandel for Scientific American Mind , the science writer David Dobbs (2007) writes that this work provided the ‘foundations of modern neuroscience’. Still active professionally at eighty-seven, Kandel is

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director of the Kavli Institute of Brain Science and co-director the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, both at Columbia University. The Zuckerman Institute, as it is known, aims to be ‘a comprehensive institute for the pursuit of interdisciplinary and collaborative research’ in neuroscience (Zuckerman Institute, 2016). Its vision is to serve as a focal point for a ‘collaborative network of academics stretching across all disciplines’ (ibid.).

In this section, I explore how Kandel’s book provides readers with an ‘interpretive scheme’ (Good, 1994) through which profound human questions may be viewed. Kandel situates the growth of neuroscience and his own contribution to it in the context of his biography and his broader interests and goals. As a Viennese Jewish refugee to the US after Kristallnacht , Kandel had initially majored in European history as an undergraduate, writing an honours thesis on the reactions of German intellectuals to National Socialism. Kandel then became enamoured of psychoanalysis entering medical school to gain qualifications in psychiatry which he had been told was the best way to become a practising psychoanalyst. His introduction to the medical sciences and keen interest in questions of mind led him to brain research.

In these autobiographical shifts, Kandel presents parallel questions about human beings. First, of the Germans, ‘how a people who loved art and music at one moment could in the very next moment commit the most barbaric and cruel acts’ (p. 6). Second, to questions about individual psychology as he ponders how his memories of the family’s apartment in Vienna, the blue toy car he owned, and the events of Kristallnacht remained as vivid as ever in later life. Third, to questions about the role of brain processes as he asked:

How did the Viennese past leave its lasting traces in the nerve cells of my brain? How was the complex three dimensional space of the apartment where I steered my toy car woven into my brain’s internal representation of the spatial world around me? How did terror sear the banging on the door of our apartment into the molecular and cellular fabric of my brain with such permanence that I can relive the experience in vivid visual and emotional detail more than half a century later? (p. 6)

Throughout In Search of Memory , Kandel (2006) makes links between his description of his neuroscientific work to questions about human psychology. The trajectory that Kandel’s narrative takes begins with broad, complex phenomena and involves a narrowing down as he establishes the reductionist approach for which he is renowned 22 . This is then followed by a subsequent expansion out again. Kandel builds on his early work on the cellular and

22 Kandel’s most recent publication, for example, is titled Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: bridging the two cultures, published in 2016.

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molecular processes in learning and memory and draws on the opportunities offered by techniques in genetic engineering to add to the complexity of phenomena he studies.

First, Kandel recounts how he approached the brain as a psychoanalytically inclined scholar of the humanities. He describes his introduction to neurobiology and provides the reader with an overview of the basic organisation of the brain. He writes: ‘It was hard to look at the brain, even a clay model of it, without wondering where Freud’s ego, id, and superego were located.’ (p. 45) He writes that ‘Although Freud did not intend his diagram to be a neuroanatomical map of the mind, it stimulated me to wonder where in the elaborate folds of the human brain these psychic agencies might live’ (p. 55).

In his account, Freud serves as Kandel’s foil, marrying the pursuit of mind and brain, each informing the other. In contrast to Kandel, who went from aspiring psychoanalyst to eminent neuroscientist, the father of psychoanalysis, Freud, began his career as a neuroanatomist. Kandel first employs a psychoanalytic scheme to the biological brain, seeing in its structure the psychodynamic entities identified by Freud. Kandel continues this inverse perspective as his studies and subsequent research work lead him further into the biological processes of the brain, first through cellular means and then molecular.

In the neurophysiologist Harry Grundfest’s laboratory at Columbia University in his senior year of medical school in 1955, Kandel writes that he hoped to uncover the biological basis of Freud’s structural theory of mind. Grundfest told him gently that this was beyond the current state of the science, and that ‘to understand mind we needed to look at the brain one cell at a time’ (p. 55). Kandel felt deflated and disappointed by the prospect until he remembered that Freud had started out seeking ‘to solve the hidden riddles of mental life by studying the brain one nerve cell at a time’ (p. 55):

I found it ironic and remarkable that I was now being encouraged to take the journey in reverse, to move from an interest in the top-down structural theory of mind to the bottom-up study of the signalling elements of the nervous system, the intricate inner worlds of nerve cells. (p. 56)

Grundfest’s influence became central to Kandel’s method, and reductionism, its central success story. He would argue in his 1979 book Cellular Basis of Behavior which he describes as ‘almost a manifesto’ where he ‘used cell biology to link brain and behavior’, that if scientists wanted to understand human behaviour, they would have to apply the ‘radical reductionist approach that had proved so effective in other areas of biology’ (p. 236).

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Grundfest’s principles were the key driving force in Kandel’s decision to study memory in Aplysia , against the advice of neurobiology luminaries of the time such as the Australian John Eccles, who argued that it was futile to try to understand the human brain through work on invertebrates.

Kandel’s first experiments on Aplysia were conducted on detached cells rather than the intact animal. Through artificial stimulation with electrical currents, Kandel simulated different types of learning identified by Pavlov: habituation , where an animal becomes used to a stimulus that it begins to ignore it, and sensitisation in which a noxious stimulus causes a state of arousal in which responses to normally innocuous stimuli are heightened. Habituation, Kandel explains:

…enables people to work effectively in an otherwise noisy environment. We become accustomed to the sound of the clock in the study and to our own heartbeat, stomach movements, and other bodily sensations. These sensations then enter our awareness rarely and only under special circumstances. In this sense, habituation is learning to recognise recurrent stimuli that can safely be ignored. (p. 167)

When Aplysia’s nerve cells were subjected to repeated weak electrical stimuli, the cell’s response to the stimulus decreased over time. Kandel also modelled sensitisation in the sea slug’s nerve cells by applying an intense electrical pulse to another site, after which he observed that a normally non-threatening stimulus to the original site cause the cells to respond much more dramatically than usual. Linking this cellular mechanism again to human experience, Kandel writes: ‘After hearing a gun go off, a person will show an exaggerated response and will jump when he hears a tone or senses a touch on the shoulder.’

The assertion in study learning and memory processes in simple organisms is that cellular processes have been conserved with evolution and some of the basic processes of the human brain will have equivalents in invertebrates like Aplysia . In the book, Kandel simultaneously explains his experimental work and the processes he uncovers, and directly links these to human experience. The reader, in identifiable experiences of their own, thus begins to associate these with the mechanisms of memory at the level of the cell. In the way that a symbolic form works (Motzkin, 2008), the neural, normally hidden, is brought into the realm of everyday human experience.

Once Kandel had established these cellular mechanisms in Aplysia ’s cells, he next sought to study learning in the ‘behaving animal’ (2006, p. 187). After cataloguing the sea slug’s

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behaviours, Kandel settled on the gill-withdrawal reflex as a good candidate and worked out the neurons involved in the reflex, establishing a system within which he and his colleagues could begin to study mind through brain.

By the start of the 1970s, based on with the work on Aplysia , Kandel and his colleagues were in a position to be able to answer some of the questions that brain scientists had been grappling with over the nature of cellular changes in learning. In his studies, Kandel perceived that he was addressing two opposing theories of mind, Kant’s a priori , and Locke’s tabula rasa , finding both to play a role: ‘The anatomy of the neural circuit is a simple example of Kantian a priori knowledge, while changes in the strength of particular connections in the neural circuit reflect the influence of experience’ he writes. (p. 203). Through ‘the elegant simplicity of the gill-withdrawal reflex’, Kandel was about to return to the ‘philosophical and psychoanalytic questions that had led [him] to biology in the first place’. (p. 203). While a psychoanalytic frame is first imposed on a biological object, once neural processes have been worked out, a neural vision can be imposed onto philosophical knowledge. Kandel takes the reader effortlessly through these shifts back and forth between mind and brain, the concrete and the abstract.

Having found a good reductionist system, Kandel then built on his earlier studies, moving from short-term implicit memory, the concern of behaviourists, to long-term implicit memory, the domain of the ‘forerunners of cognitive psychology’ (p. 208). Kandel writes that ‘…long-term memory in Aplysia , as in people, requires repeated training interspersed with periods of rest. Practice makes perfect, even in snails’ (p. 191). Discovering the long-term memory involved anatomical changes in the brain, Kandel perceived that he and his colleagues had demonstrated the ‘biological basis of individuality’: ‘…because each human being is brought up in a different environment and has different experiences, the architecture of each person’s brain is unique’ (p. 218). Kandel’s research led him to characterise the cellular and biochemical properties of memory processes in Aplysia’s nerve cells. Molecular biology by this time ‘had become the dominant and unifying force within biology…extend[ing] its influence to neural science and help[ing to] create a new science of the mind’ (p. 241). Kandel concluded that memories that endure had to involve ‘changes in the expression of genes’ (p. 238): ‘I was ready for this step. Long-term memory was beginning to fire my imagination. How can one remember events from childhood for the whole of one’s life?’ (p. 238). From implicit memories that result in automatic motor learning

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such as the gill-withdrawal reflex in the sea slug, Kandel then began to think of ways in which to study explicit memory.

In the late 1950s, before developing a system in which to study learning and memory in Aplysia , Kandel had initially tried to study cells in cats’ hippocampi; he ‘wanted to begin where Milner had left off’. Naively, Kandel says, he ‘wanted to tackle the most complex and interesting aspect of memory - the formation of long-term memory for people, places and things that [Milner] had found lacking in H. M.’ (Kandel 2006, p. 136). Kandel writes that his interest in psychoanalysis drove this desire. However, Kandel soon realised that to advance the understanding of how memories were stored in the brain, he would need to ‘study the simplest instance of memory storage’ (p. 143).

Thirty years later, Kandel felt ready to return to the study of explicit memory in the hippocampi of mammals. Techniques in the genetic engineering of mice would allow Kandel to study explicit memory ‘in the same molecular detail’ (p. 281) that his Aplysia research had allowed for implicit memory. These studies led Kandel back to ‘the larger questions that had attracted [him] at the beginning of [his] career’ (p. 293). This increase in complexity came with sacrifices: ‘…I was moving from a system in Aplysia that was reasonably well understood to systems in the mammalian brain that had yielded (and to some degree still yield) only a few fascinating results and many unresolved questions’ (p. 293). Despite these uncertainties, by the 1990s, Kandel perceived that it was time to ‘move the molecular biology of cognition a step forward’. His work on Aplysia had allowed him to show how behaviourist theories of learning worked at the molecular level, and he wanted to do the same for the theories of cognitive psychologists, who he saw as the ‘scientific successors to the psychoanalysts’ (p. 296). At the time of writing his autobiography, Kandel felt that his work on mice establishing the role of genes in the formation of spatial memories in mice was the springboard from which he might address a molecular biology of cognition. His is a ‘compound approach’ Kandel writes, one that draws tools from multiple sources to allow for research that involves ‘extending from molecules to mind’, a strategy that has allowed the birth of a ‘new science of mind’ (p. 306).

Kandel provides an interpretive scheme by providing an account of larger philosophical and psychoanalytic questions that drove him in his journey into the nerve cell. Good (1994) showed how medical students enter into a ‘distinctive reality system’ of ‘intricate details of the human body’ that were not previously part of ‘everyday worlds’ (p. 71). Kandel too

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narrates a similar growing familiarity with the biology of the brain. In this imaginative world, human experience is linked to ‘fundamental orders of material reality’ (Good 1994, p. 75). Complex phenomena may be reduced and read in brain terms, while molecular processes of single cells are amplified to frame an understanding of human complexity (Rose & Abi- Rached 2013).

Kandel writes that although psychoanalysis, as he perceived it, had begun with the scientific aim of investigating mind, from what he observed in the 1960s, it had lost its way. Kandel became disillusioned with psychoanalysis, and the mainly psychoanalytically inspired bent of American psychiatry for its eschewal of science and empirical studies:

Although psychoanalysis had historically been scientific in its ambitions – it had always wanted to develop an empirical, testable science of mind - it was rarely scientific in its methods. It had failed over the years to submit its assumptions to replicable experimentation…Rather than focusing on areas that could be tested empirically, psychoanalysis expanded its scope, taking on mental and physical disorders that it was not optimally suited to treat. (2006, p. 365)

Through his propagation of the value of neuroscience for psychiatry, Dobbs suggests that ‘a new Kandelian psychiatry’ is taking shape (2007, pp. 32-37). In 1979, Kandel published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine called ‘Psychotherapy and the single synapse’, reprinted in 2001 in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in its ‘Neuropsychiatry Classics’ section (Kandel, 2001). In the article, Kandel described what he perceived to be an unhelpful tension between neurobiology and psychiatry, and made a case for how understanding what is happening at the level of cells and synapses can assist in understanding psychological problems. Rather than making a distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘functional’ disorders, Kandel argued, it was more pertinent to ask to what extent the biological mechanisms involved in all mental illness were the result of genetic, toxicological or social impacts: ‘In each case, even in the most socially determined neurotic illness, the end result is biologic (Kandel 2001, p. 299). Kandel (1998) followed this up in 1998 with the influential ‘A new intellectual framework for psychiatry’ in the American Journal of Psychiatry in which he argued for psychiatric practice to be grounded in a firm understanding of neurobiology.

Reflecting on criticisms from colleagues in psychiatry who, into the 1980s, were dubious about Kandel’s quest to study mind in brain terms, and who argued that the study of mind and brain had to be approached separately, Kandel writes: ‘In retrospect, it was not that

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[they]…really thought that mind and brain were separate; it was rather that they did not know how to join them’ (2006, p. 421). In contrast, Kandel joins mind and brain in his narrative in the movements back and forth across the space of a projected brain. Multiple reductions take the reader from the broad and complex, the transcendental (e.g. Kant’s a priori ), to the cellular and molecular. These cellular and molecular processes are then imagined into the broad and complex, allowing Kandel to go from molecular processes of simple memory formation in a sea-slug to pondering the potential for merging neuroscience with his sociologist wife’s field in a ‘realistic molecular sociobiology’ (p. 425). It is through these moves that Kandel articulates a projected brain as neuroscience’s knowledge object (Knorr Cetina 1997, 2001), where sociological questions may eventually be explained at the level of the neuromolecular.

The projected brain and the scope of neuroscience The Memory Lab members stated that their area of study, behavioural neuroscience, had not previously been well represented at neuroscience conferences, overseas or in Australia. A trip to the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies’ (FENS) conference that lab members undertook during the period of my fieldwork, however, had been a pleasant surprise for them. Behavioural neuroscience had been centre stage. This surprised John who had been to previous meetings where ‘you wouldn’t look at the whole organism’. This meeting was ‘just such a strong indication of where neuroscience is now, where studying mental states was the dominant issue of the world meeting’. He said:

The biggest thing for sure was the behavioural neuroscience. So including the emotions, and learning and memory, and splitting them up and defining more accurately which parts of the brain are actually responsible for particular emotions, you know, like aggression and fear and so on, and even breaking them up into little bits. It’s just amazing.

John’s experience suggests the increasing centrality of an object of knowledge with an extended scope. However, while neuroscience collectively may be making a case for a ‘projected brain’, one that posits more and more human phenomena decodable at the level of its cells and synapses, it is not one that is accepted by all neuroscientists. As I noted in chapter four, as a boundary object, the projected brain must accommodate a range of perspectives and opinions (Bowker and Star 1999).

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What I have suggested is the neuroscience enterprise’s ‘official’ projected brain is most apparent in two of the five popular neuroscience books I analysed: Kandel’s (2006) In Search of Memory and Ramachandran’s (2011) The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature. Ramachandran and Kandel present the most wide-ranging argument for the scope of neuroscience. Both neuroscientists present neuroscience as poised to answer big philosophical questions that have plagued thinkers for centuries. The Tell-Tale Brain is Ramachandran’s attempt to bring together an overview of what his own work and related research in neuroscience is able to say about the brain, and to speculate on what this work might mean for understanding human nature. He brings together his work on phantom limbs, vision and autism, informed by an evolutionary perspective, and forms theories about humans’ capacity for art, culture, and consciousness. Ramachandran’s express aim is to speculate, and he states that where there are gaps in what is known, he aims to navigate them with ‘wild intuitive hunches’ (2011, p. x). This is the way science progresses, Ramachandran argues, ‘We need to roll out our best hypotheses, hunches, and hare-brained, half-baked intuitions and then rack our brains for ways to test them’ (p. xv):

From genes to cells to circuits to cognition, the depth and breadth of today’s neuroscience - however far short of an eventual Grand Unified Theory it may be - is light-years beyond where it was when I started working in the field. In the last decade we have even seen neuroscience becoming self-confident enough to start offering ideas to disciplines that have traditionally been claimed by the humanities.’ (p xi)

As Kandel (2006) outlines an exciting ‘new science of mind’, he similarly asserts that neuroscience allows for the study of the mind to move from ‘speculative metaphysics’ to ‘fertile areas of experimental research’ (p. 9). According to Kandel, this ‘new biology posits that consciousness is a biological process that will eventually be explained in terms of molecular signalling pathways used by interacting populations of nerve cells’ (p. 9).

While Ramachandran is keen to speculate, LeDoux (2002) in Synaptic Self is less inclined to make similar interpretive leaps, and instead, builds a picture of the neurobiological basis of self through reporting of research findings situated within the metaphor of the ‘synaptic self’. LeDoux is able to talk about broader aspects of self with constant reference to neural processes without needing to make the leap across the explanatory gap. LeDoux’s projection is based on an essentialising move that key informant Ann similarly made when she said that though she is reluctant to speculate beyond what she knew of neuronal processes, she nevertheless saw the neuron as being ‘so crucial to our whole being’.

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Of the neuroscience writers whose books I analysed, the late Oliver Sacks, stands out in his refusal to conflate the neurological with the psychological. Sacks is described by Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself , as a ‘combination of intellectual and renegade’ (Doidge, 2016, Loss and Forgiveness, paragraph 5). Sacks is an unusual inclusion amongst the neuroscientists whose books I chose to analyse. While Kandel, LeDoux, Damasio and Ramachandran might be called neuroscientists who write, Sacks can more accurately be called a writer and neurologist. Sacks is best known for his collections of case histories such as The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Anthropologist on Mars . Sacks, who practised as a neurologist, would be considered a clinical neuroscientist (Bear et al., 2007). Snyder in an obituary for Sacks in the Lancet wrote that he was ‘not a scientist in the conventional way’ (2015, p. 1130).

Boyce (2012), in an interview with Sacks for the Lancet , describes Sacks’s focus on case histories as ‘almost diametrically opposed to the current pop-science trend in neuroscience writing, in which data gleaned from MRI scans are held up as deep revelations of the way our minds work’ (p. 1639). Indeed, Sacks has often argued for the need for case histories to include ‘a complete human narrative’ (1991, p. 367). In his emphasis on clinical medicine and neurology, Sacks looks outmoded against the claims of neuroscience superstars like Kandel and Ramachandran.

Musicophilia is a series of case histories of people who have experience unusual onsets or ruptures in musicality following a neurological event. Sacks, who was passionate about music, would first look up ‘music’ in a new neurology textbook. The references to it were few and far between. Sacks writes that one of the ‘reason[s] for this neglect is that neurologists like to explain, to find putative mechanisms, as well as describe – and there was virtually no neuroscience of music prior to the 1980s’ (p. xiv). Today, the neuroscience of music is one of the areas that has seen significant development in the neuroscience explosion (Peretz and Zatorre, 2003). Sacks continued:

There is now an enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural underpinnings of musical perception and imagery, and the complex and often bizarre disorders to which these are prone. These new insights of neuroscience are exciting beyond measure, but there is always a certain danger that the simple art of observation may be lost, that clinical description may become perfunctory, and the richness of the human context ignored. (pp. xiv-xv)

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In Musicophilia , Sacks (2007) aims to combine the ‘old-fashioned’ with the new insights provided by neuroscience, but ‘above all…to listen to [his] patients and subjects, to imagine and enter their experiences’ (p. xv). Discussing the phenomenon of ‘brain worms’ – tunes that get stuck in the head and do not relent, Sack asks ‘What is happening, psychologically and neurologically, when a tune or a jingle takes possession of one like this?’ (p. 47). In Boyce’s (2012) profile, Sacks makes the point that he does not think neuroscience will ever fully line up brain and mind. Throughout Musicophilia are multiple ‘old fashioned’ (p. xv) references to psychological processes as distinct from neurological or physiological ones. Sacks stands out as a ‘renegade’ in a neuroscience explosion where a ‘projected brain’ of neuroscience encompasses an ever-broadening scope.

As a projection that captures the unknown, the brain as an object of knowledge in neuroscience, conveys important information about the imagined scope of the field (Rheinberger, 1997 , Knorr Cetina, 1997, Knorr Cetina, 2001). Like the neuroscientist writers, my participants similarly had a range of perspectives in relation to this projected brain. Like Kandel and Ramachandran, key informants Belinda, a perception researcher, and Thomas, the behavioural neuroscientist, saw the fullest extent of the possibilities asserted by the neuroscience enterprise despite noting that neuroscience was far from understanding how the brain and mind actually work. Thomas emphasised the immense challenge that he perceived neuroscience to be uniquely faced with. According to Thomas, the brain was ‘the most complex entity in the universe that we’re aware of’. In terms of current understanding in neuroscience, Thomas said that they were at the ‘tip of the iceberg in terms of explanation’. Belinda similarly said: ‘I think a lot of people don’t realise how far away science is from understanding our experiences’. Nevertheless, she and Thomas both thought the answers to the big questions were ‘findable’, captured in the projected brain as an object of knowledge that represented work that was yet to be done (Knorr Cetina, 1997, Knorr Cetina, 2001).

Neuroscientists, coming from a range of backgrounds, bring with them the different objects and categories of their respective trades (Bowker & Star 1999). As a boundary object, the projected brain is a shared object that allows for adolescent mental health researcher Emily’s understanding of ‘real-world’ emotional processes, as well as the Memory Lab’s John’s understanding of behaviour as ‘ephemeral’. Key informant William, the former physicist, described a different attitude to neuroscience’s object, stemming, he said from the difference

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between biological phenomena and the phenomena he had dealt with in physics. He described the medical sciences as ‘heterogenous’ and ‘random’ in comparison to the physical sciences:

It’s like, you take the genome, you produce proteins, you make molecules, and then these proteins can be co-opted by the body for all sorts of different purposes, different immunological functions. Like brain cells might uptake a certain small molecule, or metabolise [it], and then [in] another part of the body like the liver, the same protein might have a completely different function. So, there’s this enormous diversity where a given molecule has all these different functions depending on which part of the body it’s in. And I find that, personally, very frustrating because it’s incredibly diverse and it’s the consequences of evolution.

While there were some ‘unifying factors’ amidst the chaos, William said, it was all still ‘enormously diverse’. He contrasted this to physics and its efforts to establish ‘one mathematically rigorous self-persisting theoretical framework’. William’s projection was one in which sense could be made of the brain’s biological randomness in terms of the ‘grand unifying theories’ that he chased as a physicist.

The projected brain, taking shape through the collective work of scientists within the field of neuroscience, encompasses parts that are sometimes strange to individual neuroscientists (Bowker & Star 1999). These boundary objects are not merely created haphazardly but require work to maintain (ibid.). Adept at making the links that hold together a projected brain, Kandel is a proponent of the cohesiveness of its different elements. Kandel has co-hosted The Brain Series with US TV presenter Charlie Rose, encouraging primate scientists to see the relevance of work on the nervous system of C. elegans (PBS, 2010).

Bower and Star (1999) describe membership as occurring along a continuum where members have different levels of comfort with the objects of the collective. Contrasting a virtuoso violinist to the beginning student, Bowker and Star suggest that both are members of a collective of violinists even though one may wield his or her instrument with far more skill than the other. There are thus many different ways of being a member of a community, from a full-fledged card-carrying neuroscientist like Thomas (discussed in chapter four), to a ‘renegade’ neurologist stubbornly maintaining the distinction between the neurological and the psychological. ‘Illegitimacy’, Bowker and Star (1999) argue, is ‘seeing those objects as would a stranger’ (p. 295); it is what marks one as an outsider. It is not surprising then that a participant expressed special concern about the confidentiality and anonymity of their comments when they said:

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I think there’s a possibility that we might look back on this period with a feeling of how absurd it was. That we were trying to pick apart something as complex as the brain, the interactions between the brain and experience and things like that you know, measuring oxygenation levels of the brain when people are doing certain things. I don’t know. I think there might be sort of looking back on history and saying wow that was a really unusual period.

In contrast, while key informant Ann could not herself imagine the scope of neuroscience that extends to mind and whatever mind is seen to encompass, she nevertheless accepted its status as a knowledge object whose characteristics others would be able to eventually work out. As a cellular neuroscientist, Ann had only recently started to collaborate with behavioural neuroscientists to study processes involved in learning and memory formation. Ann admitted that she was not very comfortable even analysing circuits of neurons. She was used to focusing on individual nerve cells. She wondered whether it would ever be ‘very clear what a thought is’ or ‘how thinking and feeling really do work’. She described herself as a ‘nuts and bolts’ type of person. She said:

I like the things that you can test and prove and measure. I’ll never be the one that makes the connection between the brain and the mind, I don’t think, because I’ll be still measuring pieces of brain.

Ann described being fascinated by something that she had read in an Oliver Sacks book where a woman was having brain surgery while conscious and suddenly remembered a lullaby that her mother used to sing to her. The woman had no conscious memories of her mother who had died when the woman was still a baby. Ann said:

Sounds sort of odd to me that you know one little chunk of one lobe would store, you know, an Irish lullaby. But it has to be stored somewhere. It’s fascinating. That’s what I think is so interesting trying to make sense of individual cell communication and then circuits and regions and different regions talking to each other and how that can possibly translate into –

She trailed off leaving her sentence unfinished. For Ann, while this work seemed ‘quite impossible’ to her, she put this down to her own character, the individual quirk of being a ‘nuts and bolts’ type of person. A projected brain for neuroscience that extended to ‘more abstract thought’ was not one that Ann could fathom understanding mechanistically. Neuroscience’s brain, nevertheless, existed for her as something that someone else would fill out.

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Whether or not my participants saw neuroscience in the same way that Kandel and Ramachandran presented it, as being ready to take on age-old philosophical puzzles, there was a sense that the small contributions each made, their ‘baby steps’, would eventually add up. Eventually, these would ‘hopefully one day piece together some overall picture’ (Emily, adolescent mental health researcher). What was shared was the idea that mind, split and dissected in various studiable ways, with the appropriate technology and suitable experimental setups, would eventually be mapped onto brain.

Conclusion In this chapter, I explored the need for neuroscientists who study human thought, behaviour and feeling to manage the categories of mind and brain. I have argued that a ‘projected brain’ takes shape in these efforts, an object that captures mind and brain, the material and the immaterial, the known and the unknown. Through recounting my key informants’ perspectives on how mind and brain were positioned, I showed how neuroscience’s ‘mind/brain’ encompasses a variety of arrangements that often reflect neuroscientists’ disciplinary backgrounds and the type of work they are engaged in. John and the Memory Lab’s conceptualisations of aspects of mind showed how scientists can transform what for them is immaterial into the workably material. In the Memory Lab, the material and the immaterial were both used to address the challenge of juggling mind and brain. I suggested that Kandel’s autobiography In Search of Memory was an articulation of an official object of neuroscience, a projected brain where an increasingly broad range of human phenomena can be understood and investigated at the level of the brain. This object was by no means one that all neuroscientists accepted to its fullest extent and both the neuroscience authors and my participants’ perspectives on the scope of neuroscience indicated that this is an object in flux.

This chapter dealt precisely with this movement, the process by which neuroscience articulates and increasingly broad scope in which complex human problems can be understood at the level of the brain. Having argued in the previous chapter that the ‘tangible brain’ is foundational in the boundary infrastructure that neuroscience’s brain provides, this chapter emphasised the role of the ‘projected brain’ as an object of knowledge (Knorr Cetina 1997, 2001). The projected brain is an evolving object, one that, in encompassing a growing range of issues to which neuroscientific investigation is relevant, provides the direction and purpose of the field. An object where mind and brain are contained in a single object, the projected brain is characterised not only by what is known about the brain, but also by a

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‘lack’ (Knorr Cetina 1997, p. 13). While still in the process of being materially defined, the projected brain is at once entirely concrete and material, yet able to go where material cannot yet go.

To further develop the idea that the brain provides neuroscience with its coherence and to explore the question of how neuroscience can be seen to be a compelling explanatory framework for an array of problems, in the following chapter, I focus specifically on the brain as a particularly human object. I consider how the brain, already considered to be central to life, sits at the intersection of multiple domains and how its ability to be inserted into explanations in a range of situations opens up the epistemic space to which neuroscience is seen to apply.

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Chapter 6 The Versatile Brain

After the 2016 US election, while political pundits may have been stumped by Donald Trump’s unexpected win, according to US neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields, this would have come as no surprise to neuroscientists (‘Trumps victory and the neuroscience of rage’, November 10, 2016, Scientific American Mind Guest blog ). To make sense of the election, Fields argued, one needed to understand ‘the brain’s threat detection mechanism’. Trump’s surprise win was the result of rage, a ‘core of fear and anger gripping’ the populous, and was due to human beings’ ‘neural circuitry of defensive aggression and rage’ whose purpose was to ‘protect one’s own tribe’. Earlier, as Trump defied expectation during his campaign for nomination as the Republican Party’s candidate, CNN published the requisite ‘This is your brain on Donald Trump’ article with a sub-heading stating that ‘viewers may love or despise Donald Trump, but the sight of him lights up the brain’ (‘This is your brain on Donald Trump’, CNN Media , 26 March 2016) . The article reported on research conducted by neuroscience PhD student and hedge fund manager Sam Barnett who monitored participant brainwaves via EEG as they watched the candidate debates during the primaries. According to the article, Barnett had discovered that whether the participant was Democrat or Republican, reacting positively or negatively, ‘something about Trump — his face, his voice, his message — generates “increased brain engagement”’.

Other write-ups addressed the neuroscientific reason for Trump supporters’ continued belief in Trump’s lies (‘The neuroscience behind why people keep believing Trump’s most egregious lies’, Quartz , 21 September 2016), Trump’s appeal to innate fear responses (‘Neuroscientist: Donald Trump’s meteoric rise can be explained by 4 basic human instincts’, Business Insider Australia , 31 July 2016), as well as the role of the unconscious brain in political decision-making (Dooley, ‘Trump explained by neuroscience’, Forbes , 28 Dec 2015). Gleb Tsipursky, in Huffington Post, stated that ‘traditional frameworks’ had failed to account for Trump’s popularity with voters. ‘Turning to neuroscience’, he argued, ‘helps provide a more accurate explanation, by revealing that Trump’s popularity stems from his masterful ability to resonate with the emotions of many Americans.’ (‘Trump Feels Your Anger and Anxiety: How Neuroscience Helps Explain Trump’s Triumphs’, Huffington Post , 25 April 2016).

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

As the arguable twenty-first-century experts on human behaviour in medicalised, industrial societies, it is not surprising that neuroscientists would be called upon to shed light on some of the pressing issues of the day. These range from the US elections, to terrorism (e.g. Bruneau, 2016), and climate change (e.g. Grasso, 2013). In a ‘neuroculture’ (Vidal and Ortega, 2011) where the brain is seen to be a key component in imaginings of selfhood (Vidal 2009), there are few situations involving human action and experience to which the brain could not be seen to be relevant.

The brain’s central role in everything that human beings do is a mundane fact. Within the neuroscience enterprise, this everyday truth provides the rationale for the brain’s processes to be considered relevant to understanding many, if not all, aspects of human life. For my participants, the reason for neuroscience’s wide-spread popularity was self-evident. The brain was, after all, ‘inherently interesting’.23 ‘But how could you not be interested?’ they asked.24 ‘Everyone knows the brain is important’.25

In this chapter, I explore how processes of the brain are considered to meaningfully illuminate many areas of human experience and to clarify long-held concepts about human nature. I develop the concept of the ‘versatile brain’ as a way of thinking about how the brain, and thus neuroscience as the discipline that studies the brain, is made relevant to fundamental questions of how one should live. The word ‘versatile’ captures the interpretive flexibility that is characteristic of boundary objects (Star 2010). My argument about the brain’s ‘versatility’ rests on the idea that the brain is an object comprised of parts belonging to multiple domains of human life (Strathern, 1992, Franklin, 2003). I suggest that the ‘versatile brain’ is the boundary object that allows brain-based, neuroscientific explanations to be applied in contexts that extend well beyond the scientific and biological.

Imagined as inextricably entwined in life, the brain is a very particular kind of scientific object, one that may be thought of as a ‘condensed epistemic point of many intersecting strands’ (Franklin, 2013, p. 6). I suggest that the brain can be thought about via the logic of many distinct orders of knowledge. I draw specifically on work by Marilyn Strathern (1992) that deals with the way in which knowledge is made in the West, and as elaborated on by Sarah Franklin (2003, Franklin, 2013, Franklin, 2014). Strathern provides a useful approach to understanding how different orders of knowledge and logics are at work when the brain is

23 Scott, autism researcher 24 Bryan, behavioural neuroscientist 25 Belinda, perception researcher

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evoked in different contexts. Strathern (1992) provides a theory of thinking about the way that objects in biomedicine are made up of overlapping parts belonging to separate domains. Objects of overlap acquire their interpretive flexibility through the possibilities that their status allows for connecting and disconnecting to different areas of knowledge (Franklin 2013). This approach is helpful in considering how neuroscientists make use of the brain as an object when they talk about their work, when they consider neuroscience’s significance, and when they communicate neuroscience to a wider public. Strathern’s theories draw attention to the significance of the reproduction and repetition of particular ideas and concepts surrounding the brain, and provide ways of thinking about how this object changes in the process (Franklin, 2003, Franklin, 2013, Franklin, 2014, Strathern 2014 cited in Street and Copeman, 2014).

The construction of the brain as the object of neuroscience work, like objects in areas of bioscience such as genetics and assisted reproduction, is a site that is ripe for mixing what has traditionally been considered natural, with what has traditionally been treated as cultural or social. Indeed, as I noted in the introduction to this thesis, the proponents of neuroanthropology argue that the biological brain is as much cultural as it is natural, being ‘shot through with the environment’ (Downey and Lende 2012, p. 49). The twentieth- and twenty-first-century biosciences have challenged social theorists to develop ways of understanding how the transformations engendered by the knowledge, technologies, and objects of bioscience change the categories of the natural and the social or cultural.

In the eighties and nineties, anthropologist Paul Rabinow and philosopher of science Donna Haraway, along with Strathern, developed theories to think about this mixing (Franklin 2003). Rabinow (1996a) developed the concept of ‘biosociality’ to describe the way in which new technologies would allow biology to be modelled on the social. Rabinow argued that where, in the past, attempts were made to model the social on nature, new technologies would instead allow nature to be modelled on the social. While in his essay, Rabinow was concerned with ontological changes that twentieth-century bioscience had brought about, Strathern as well as Haraway in her well-known ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, were focused on the relations between things considered nature and things considered culture. Strathern’s work, like Haraway’s, deals with the way in which we relate to the categories of the natural and social and the hierarchies that are part of the way these mixtures are imagined (Franklin 2003). In ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, Haraway (1991) drew attention to the usual oppositional dualisms of male/female, nature/culture, mind/body and so on. Haraway highlighted the

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tendency for these to be arranged in hierarchies, and for one to be used as a ‘resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other’ (p. 151). The figure of the cyborg provided a tool to imaginatively explore the possibility of different relations where hierarchies and resolutions are eschewed.

Just as what was considered ‘biology’ in the twentieth century came increasingly to represent mixtures of the biological and the technological (Franklin 2003), so too, biology and the social are brought together in neuroscience’s brain. Franklin (2003) argues that, while the boundaries between categories of the natural, social and technological may be less clear, maintaining these divisions in analysis is useful. Strathern’s theories of Western knowledge conventions provide a way of thinking about the overlap of these categories, yet keeping them separate in one’s analysis to emphasise the work that they are able to do (Franklin 2003). Maintaining this distinction provides a way of understanding the ‘borrowings’ (Franklin et al., 2000, p. 9) and transfers of logic that developments in twenty-first-century bioscience allow (Franklin 2013). Franklin et al. (2000) argue that it is precisely the separateness of these categories that makes these exchanges effective.

Strathern developed her theories from a comparison of Melanesian and English styles of kinship thinking. Kinship thinking provides clues about the way in which a group thinks about the relation between the social and natural worlds (Strathern 1992b in Franklin 2013). Strathern (1992) observed that the idea that one can simultaneously be an individual and also part of something called ‘society’ is a Western-specific notion. In English kinship thinking, relationships are seen to produce individuals. While the English view relations to be external to the individual (they are relations ‘between’ people), the Melanesians consider people to embody relations. Thus, Strathern argues, for the English, ‘society’ is thought of as a ‘separate order of phenomena’ (Strathern 1992, p. 76).

Strathern (1992) employs the neologism ‘merograph’ (‘mero’ meaning part and ‘graph’, to write) to describe this style of thinking, sense-making, and knowledge production that she identifies as uniquely Western. The important point about her comparative work on kinship that supports her theory of ‘merographic’ thinking is that entities can be considered to be comprised of different parts, yet continue to be seen as self-existing. The parts that are connected also retain their individuality and exist as separate wholes despite areas where they overlap. Entities, whether people, things, concepts, and so on, are seen to possess a uniqueness in and of themselves (Schlecker and Hirsch, 2001).

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What Strathern calls the ‘merographic connection’ describes a tendency that she identifies of making sense of things by putting them in context, and by describing them as part of something else (Street and Copeman 2014; Schlecker et al. 2001). She writes: ‘the context, by virtue of not being equivalent to the thing put into it, will ‘illuminate’ the thing from a particular angle (display one of its parts)’ (Strathern 1992, p. 73). This, Strathern argues, potentially gives rise to a multitude of perspectives.

The concept of the ‘merographic connection’ addresses a specific mode of ‘cultural borrowing’ that Strathern considers to be characteristic of Western knowledge practices (Franklin, 2003, p. 66). Focused on ‘how ideas behave’ (Strathern 1992, p. xvii), and concerned specifically with ‘the way ideas travel, connect, disconnect, and contain one another’ (Franklin, 2003, p. 66), Strathern’s work emphasises the relationality of how we know things (Greenhouse, 2014). Strathern’s use of the word ‘merograph’, as a combination of ‘part’ and ‘write’, aims to capture ‘the way ideas write or describe one another’ (1992, p. 204). Concepts never exist on their own (Strathern 1992), and as Locke pointed out, the way in which we know one thing is always related to how we know something else (Sahlins 1993 cited in Strathern, 2005). Franklin (2003) provides the example of the concept of the ‘gene’ which already contains ideas about kinship and individuality. Similarly, ideas of the brain in contemporary neuroscience, while changing in the context of a neuroscience explosion, already contain notions of personhood and selfhood.

Franklin (2014, p. 249) suggests that Strathern’s model illustrates how scientific facts such as those coming out of the new genetics, or neuroscience for that matter, can take on different meanings in different contexts. For example, the ‘gene’ takes on a range of meanings as it moves from the clinic to conversations with family members (Franklin 2013). This ability to selectively connect and disconnect to different domains and logics is crucial, and it is this ability that lends the objects of contemporary bioscience their flexibility (Franklin 2014). Because the parts that make up these objects are not equivalent, since they belong to separate domains, these connections are always partial 26 (Franklin 2003). This partiality, however, is exactly what allows for a thing’s coherence (Franklin 2013). As a result, a plurality of possibilities is introduced even when defining things that are seen to stand alone as self- contained entities such as scientific facts (ibid.). Nature and culture, biology and the social

26 Merographic connections, which have to do with overlap, are distinct from Strathern’s notion of ‘partial connections’ that refer to movements in scale (Franklin 2003)

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are just some of the domains that form the background against which the brain is figured, and which provide an object of overlap with opportunities for connection and disconnection (ibid.).

In this chapter, I explore the ability to connect and disconnect, a central characteristic of a ‘versatile brain’, one of the boundary objects that I argue makes up neuroscience’s brain. First, through my interviews with key informants, I consider the effect of analogy when participants talk about the brain and neuroscience. Analogy facilitates a transfer of logic across domains (Franklin 2013), a process which allows for an expansion of the relevance and reach of neuroscience. I then illustrate the versatility of neuroscience’s brain by showing how the brain can simultaneously be seen to be a special kind of organ and an organ just like any other; how the brain is considered to contain, or be equivalent to, the self, and, at the same time, can be separated out from the self. Next, through an analysis of Damasio’s (2003) book Looking for Spinoza , I demonstrate how the brain is an object that is ripe for making connections between different domains of human life. Here, I deal with the way the brain is an object of overlap in Strathern’s sense. I suggest that by employing what Strathern identifies as a strategy in Western knowledge-making of placing in context (Street and Copeman 2014; Franklin 2014), Damasio is able to draw analogies between neuroscientist and philosopher, religion and neuroscience, brain and human nature, to present neuroscientific knowledge as a source of profound truth. My analysis here provides the basis for considering, in the following section, the way the brain is used by neuroscientists as an object in their discussions about the significance of neuroscience. The brain, as an object of overlap, functions in neuroscientists’ talk as a stand-in for a whole person, and slips easily into conversations and descriptions in a way that seems ‘obvious and normal’ (Franklin 2013, p. 16), though occasionally there are disruptions when neural facts do not connect to social ones (Edwards 2000 in Franklin 2014).

Star (2010) writes that she developed the concept of the boundary object to be of greatest use in analyses at the level of the organisational. While the versatile brain that I describe here addresses the applicability of brain-based explanations and neuroscience expertise to situations beyond the laboratory, in so doing, the versatile brain is a key part of neuroscience’s contemporary relevance and appeal. I argue that as part of the boundary infrastructure that neuroscience’s brain provides, the versatile brain, in facilitating the mingling of biological facts with other types of knowledge, expands the epistemic space to which the brain applies (Street and Copeman 2014). As a symbolic form that gives shape to

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reality, the versatile brain shows up ‘naturally’ in unexpected places, in conversations about TV watching and child-rearing, in the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, and indeed, in analyses of US voter behaviour.

Brain and self: a very special organ and an organ like any other Like Vidal (2009) has suggested is the case with modern Western conceptions of personhood, the key reason that my key informants thought the brain was of intrinsic interest to a lay audience was that it was central to what made the person. Belinda noted that ‘if we didn’t have our livers and other different organs, we’d also really suffer’, but neuroscience, in dealing with the brain, was much more relatable to a general audience. Belinda thought that neuroimaging had played a disproportionate role in generating neuroscience’s wider appeal. She said that while breakthroughs that had occurred much earlier, such as Kandel’s discovery of the cellular and molecular processes involved in learning and memory, were as significant, if not more so, imaging technologies meant that neuroscience was now ‘tackling questions that people [could] understand at the level of the entire person’. Belinda saw research such as that of the Self-Control Lab’s to be more recognisably relevant to the general public than that of laboratories like the Memory Lab. However, as I have shown in chapter five through my analysis of Kandel’s book, cellular and molecular processes in neurons can also be made relevant to a general readership through appeals to human experience. Nevertheless, Belinda makes a crucial point when she points to the significance of making neuroscience relevant to the ‘entire person’.

To Belinda, the brain, on its own accord, was an organ that held important answers to questions of personhood and selfhood. As a teenager, Belinda had been interested in what ‘made me me’. She perceived the answer to basic questions of human existence to be discoverable in research on the brain, questions such as why one feels happy, why things feel good, and where one’s sense of self comes from. Belinda perceived that it was ‘the brain [that was] doing it’ and she wanted ‘to know how the brain [was] doing it’. Belinda explained this brain-centred approach to understanding the self as the obvious alternative to supernatural explanations derived from religious concepts such as the soul. She said:

I’m not a highly religious person. I don’t think there’s some soul, magical soul that just creates our perceptions and experiences. So, I think it’s entirely driven by the brain, so I’ve just always been interested by how the brain could give you a sense of self and how the brain could give you experiences and how people could have such

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radically different experiences in the same sorts of environments, and so that’s how I got interested. Like I sort of want to know the answer, I want to know the why, and to me, neuroscience, that’s the field that answers that question.

Belinda presents two options for understanding human experience: first, via a ‘magical’ or religious system using notions such as ‘soul’, and second, through a neuroscientific, brain- based approach. Emily, the adolescent mental health researcher, described her own interest in neuroscience in a similar way, appealing to her lack of religiosity. In describing her fascination with neuroscience and her excitement about being able to be part of research on the brain, Emily said: ‘for me, we are our brains. Our brains determine who we are and how we behave, our personalities, everything’. Not being particularly ‘spiritual’ or believing ‘that humans have spirits’, she said, ‘as far as [she could] tell, your brain controls everything in your body, including your thoughts and behaviours’. It was, she said, ‘the controller of all things’. In their explanations, both Belinda and Emily refer to a concept of an immaterial soul responsible for human experience, and situate this within a domain they call ‘religion’. In so doing, they displace the soul and religion, putting the brain and neuroscience in its place.

Understanding how analogies work through acts of comparison is a central feature of Strathern’s work (Street & Copeman 2014; Franklin 2014). Analogies are far from inconsequential and understanding their use provides a dynamic account of knowledge- making (Franklin 2014). The assertion of the difference between science and religion that Belinda and Emily make is what Strathern, in her model of the ‘merographic connection’, calls ‘connection from another angle’ (Strathern 1992, p. 73). Franklin (2013) describes this as a strategic move that can simultaneously displace yet conserve meaning. Neuroscience is now able to stand in for a system of meaning that religion once provided while being a move away from ideas such as a ‘magical soul’. The comparison here involves what Franklin (2014) identifies as a double analogy. Neuroscience is both like religion (i.e. providing a system of meaning within which one can understand the self), and nothing like it at all (i.e. a rational system of understanding based on the scientific method). As Maurer (2005) has argued via Strathern, and which I emphasised in chapter five when I described the conceptual moves made by John in his understanding of personality, this strategy allows two systems of meaning to operate simultaneously. The versatile brain is thus able to be biological and concrete, yielding a solidly scientific understanding, and yet be relevant to concerns that enter the realm of the spiritual.

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Like Emily and Belinda, behavioural neuroscientist Bryan shared the perspective that the brain was intrinsically interesting because it was the organ that stood for the human self. Bryan explained how he imagined this biological self. Like Joseph LeDoux (2002) in his book Synaptic Self , Bryan made reference to the role of memory in selfhood and the synaptic processes of memory formation. He said of the brain:

It’s the thing that holds the essence of you. If you think about memories, right, you are your memories. The memories [are] the story of what’s happened to this collection of cells, your toenails, to the tips of your hair. And the memory is the story of those things, and the memory is stored in patterns of synaptic strengthening or weakening, and they’re stored in circuits in your brain.

Here, Bryan presents a fully biological version of the self, a ‘collection of cells’ that encompasses both the physical attributes that one associates with a person, their outwardly visible physical existence, and their interior neuronal existence, the physicality on which experience is recorded via changes in the brain. The mental and physiological entity that is memory, as the ‘story of what’s happened’ to the self, is a story that can be told in many different ways. The ‘patterns of synaptic strengthening or weakening’ form only part of what is considered ‘self’. It is just one version of the story. Even so, in the style of thinking that Strathern (1992) identifies as ‘merographic’, the brain can, nevertheless, be seen to be what ‘holds the essence of you’.

Boundary objects are contradictory (Bowker & Star 1999). Even as the versatile brain is a very special kind of biological organ, it is also an organ like any other. Just as our selves ‘are our brains’ (Emily), they can also be seen to be what is not-self, especially when they malfunction. This serves to set a person’s behaviour apart from the person. In areas that involve the mixing of logic from different domains, paradox is usual and unsurprising (Franklin 2014). The background against which the brain is characterised provides options that can be drawn on selectively. While Bryan argued that the brain was the ‘essence’ of self, other key informants, in the context of a different discussion, described the benefits of understanding issues such as addiction and mental illness as brain diseases. My participants made an argument that is common in neuroscience that understanding these as brain-based malfunctions was a more compassionate approach to mental disorder and addiction, and one

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that reduces the stigma attached to these conditions by shifting blame from the person to their biology (Haslam and Kvaale, 2015) 27 .

Thomas, the behavioural neuroscientist, thought that understanding mental illness as brain disorders would and should change attitudes towards the behaviour of mentally ill people. He described the way in which his neuroscience training informed his understanding of people with mental illnesses or brain disorders. Thomas perceived that there was a lot of stigma attached to disorders such as depression, bipolar, dementia and autism. This would not be the case, Thomas said, if there was a more widespread understanding of the brain: ‘the way you perceive those people and interact with them changes because you know, you have a sense of what’s different in their brains and what’s causing that.’ Through a greater understanding of these conditions at the level of brain dysfunction, Thomas thought it was possible to ‘move away from that stigma’: ‘Why should someone with schizophrenia or psychosis, bipolar disorder or depression be treated any differently from someone with cancer or someone with heart disease?’.

Steven, who worked in addiction, pointed out that many more people take drugs than become addicted to them, and that it was something in a person’s brain that caused them to be susceptible to addiction. Steven argued that, rather than being seen to be a ‘moral flaw’, addiction should be seen as a ‘brain disorder’. He said: ‘It’s a disorder, it’s a disease, just as hypertension is, just as Alzheimer’s disease is, just as diabetes is. It’s just a different disease. And those people are just as worthy of being treated as anybody else.’

In Bryan’s account, the brain’s biology and its role in selfhood are both ‘activate[d]’ (Franklin 2014, p. 254), while in Thomas and Steven’s descriptions, it is the brain’s mundane biology that is emphasised, allowing the connection to ‘self’ to be eclipsed. Thus, while the brain could be seen to be the source of selfhood, it could also provide a way to distance someone’s behaviour from the self by attributing it to the dysfunction of its physiological processes. The move of highlighting the brain’s likeness to other organs, such as the pancreas or heart, connects the brain to a different whole, namely, that of bare, mechanical, physicality. Emphasising the relation between the brain and other organs serves to hide the other parts that the brain, as an object of overlap, also contains (Street and Copeman 2014).

27 Haslam and Kvaale (2015) have found that while biogenetic understandings can reduce blame of people with mental illness for their condition, these understandings may increase stigma in other ways by supporting the idea that people with mental illness are dangerous and beyond help.

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Autism researcher Scott, too, in talking about mental illness, described the brain as an organ like any other in the body, susceptible to disease and dysfunction, and made similar arguments to Thomas and Steven about the stigma attached to mental disorder. However, making the point that the brain was also quite unlike other organs, Scott demonstrated the paradox and contradiction possible in an object of overlap (Franklin 2014). He said:

The difference is that you experience some sort of abnormalities in the brain, that it changes who you are as a person, it can change personality, it changes the way that you behave, the way that you therefore interact and impact upon other people. So, I think that the stigma that is still very much around mental illness, you might argue that it hasn’t changed all that much among the broader community. People are not necessarily looking at mental illness, oh ok, that’s dysfunction within a biological organ. They’re looking at it as, oh you know, that person’s whatever. You know what I mean? That that person’s got problems, and that’s going to affect my perception of them, and my capacity for sympathy and so forth.

Scott thus points out that, whether functioning as it should or in a disordered way, the brain and its effects extend beyond the realm of the merely biological.

As a boundary object that possesses an interpretive flexibility (Star 2010), the versatile brain is able to simultaneously stand for the scientific and the spiritual, the self and the non-self, just any biological organ as well as a particularly unique one. The brain’s interpretive flexibility is derived from its being a point where multiple strands, paradoxical and contradictory, come together (Franklin 2014). As an object of overlap in the Strathernian (1992) sense, from one angle, the versatile brain has the capacity to be the ‘essence of self’, from another, it is able to be like ‘any number of organs that can experience dysfunction’ (Scott, autism researcher). In the following section, I explore how the brain is the meeting place of multiple, intersecting threads (Franklin, 2013), a status that gives it a special ability to facilitate connections that are particularly useful in making a case for neuroscience’s broad significance.

Damasio’s ‘Looking for Spinoza’: possibilities for connection I have suggested that the brain in neuroscience, the mind/brain, is an object of overlapping parts, what Strathern refers to as ‘merographic’ (1992). As Franklin (2013) emphasises, Strathern’s concept does not merely point to the brain’s plurality and hybridity. Rather, it draws attention to the fact that the logic by which the brain is understood in neuroscience relies on the logics of ‘several distinct but overlapping wholes’ (p. 157) whether they be

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biology, nature, science, society, or the individual. For Strathern, the act of placing an object like neuroscience’s brain in context allows ‘connections from another angle’ (1992, 73), a move which generates a new point of view. As I have shown in the previous section, this can both extend and displace meaning (Street and Copeman 2014; Franklin 2013). In this section, I present an analysis of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s (2003) book Looking for Spinoza to illustrate that the versatile brain is an object of overlapping parts, providing multiple possibilities for connection.

I have chosen Damasio’s book specifically as his express aim is to bring together the neurobiology of feeling with a different body of knowledge, namely Spinoza’s philosophy, and to make an argument of how both can inform the ultimate question of how to live a good, happy life. For Damasio, the connections between philosophy and neuroscience, biology and society are there already. Damasio works from the assumption of a ‘consilience’ framework, E. O. Wilson’s argument for the unity of knowledge in which Wilson envisions a ‘“jumping- together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation’ (Wilson, 1998, p. 8). Damasio writes that ‘E. O. Wilson’s consilience project is an example of the sort of attitude that could advance knowledge by bringing together biology and the humanities’ (2003, p. 316). In this section, I consider instead the role of analogy in extending the epistemic space to which the brain (and neuroscience) can apply. I explore how, as Damasio places the brain, neuroscience, and neuroscientist in different contexts, the versatile brain provides the opportunity for making connections between neuroscience and complex questions of how one should live.

Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese American neuroscientist, trained as a neurologist, who is well known for his work on the neuroscience of emotion and feeling. With his wife Hanna Damasio, he is founder and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. The centre’s website lists eight different research programmes including a ‘Brain and Music Program’, as well as a ‘Brain and Society Program’. The ‘Brain and Society Program’ includes projects such as ‘Narrative Framing and the Violation of Sacred Values’, ‘The Brain’s Processing of Compassion and Admiration Across Cultures’, ‘The Brain’s Virtuous Cycle: An Investigation of Gratitude and Good Human Conduct’ and ‘Religiosity, Culture and Decision-Making’, all involving investigation of the neural correlates of these various phenomena. Damasio is described on various websites and in magazine articles as ‘noted neurologist’ (Lenzen, 2005), ‘renowned neuroscientist’ (Big Think, 2017), and ‘one of the most influential neuroscientists of his generation’ (Lehrer,

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2010). Damasio, through his research work, is specifically involved in linking the neurobiological to the domains of the spiritual, moral, the artistic, the social and so on.

In this book, drawing on his work on the neurobiology on feeling, Damasio presents his theory of what he thinks feelings are, and elaborates on their importance for human life overall. Of the five books that I analysed, Damasio’s book is the most ambitious. In it, Damasio (2003) presents an integrated framework for living grounded in the neurobiology of feeling and emotion. While the book is sub-titled ‘Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain’, the brain and neuroscience are implicit presences in Damasio’s text. They are conveyed through the way Damasio structures himself for the reader (Prior, 2003), rather than foregrounded through explicit statements regarding the importance and significance of neuroscience and the brain as they are in Kandel’s (2006) and Ramachandran’s (2011) books. The brain and neuroscience are woven into a larger narrative about human life.

In his introductory chapter, noting how poorly feelings were understood in neurobiological terms, Damasio says that he too once thought that feelings were not amenable to scientific investigation. Damasio thought that ‘feelings were impossible to define with specificity unlike objects you could see, hear, or touch’; they were ‘intangible’ and quite ‘unlike those concrete entities’, ‘private and inaccessible’ (2003, p. 4). While Kandel and Ramachandran explicitly argue that neuroscience is poised to tackle big, complex questions as I showed in chapter five, Damasio describes his own process of coming to see how what seemed impossible to study was in fact very much open to neuroscientific investigation.

In the large body of work on the neuroscience of emotion and feeling that he is known for, Damasio distinguishes emotion from feeling. Emotion is observable and measurable since it involves physiological reactions to various stimuli, while feelings are representations in the mind of a body state. Drawing on Spinoza’s idea of the conatus , the drive to preserve life that Spinoza argued to be the essence of a human being (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001), Damasio places feeling in the context of this striving. Damasio argues that feelings are reflections of the state of the organism, and are indications of ‘human flourishing or human distress’ (2003, p. 6). Feeling involves the perception of body states as well as their accompanying mind states; the positivity or negativity of feelings connote those that represent states that are physiologically beneficial and those that are detrimental respectively. Ultimately, Damasio argues that understanding the neurobiology of feeling can go a long way to providing clues for how one should live their life.

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The philosopher and the neuroscientist Baruch Spinoza 28 (1622-1677) was a seventeenth-century, Dutch-born philosopher of Sephardic Jewish descent. His family had migrated from Portugal to escape the Inquisition. As a child, Spinoza had been a gifted Talmudic scholar and was thought to be destined for the rabbinate. However, he was eventually excommunicated from the Amsterdam Sephardic community at the age of twenty-four for heresy. Spinoza saw the drive to maintain life to be the quintessence of a human being (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001). In his work Ethics Demonstrated According to the Geometrical Order , which Damasio principally draws on and refers to in his book as The Ethics , Spinoza presented an integrated, whole system of philosophy that taught how to arrive at serenity and happiness and avoid a meaningless existence (ibid.).

In describing his encounter with Spinoza, first as a teenager, and later as a neuroscientist, Damasio places Spinoza’s thought in the context of twentieth-century neuroscience. As an adolescent who appreciated some of what Spinoza was saying but who found much of it unintelligible, Damasio was left with a sense of awe, feeling that Spinoza was ‘both fascinating and forbidding’ (2003, p. 10). An opportunity to revisit Spinoza’s work sparked a new sense of understanding:

… there was a quote of his that I had long treasured - it came from the Ethics and pertained to the notion of self - and it was when I thought of citing it and needed to check its accuracy and context that Spinoza returned to my life. I found the quote, all right, and it did match the contents of the yellowed paper I had once pinned to the wall. But then I started reading backward and forwards from the particular passage where I had landed, and I simply could not stop. Spinoza was still the same, but I was not. Much of what had once seemed impenetrable now seemed familiar, strangely familiar, in fact, and quite relevant to several aspects of my recent work. (2003, pp. 10-11)

In the interim of his first reading of Spinoza as a teenager and his revisitation as an adult, what is different is that Damasio is now a neuroscientist, equipped with an intimate knowledge of the brain, and, in particular, the neurobiology of feelings. In this paragraph, Damasio is thus making a comparison between a state uninformed by neurobiology and one illuminated by it. What he now recognises as ‘familiar’ in Spinoza’s previously impenetrable treatise is the truth of neurobiology and the working of the human brain reflected back in Spinoza’s insight on human nature.

28 Information about Spinoza from Skirbekk and Gilje (2001).

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This contextualisation presents the frame within which Damasio is able to tell parallel stories of his work on the neurobiology of feeling and emotion, and Spinoza’s thoughts on the self, emotions and life preservation. In this move, Damasio thus draws an analogy between Spinoza, the philosopher, and Damasio, the neuroscientist. In effect substituting himself for Spinoza, Damasio reads in Spinoza things unsaid because, Damasio writes, the conceptual equipment and scientific evidence were not present at the time that Spinoza was writing. Substitution, Strathern (1992) argues, serves to connect an entity to a new domain of knowledge. Damasio notes in his introduction that one of his aims in the book - and one to which the title alludes - is to outline Spinoza the ‘protobiologist’, a ‘biological thinker’, hidden ‘behind countless propositions, axioms, proofs, lemmas, and scholia’ (2003, p. 14). In Spinoza’s exposition of mind and body, Damasio writes, Spinoza was careful not to mention the brain since little was known about it at the time. Damasio thus is now able to serve as Spinoza’s mouthpiece, writing that ‘now we can fill in the brain details and venture to say for him what he obviously could not’ (p. 213). In this way, neurobiology is connected to philosophy to reveal profound truths about human existence. In Damasio’s account, the versatile brain is already there in Spinoza’s writing, being the basis of human beings’ experiences. Seen to be essential to understanding human nature, the processes of the brain that have been deciphered by neuroscience are thus necessarily already present in the astute observations of a seventeenth-century philosopher.

The neuroscientist and a new system of meaning The brain and Spinoza’s version of the self are also brought into an analogous relationship through the act of putting into context. Damasio emphasises the centrality of issues to do with emotion and feeling in human life, particularly, shared human life. Drawing on Spinoza’s idea of the conatus , the life-preserving drive of the living organism, Damasio is able to consolidate neuroscience and prescient philosophical wisdom. This allows Damasio to consider what the mind is, and how we may live good lives: ‘Does knowing how emotions and feelings work matter at all to how we live?’ (2003, p. 267) he asks. A contented life, Spinoza asserted, required understanding and working within the possibilities of natural laws (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001). The proof being in the pudding, Damasio asks ‘was Spinoza really content?’ (2003, p. 267). Damasio says that he believes Spinoza was content, and that in his philosophy, he had worked out a way of living. Damasio recommends coming to a similar understanding of our natures that neurobiology reveals. Being aware of how we respond to ‘emotionally competent objects’ allows us to ‘wilfully strive’ to control our

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emotions (p. 52). The implication of this, Damasio suggests, seen within the context of the conatus , is that we are ‘exerting some control over the life process and leading the organism into greater or lesser harmony’ (p. 52).

At the start of the book, as part of his statement of purpose, Damasio makes clear what he imagines the role of the neuroscience of feeling and emotion to be in the way in which human beings are understood. The neurobiology of feeling provides ‘new knowledge’ (2003, p. 8) that he suggests has profound implications for human beings. Understandings in this area will not only lead to better therapies for particular health conditions, but as a truer picture of how human beings work, should also inform how individuals choose to live and how societies are organised:

...understanding what feelings are, how they work, and what they mean is indispensable to the future construction of a view of human beings more accurate than the one currently available, a view that would take into account advances in the social sciences, cognitive science, and biology. Why is such a construction of any practical use? Because the success and failure of humanity depends in large measure on how the public and the institutions charged with the governance of public life incorporate that revised view of human beings in principles and policies capable of reducing human distress and enhancing human flourishing. (pp. 7-8)

Damasio hints that earlier, more traditional, modes in which human beings have been understood require revision in the light of neuroscientific knowledge. Damasio suggests the need for a reorganisation of society based on the truths emerging from the neurobiology of feeling and emotion. He goes on to write that ‘In effect, the new knowledge even speaks to the manner in which humans deal with unresolved tensions between sacred and secular interpretations of their own existence’ (p. 8).

Like Belinda and Emily’s views on the brain and self that I presented in the earlier section, Damasio similarly associates the brain with profound questions of how life should be organised. For Spinoza, God was Nature, and coming to an understanding and acceptance of one’s nature was to love God (Skirbekk and Gilje, 2001). Damasio writes that ‘Spinoza argued that norms that shape social and personal conduct should be shaped by deeper knowledge of humanity, one that made contact with the God or Nature within ourselves’ (2003, p. 13). The appeal that Damasio finds in Spinoza is the fact that he is at once ‘close to the observable and the concrete and yet unabashedly spiritual’ (p. 16). Having lost faith in the Judaism that he was raised in and been subsequently excommunicated from the community

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that he lived in, Spinoza needed to find a way of living outside of the structure that his religion had provided.

The story of Spinoza’s life that Damasio tells parallels the ‘disenchantment of the world’ that Weber identified (Weber et al., 1946) and hints at the loss of meaning and the need for a new framework for how to live. Weber wrote in his essay ‘Science as vocation’ about the role of science and religion in meaning-making, where science is seen to involve the dispassionate study of what is: ‘And still less can it be proved that the existence of the world which these sciences describe is worthwhile, that it has any “meaning”, or that it makes sense to live in such a world. Science does not ask for the answers to such a question.’ (1946, p. 144). In his book The Scientific Life , Shapin (2008) notes that this is a particular historical development and that scientists, or natural philosophers as they might have been pre-twentieth century, saw themselves as deeply involved in moral questions about human life. It was not until after World War II that the trope of the scientist as a disinterested, objective observer emerged. In the nineteenth century, the natural philosopher was thought of as a ‘priest of nature’ (2008, p. 15). In both his popular writings at and his research work at the Brain and Creativity Institute, Damasio deals with questions of meaning and purpose. Arguing for the relevance of neuroscientific facts in informing us on questions of how to live, Damasio employs the trope of natural philosopher as ‘priest of nature’. Through these links, Damasio is able to connect neuroscience and new knowledge about the brain with the domain of the spiritual, to questions of life and death and what it means to be human:

The same natural endeavour of self-preservation that Spinoza articulates so transparently as an essence of our beings, the conatus , is called into action when we are confronted with the reality of suffering and especially the reality of death, actual or anticipated, our own, or that of those we love. (2003, p. 269)

As an object of overlapping parts, the brain provides the possibilities for the connections that Damasio makes through his pairings of philosopher with neuroscientist, and neuroscience with religion and spirituality. In this process, what Franklin et al. (2000) identify as the ‘isomorphism’ between nature and culture, where each increasingly ‘acquir[es] each other’s powers’ (p. 9) is evident. Through Damasio’s text, I have shown the kind of ‘traffic’ and ‘borrowings’ (p. 9) possible in the way ideas about the brain travel. The versatile brain moves easily across domains, from the scientific to the spiritual; across centuries, from the twenty- first to the seventeenth and back again. As a boundary object, the versatile brain is able to

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repurpose a seventeenth-century framework for living, to have been already present (if not at the time explicitly known) in a seventeenth-century philosopher’s work.

The obvious uses of a versatile brain One day in the Memory Lab, Sarah and a colleague were chatting in their shared office about a programme that had aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National the night before. The programme had been about a new book by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young called The Woman Who Changed Her Brain (published in 2012). As a child, Arrowsmith- Young had a range of serious learning difficulties as well as trouble navigating social interaction. She was able to get through school and university to earn a master’s degree in psychology because she had an unusually good memory, but this had involved considerable difficulty. In a book by the pioneering neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, Arrowsmith- Young recognised her own cognitive deficits in his description of a wounded soldier who had damage to a particular region of the brain. Arrowsmith-Young reasoned that a similar part of her own brain had not developed normally. On this discovery, Arrowsmith-Young experienced ‘profound relief’: ‘now that I knew it was the brain’ she said, ‘maybe, maybe, something could be done’ (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2012, 22.06 min).

Bolstered by the burgeoning evidence of the brain’s plasticity, Arrowsmith-Young devised a series of exercises for herself, in the hope that her brain would adapt to this malfunction and that other parts of the brain might take on the function of the faculties that she was lacking. Experiencing remarkable success with her methods, Arrowsmith-Young developed her method into a programme for children with learning difficulties called the Arrowsmith School. Arrowsmith-Young appears as one of the so-called ‘neuroplasticians’ in Norman Doidge’s (2007) bestseller, The Brain that Changes Itself , in a chapter called ‘Building herself a better brain’. The radio programme told the stories of children with profound learning difficulties like Arrowsmith-Young, as well as adults with particular deficits that were anathema to their professions, such as a butcher who could not sense where his left arm was located in space, and an aspiring architect with average spatial skills. In all instances, depending on the area of ability that her clients needed to work on, Arrowsmith-Young designed exercises that they would have to work on over a period of time lasting up to four years.

While media write-ups have been largely favourable based on anecdotal evidence from the families of children who have been helped through the school curriculum (Murray, 2014), the

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programme has received criticism from experts due to the absence of robust controlled studies (Doidge, 2007, Tarica, 2012). And while the fact that students at the Arrowsmith School improved was not in doubt, just how this improvement had occurred through the exercises that Arrowsmith-Young had designed was not known.

‘Nobody really knows exactly how it works when you come down to it,’ Sarah said. ‘They’re just talking in metaphors.’ Yet, as I have shown in this chapter so far, and as Franklin (2013, p. 158) following Strathern has argued, metaphors are never ‘just’ metaphors (p. 158). Metaphors, particularly in the context of what Strathern calls ‘merographic’ thinking, are agential (Franklin 2014. p. 243). Analogies connect different domains, in the case of neuroscience and at the most basic level, nature (to which the brain is imagined to belong), and culture (the domain to which human action and activity are assigned).

In this section, I describe the ease with which the versatile brain can be used metaphorically in the way that neuroscientists talk about human beings and human action. Neuroscientists themselves identify a ‘gap’ (Franklin 2014) in neuroscientific thinking when brain facts are applied beyond the laboratory. As I showed in the previous sections, being an object of overlapping parts, the versatile brain facilitates a ‘borrowing’ (Franklin et al. 2000, p. 9) from domains other than the concretely biological. Within Strathern’s model of the ‘merograph’, however, the parts are not necessarily equal. While the familiarity of the brain and the obvious way in which it fits into explanations of human beings rely on its being considered an object of overlapping parts (Franklin 2013, p. 16), in a neuroscience explosion, it is often the neural, the biological, and the natural that possess a ‘unidirectional and hegemonic agency’ (Franklin 2014, p. 252).

In her comments on Arrowsmith-Young, Sarah was identifying a tendency to slip the brain into explanations of human activity even though the actual processes were not known. In this tendency, the hybridity of the brain as an object of neuroscience makes its insertion seem ‘obvious and normal’ (Franklin 2013, p. 16), since it brings with it logics beyond those of a single domain (Franklin 2014). Sarah herself frequently inserted the brain into the way she talked about people when she was making a point about the impact of certain experiences on the brain. Speaking about children, she asked, ‘if you really understood the biology of a developing brain, would you put it in front of a TV?’ given that ‘TVs and phones [did not] help brains at all’. Would people practise ‘controlled crying’ if they knew ‘how you teach a developing brain emotional control’?

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Talking about a course in psychotherapy that she had taken, Sarah told me how her instructor had been keen to emphasise the neuroscience behind the therapy that he was teaching, an approach that had been particularly appealing to her:

He really wanted [his students] to understand biology. Like there was a nervous system responsible for this person in front of them. I mean it sounds very reductionist, but it’s the truth. The nervous system is responsible for the actions and emotions of anybody, of any organism of a certain level of development. No nervous system, no nothing.

This perceived fundamental truth was something that behavioural neuroscientist Bryan also emphasised as he described the work of his colleagues in the psychology department where he worked:

I like to think, and I certainly say this in lectures and things, when they’re engaging in some kind of therapeutic practice, therapy or mindfulness-based therapy, whatever it is they’re doing, the way they get changes is by changing the physical structure of someone’s brain. That is exactly what they are doing. They can’t be doing anything but that…understanding behaviour and engaging in behaviour change has to arise through changes in people’s brains.

Unlike the metaphorical sense in which Sarah suggests Arrowsmith-Young talks about neural plasticity as she helps children to overcome their debilitating learning difficulties, Sarah and Bryan’s statements are meant quite literally. They are backed, at least partially, by knowledge about actual physical impacts of technology on brains or of the synaptic changes produced by therapeutic interaction. Yet the way in which it makes sense to put a brain ‘in front of a TV’ or ‘change the physical structure of someone’s brain’ nevertheless relies on analogies that connect brain facts to social ones (Edwards 2000 in Franklin 2014). The brain can be thought of as being like a person, and a developing brain like a child that needs to be reared with or without the help of technology. The breaking and making of synaptic connections are like the interruption of habitual patterns of thought and the establishment of new ones, achieved through the process of talk therapy.

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Brain facts all on their own

Since the knowledge produced in laboratories is only ever completely applicable in the context in which it is made (Rapp 1999 cited in Franklin 2014), thinking about the gene, or indeed the brain, as a part of everyday human life involves a gap. When brain facts are expected to function in a social context, or indeed are seen to naturally and obviously be relevant to them (Franklin 2013), adjustments with the help of more familiar everyday concepts are not only unsurprising but necessary (Edwards 2000 cited in Franklin 2014). Understanding a concept such as neural plasticity and transposing these neural mechanisms onto experiences of practising reading a clock, in Arrowsmith-Young’s case, or onto the processes of psychotherapy that Bryan referred to, illustrates the appeal that facts about the brain can have when they are employed in an analogous fashion, and the potential of the versatile brain to allow these connections to be made. Yet, participants also hinted at gaps in the way in which information was being moved around. The question of what the facts coming out of neuroscience mean or what they should tell us about ourselves is by no means settled. Franklin (2014, p. 246) has argued that the more that we know about and can talk about genetic processes in ‘explicitly literal’ ways, ‘ the more uncertain it seems we are about the meaning of this information or what to do with it ’ (italics are Franklin’s). While Sarah and Bryan slipped brain facts into conversations in ways that were ‘obvious and normal’ (Franklin 2013, p. 16), there were other instances when my key informants were either reluctant to do this, or had made a conscious effort to avoid it.

Ann, the cellular neuroscientist who described herself as a concrete ‘nuts-and-bolts’ sort of person, suggested that this ‘biologisation’ of thought is not complete. Referring to work in memory research, she said ‘even now, everyone thinks that long-term potentiation is possibly a synaptic event that might underlie aspects of memory, but you can’t even make that one statement clear, that memory is long-term potentiation.’ For Ann, being the nuts-and-bolts kind of person she was, for an understanding of brain processes to really inform her experience of life in a meaningful way, she wanted to be able to say concretely what brain processes were the act of remembering. As things stood, while she was certain of how things worked in the nerve cells she studied, the links between those processes and her actual waking life were mere speculation.

Simon, the Self-Control Lab head who stood out amongst my participants in terms of the comparatively modest attitudes that he had of neuroscience’s scope, thought there was a

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difference between ‘the physical or physiological processes underlying some behaviour’ and ‘understand[ing] it completely’. He said:

You know, you can understand the physiological basis for a behaviour but not its motivation. And somebody might not ever be able to explain the motivation for a particular behaviour, um, an individual. So, we’ll never understand it completely. Why people do certain things.

It is not inconceivable that the neural processes that constitute ‘motivation’ would be within the scope of the neuroscience enterprise. What Simon was suggesting, however, was that there was something beyond mere neural processes, beyond the domain of the biological, that would account for what we would call ‘motivation’. Simon was attuned to the tendency for brain facts to be slipped into other ways of talking about human phenomena. He suggested that one of the challenges for neuroscience was how to ‘be careful about the way we talk about’ developments in neuroscience. For example, when it came to the question of responsibility, Simon argued that while understanding the neuroscience behind a particular behaviour might provide a ‘reason’ for the behaviour, but whether it ‘necessarily excuse[d]’ it was a separate question.

Brain facts do not say enough on their own and their ability to be made meaningful to the questions of human existence draws from other orders of knowledge beyond the biological and the scientific (Cohn, 2004, Edwards 2000 cited in Franklin, 2014). In the expansion of neuroscience to include a broadening scope is an inevitable mixing of ideas from a range of disciplines and domains that can effectively address this gap. Yet, while other logics are employed to make sense of brain facts, in Bryan and Sarah’s use of the brain in the way they talk about child rearing and psychotherapy, the brain is still able to stand for the wholly concrete and biological. After all, ‘no nervous system, no nothing’ (Sarah). Within the conventions of Western knowledge-making that Strathern identifies, metaphor can preserve as well as expand meaning (Street & Copeman 2014).

An overriding logic In the midst of the borrowing, transfer, and translation of concepts and ideas (Street and Copeman 2014; Franklin 2013) is an instrumentalism in the way that knowledge moves and in which domains are swapped (Franklin 2013, p. 156). Though both social and biological facts can each be deployed in service of the other (Thompson 2005), most often, being seen

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to come prior to all else (Franklin 2013), it is biology that is ‘mobilized’ (Thompson 2005, p. 146) and nature that ‘is put to work’ (Frankin et al. 2000, p. 19) to strategic effect. In Looking for Spinoza , for instance, it is neurobiology that finally backs up Spinoza and makes him worth a second look.

The Self-Control Lab’s Patrick thought that neuroscientists could ‘derive a lot of questions by reading about what philosophers think’. Patrick reasoned that, had eighteenth-century philosophers such as David Hume been alive today, they would have been ‘pretty attracted to neuroscience’ as a way of answering some of the questions about human nature with which they were grappling. Patrick described an article that he had come across on Hume’s ideas on reason and passion. The article, published in the Journal of Neuroscience and entitled ‘When Desire Collides with Reason’, investigated the brain regions involved in resisting something desirable in the short term for long-term gains (Diekhof and Gruber, 2010). In his Treatise on Human Nature , Hume described passion as what motivated human beings, being feelings about what ‘ought’ to be. Hume considered reason, which was the sense of what was, to be a ‘slave’ to passion (Schmitter, 2010). Patrick described the appeal of fMRI studies of the neural correlates involved in resisting an immediate reward. He said:

You can visualise the collision, like the conflict between what you want now, which is a passion, versus what you know you should have, something that you know will be beneficial to you in the future.

In the results of the study by Diekhof and Gruber (2010) where an area of the prefrontal cortex applies a moderating effect to another area in the brain, Patrick saw the embodiment of what he described as Hume’s arguments about ‘passion and desire versus reason’. For Patrick, research on how the brain works provided powerful material and visual evidence of the accuracy of Hume’s writings on human experience.

Just as neuroscience backs up certain concepts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, it can also be seen to spell the end of previously taken for granted ideas about human experience. The question of free will has been one that has given rise to some controversy (Racine et al., 2016), the most prominent commentator perhaps being the new atheist and neuroscientist author, Sam Harris, who published a book called Free Will in 2012 arguing that human beings do not have free will. A study by Libet in 1983 set off a debate about the existence of free will and led to a host of other studies on the topic (Racine et al.

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2016). Racine et al. (2016) found, in an analysis of media coverage of Libet’s study, that neuroscientific commentators were drawing conclusions about free will based on everyday common-sense notions rather than clearly defined philosophical positions. Often, those arguing that free will was a myth, did so by equating the existence of something called ‘free will’ to the existence of a soul. As in the case of the mind/body problem that I discussed in chapter two (Van Oudenhove and Cuypers, 2010), while the illusoriness of free will is not a particularly controversial point, possible philosophical positions on free will are complex, nuanced and varied (Racine et al. 2016).

Patrick and John are two participants who raised the question of free will in discussing what the implications of neuroscience were. Patrick and John both said that, through their familiarity with neuroscience, they had concluded that there was no such thing as ‘free will’. John suggested that the ‘philosophical aspect of free will’ would cease to be relevant. He said:

I think what will happen in the end is that we will restructure the way that we describe things. Free will become an unintelligible or an unintelligent thing to pursue. It will be: how do you define the decision-making process in the organism? That would be a better way of stating it rather than talking about the philosophical aspect of free will.

Talking about the goal of neuroscience being to ‘mechanise the mind’, John suggested that the ‘inevitable consequence’ of this work would be a shift towards a more deterministic view of human behaviour. Both Patrick and John described a reluctance to arrive at the conclusions that they were coming to. Patrick described the way in which neuroscience shaped the way that he thought about others’ behaviour. He said:

Sometimes you might have to try not to think about things [at] a neural level. When you are with people, you don’t want to suddenly reduce their behaviour to just the activity between various networks of the brain. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to do that.

Similarly, John’s deterministic perspective on human behaviour was one that he felt that he had been ‘forced’ to accept in the course of doing neuroscience. In the way in which John imagined human behaviour (dealt with in chapter five), the way someone behaved was ‘determined by [their] brain structure and the particular environment that [they] encounter[ed]’:

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SC: What do you think about that deterministic perspective? John: Well, I have been forced to agree with it.

SC: What do you mean you’ve been forced to agree with it?

John: Well, if I think, the way I – thinking, it’s a lot to do with my genetics and my upbringing. The way I decide to do something, if I knew everything about my brain, and its structure, I can predict with a high level of confidence what I’d do. Put a situation in front of me, and likewise with anybody. So, our behaviour is determined by our genetics and our past experience, and the environment that we encounter. Doesn’t mean it’s simple, but that seems to be an inevitable consequence of the neuroscience that we’re studying.

John argued that this would have profound ‘philosophical, social, legal consequences’ as it touched on questions of ‘the way we regard responsibility for our behaviour’. For Patrick and John, the neuroscience that they were doing, and the neuroscience they were familiar with, structured human beings for them in a very specific way (Good 1994). The mechanical processes of the brain were the basic ground on which all else is built. Thus, for example, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature correctly intuits an undeniable brain-based effect in the way brain regions interact, one that is manifested as a tussle between passion and reason.

While what the neuroscience of decision-making should mean for concepts of free will is beyond the scope of this thesis, my participants’ perspectives illustrate how domains are arranged in the space of a versatile brain. In the neuroscience enterprise’s push for greater interdisciplinarity, scholars have shown (Racine et al. 2016) how neuroscientific findings possess an ‘epistemic supremacy’ (p. 1002). In After Nature , Strathern (1992) writes that the logic of a whole does not come from the logic of its parts, but from the relations that exist between the parts. The brain as it is coming to be known through neuroscience, though drawing on a range of ideas and concepts, is not made up equally of the logics of the domains of which it is comprised.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I explored the idea of a ‘versatile brain’ as the boundary object possessing an interpretive flexibility that allows it to expand the range of phenomena to which neuroscience is seen to be applicable. This brain is an object that accommodates paradox and contradiction,

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able to be both self and non-self, mundanely biological and yet more than mere biology. The versatile brain provides an approach to human issues that is firmly biological, yet is one that can fill the gaps that biology does not address. As an object of overlapping parts that belong to different domains, it is able to facilitate the application of neuroscience to a range of human problems, including fundamental questions about how life should be lived. The versatile brain, slipping easily into everyday talk as substitutes for human beings and human action, shows up in unexpected places, though there are limitations and disruptions in the way that it travels.

I explored this boundary object’s interpretive flexibility via Strathern’s (1992) theorisation of knowledge-making in the West. As part of the boundary infrastructure that I argue neuroscience’s brain provides, the versatile brain expands neuroscience’s epistemic space, while providing a firm grounding in the concrete. The brain, being both nature and culture, provides the possibility of new perspectives each time it is placed in a different context (Strathern 1992). While nature and culture are analogous domains, ‘each is also connected to a whole range of other phenomena that differentiates them’ (p. 73). Every act of placing the brain in context is an opportunity for knowledge to be moved around, a process that, through repetition, adjusts the background against which the brain is characterised (Franklin 2013).

The concept of the versatile brain as a boundary object that is able to be slipped easily into other ways of understanding human beings captures the dynamism of neuroscience, and provides a way of thinking about neuroscience’s expansion into areas that are traditionally the domains of other disciplines. While it can extend meaning in the ways it is liberally evoked in a range of situations, it is also able to anchor meaning in a powerful, singular truth of the neural (Franklin 2013; 2014).

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Throughout my fieldwork with the Memory and Self-Control Labs, just as I tried to make sense of what they were doing, my participants also tried to make sense of what I was doing as a student ethnographer in their laboratories. They asked questions about what my purpose was and quizzed me on my research questions, finding the open-ended and relatively undefined nature of ethnography sometimes baffling. A few months after I completed my fieldwork with the Memory Lab, I returned to present some of my preliminary ideas about the data I had collected. I provided an overview of my STS-inspired approach. I explained the idea of the situatedness of scientific knowledge (Haraway 1988) and suggested that the way that human beings are understood in terms of the brain was not inevitable. ‘Are you saying that we could be wrong?’ John, the laboratory head, asked during the presentation. ‘I have no problem with that statement,’ John continued. ‘We could be wrong. That’s the nature of empiricism’.

As John had explained to me in one of our chats as he tried to help me nail down my research question, the laboratory had a clear, unchanging aim. This was to discover the engram, a goal within which their specific project of identifying the neurons involved in fear learning fitted. Of course, they could only work with the materials and technologies that were available to them. ‘Bootstrapping’ was what John and Sarah called this process. A bad supply of a reagent, a change in the person handling the mice, mice born to mothers pregnant during construction work, for example, could all potentially create artefacts. These were results, Sarah said, that were ‘not truthful’. As an experienced research assistant, Sarah was the person who was responsible for the day-to-day processes of the laboratory. She had worked out a system where a mouse was trained, tested, killed, their brain perfused and fixed, steps which all needed to occur according to a strict timetable. ‘Successful science,’ she said, meaning science that got at the truth, was based on ‘getting all these things right’.

In the popular understanding of science, one that forms the modern understanding about scientists and what they do, scientists study the natural world and through their methods discover truths about it (Sismondo 2010). There are thus fear learning neurons or regions responsible for self-control in the brain that the laboratories’ methods and techniques allow scientists to discover. Only time will tell, as techniques and technologies develop, whether what they have found corresponds to this truth. In contrast, this study took a broader perspective on how scientific knowledge is made by considering the confluence of a host of

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elements that have allowed this work to occur (Edwards et al. 2007). While there is an immense literature in the philosophy of science about the nature of scientific knowledge and truth (Sismondo 2010; Hess 1997b), these are beyond the scope of this thesis. What this thesis does instead is to represent truth and knowledge-making from the perspectives of my neuroscientist participants and the authors whose books I have analysed, situating these within the establishment and growth of the field of neuroscience.

Taking the approach of object ethnography centred on the brain to understand the growth of neuroscience and its expansion into the study of broad human phenomena, I have been able to consider the way in which the development of neuroscience and the brain as its object of study have developed in tandem. In this approach, the brain that is the object of neuroscientific investigation is shown to be made through relationships established between scientists from a range of disciplines, the materials and technologies that facilitate their work, and the practices and processes that constitute it (Callon 1986; Star 2010; Knorr Cetina 1997, 2000). In this scenario, the brain in neuroscience is a scientific object with a very particular history, its characteristics as an object of scientific investigation developed in a particular time and place (Hacking 2002; Daston 2000).

Early on in my fieldwork with the Memory Lab, Sarah tried to make sense of what I was doing in the lab. Why was I there, apart from just wanting to ‘hang out’ and ‘have fun’? I described how in traditional anthropological studies, anthropologists would try to understand cultures and societies different to their own, and how social scientists studying science had adopted a similar approach in trying to understand scientific worlds. I was trying to understand neuroscience as a specific culture with a unique way of thinking and doing. ‘But, why should we be understood?’ she asked.

Indeed, why should it matter what a small neuroscience laboratory in Australia does as part of their day-to-day work? Or that a geneticist would come to be interested in memory or a psychologist in brain processes? While the members of the Memory and Self-Control Labs were my introduction to the world of neuroscience research on the human and have been central to my understanding of neuroscience’s brain, this thesis is not, ultimately, about the work of individual laboratories. The laboratories are examples of how facts about the brain are produced in a particular context. This context is that of a neuroscience explosion where mind is what brain does, and where questions about mind, however mind is defined, are seen

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to be found in the brain. This thesis is about the making of a field, its objects, and through these, an approach to understanding human beings.

The neuroscience enterprise articulates a broad vision for phenomena that can be explained in terms of the brain. Not all neuroscientists necessarily share this vision by any means, and some may do so only to a limited extent. Individual neuroscientists may be focused solely on finding practical solutions to brain disorders, or in working out the physiological processes of small ‘bits of brain’, as was key informant Ann. Even so, the vision of the neuroscience enterprise provides the field, as a collective, with its orientation. Neuroscience, being the study of the brain and nervous system, collectively delimits an area of expertise that extends from molecules to mind. Neuroscience’s brain is made up of different categories, mind and body, nature and culture, in a single object. This object is a particularly human kind of scientific object, in whose material form and physical processes an ‘unmistakably human model of ourselves’ (Franklin 2014, p. 252) is recognised. Neuroscience’s brain is thus able to be many things at once. In the way that it conceives of and approaches the brain, neuroscience is able to draw from a long history, and from a broad spectrum of ideas, techniques and materials.

In this chapter, I conclude the thesis, emphasising and developing my central argument, and discussing its implications. I first provide a summary of the thesis, revisiting the main arguments of each chapter. I then turn to the methodological, conceptual, and substantive contributions that this thesis makes. I finish by discussing the limitations within which the study should be considered and make suggestions for possibilities for future research.

Summary of thesis The central argument that I have made in this thesis is that the brain is an object that gives neuroscience its coherence as an interdisciplinary field. The brain, as it is approached and articulated in neuroscience, embodies connections between neuroscience, brain, and human. It sustains the expansion of neuroscience into the study of increasingly broad human phenomena. Specifically, I have argued that the brain in neuroscience functions as ‘boundary infrastructure’, a network of three boundary objects that each have a role in facilitating cohesion amidst difference and contradiction (Bowker and Star 1999). As boundary infrastructure, neuroscience’s brain serves the organisational needs of an enterprise whose object includes mind and whatever mind is seen to contain. The brain, as neuroscience’s primary object of study, first draws together this collective, providing the space for different

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approaches, at the same time, serving a common informational need; second, it functions as the goal of neuroscience, an object that is both mind and body, material and immaterial; third, it is an object that is already seen to contain parts of different domains of human life, facilitating mixtures of knowledge that expand the terrain to which brain-based explanations can be applied. I have suggested that neuroscience’s brain is a symbolic form that structures a particularly neuroscientific approach to human thought, behaviour and feeling. The brain provides a concrete, tangible understanding of human issues; it allows brain-based explanations to extend to areas that material is not yet able to go; being central to human life, the brain allows neuroscience to be imagined as a framework for how life should be lived.

In chapter one, I made an argument for the need for a brain-based exploration of the growth of neuroscience and its expansion into the study of increasingly broad human phenomena. I provided justification for such a brain-centric approach, emphasising that, as an object of human knowledge, the brain is dynamic and evolving (Borck 2016; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). The chapter provided a brief overview of a neuroscience ‘explosion’, from the 1990’s Decade of the Brain onwards. I suggested that in the emergence of a ‘neuroculture’ (Frazzetto et al. 2009; Vidal & Orega 2011) where brain-based explanations of human behaviour possess an ‘epistemic supremacy’ (Racine 2016, p. 1002), neuroscience, brain and human appear inextricably linked. I presented an overarching theoretical framework drawing: first, on Bowker and Star’s (1999) concept of boundary infrastructure, a network of shared ‘boundary objects’ (Bowker & Star 1999; Star 2010) that allows collaborative work in the absence of agreement; and second, on philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s (in Good 1994) concept of the ‘symbolic form’ that addresses the role of symbols in structuring an approach to reality. The first concept focuses attention on work processes, materials, and relationships, and the second to the role of imagination. Within this overarching frame, I drew on theories that provided ways of thinking about the brain as both an object of science, as well as a particularly human object that is intertwined in ways of thinking about human life.

Chapter two provided the context for thinking about the brain as an object of neuroscience with an overview of ideas about mind and brain and how they have been investigated over time. Following Clarke and Fujimura’s (1992) recommendation of a broad understanding of what is relevant to science, I argued for an understanding of neuroscience’s brain as a point of confluence of materials, technologies, practices, ideas, professions, disciplines and so on, occurring in the context of a formalised neuroscience enterprise.

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My research rests on the assumption that neuroscience’s object is the mind/brain, and I showed this through examples from Francis O. Schmitt’s articulation of the Neuroscience Research Program that he established at MIT in 1962 (Adelman 2010), as well as material from Kandel et al.’s (2013) Principles of Neural Science , the standard textbook used in neuroscience university courses. A brief history of the concept of ‘mind’ illustrated how ideas of mind, and ideas about its relation to brain, have evolved over time, and showed that parallel developments in science, medicine, and society accompanied these shifts. While the mind/body problem has been a constant feature of Western thinking on mind and brain, in contemporary neuroscience, mind is seen to be what brain does, a solution that allows the work of neuroscience to proceed. Nevertheless, neuroscientists may adopt several positions in relation to the mind/body problem as they make arguments about neuroscience’s relevance to questions of mind (van Oudenhove & Cuypers 2010).

Having provided some context for understanding the brain as neuroscience’s object, I then gave an overview of the development of two of the main methods that are employed in studies of mind and brain, namely brain imaging and studies with rodents. These methods broadly make up the research of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience, the research areas of the Self-Control and Memory labs in this thesis. Here, I highlighted the groundwork that provides these methods with legitimacy within a neuroscience enterprise and emphasised that studies of mind and brain are both facilitated and constrained in the process (Clarke in 1987 cited in Clarke & Fujimura 1992).

Chapter three described my approach of ‘object ethnography’, an ethnographic study of neuroscience that centres on the brain as its object, to address the question of how neuroscience sustains an increasingly broad research scope. As a methodological tool, I employed the approach, described by Henare et al. (2007), of taking an object to be whatever respondents say it is. This provided me with an approach that began with neuroscientists’ perspectives (Hess 1997b). Focusing on the brain allowed me to delineate a dispersed field (Martin, 1997, Schensul and LeCompte, 2012), connecting the different sources of data that I collected, as well as the world of neuroscience to the world beyond the laboratory.

Chapters four, five and six formed the substantive portion of my thesis in which I presented three different boundary objects: the tangible, projected, and versatile brains. In chapter four, I described the tangible brain as the foundation of the boundary infrastructure that I argue the brain in neuroscience provides for the field. Neuroscience can be thought of as an object-

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centred collective of scientists bringing with them different ideas, techniques and materials (Knorr Cetina 1997). I began the chapter with an account of the Decade of the Brain to illustrate the importance of a moment when scientists from different disciplines were drawn into the neuroscience enterprise. All were part of the making of neuroscience and of establishing ways of understanding the brain, even while most did not know the brain at all the levels covered in a neuroscience university course. Neuroscience’s brain, its official object, is articulated in textbooks such as Principles of Neural Science (Kandel et al. 2013) and by ‘full-fledged’ neuroscientists like key informant Thomas. This official object is a biological organ that extends from molecules to mind.

Through accounts of the work in the Memory and Self-Control labs, I described the materialisation that was a central process in the work of these scientists as they counted activated neurons and produced tangible evidence of brain activity. This process was one that was precisely orchestrated, requiring the alignment of multiple elements. It also required vigilance against the risk of turning what was not real into what the scientists recognised were very concrete products (e.g. brain images) with real-world effects. My participants developed brain-based explanations to provide fundamental information about human thought, behaviour and feeling. The tangible brain, its biological, physical reality came first for the neuroscientists, forming a basic reason that they were neuroscientists at all, and forming a crucial way in which they understood human phenomena.

Chapter five explored the way in which the brain operates as an object of knowledge that guides the direction of neuroscience work (Rheinberger, 1997, Daston, 2000, Knorr Cetina, 1997). I proposed the ‘projected brain’ as a boundary object that emerged from the need to juggle mind and brain (Bowker and Star 1999). The chapter also considered the way in which materiality and immateriality are intertwined in a dialectical relationship (Sunder Rajan, 2006, Miller, 2005, Ingold, 2007). My participants all had different ways of positioning mind in relation to brain depending on the nature of their work and the disciplinary orientation they brought to the brain. Although mind might have been taken to be what brain did, mind and brain were categories that nevertheless had to be managed.

I described the primary project of the Memory Lab of identifying the neurons involved in fear learning through the laboratory head’s conceptualisation of personality. Here, I showed the two-way relationship between the abstract, or what John considered to be ‘ephemeral’, with the concrete. This interplay of the material and immaterial carries over into the practical

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world of the laboratory as research aims are adjusted according to what is feasible with the materials at hand. The projected brain, as a boundary object in the world of the laboratory, performed a different practical purpose from the concrete, tangible brain that I described in chapter four (Knorr Cetina 2000).

Eric Kandel’s (2006) In Search of Memory provided an example of the articulation of a projected brain for neuroscience from one of neuroscience’s luminaries. I suggested that through his articulation of a projected brain, functioning in the manner of Cassirer’s symbolic form (Good 1994), Kandel provided an interpretive scheme for understanding broad human issues through neuroscience. As neuroscience’s knowledge object, the projected brain was an evolving thing. The projected brain was an object that was naturalised for individual neuroscientists to different extents, evident in the ways that my participants and the neuroscience writers engaged with the question of neuroscience’s scope.

In chapter six, I developed the idea of a ‘versatile brain’ drawing on Strathern’s (1992) theories of Western knowledge conventions. I showed how the brain was a particularly human object, and how it allowed connections to be made between different orders of knowledge; these could be moved around in strategic ways. The brain could be at once representative of self as well as non-self. Substituting the brain for concepts such as the soul in thinking about human life provided opportunities for making connections to systems of meaning beyond the biological and scientific (Strathern 1992). Through Damasio’s (2003) book Looking for Spinoza , I showed how Damasio made use of opportunities for connection and mixing that the brain provided as a uniquely human kind of scientific object. Through these moves, I argued that Damasio was able to articulate a system of meaning based on neuroscience. Sitting at intersections of human life, the brain was a ‘familiar’ object (Franklin 2013). Inserting the brain into the way human beings are talked about, the way in which philosophical theories were assessed and so on, appeared to make intuitive sense. Though this process, a biological logic was able to dominate while other forms of knowledge filled in for what this logic lacked in addressing questions of human life (Edwards 2000 in Franklin 2013; Cohn 2004). Following Strathern (discussed in Street & Copeman 2014), I argued that the use of the versatile brain in the ways that I illustrated in chapter six, opened up epistemic space for neuroscience, extending the kind of human phenomena to which it could apply.

Taking the approach of object ethnography to an investigation of neuroscience has allowed me to examine how the brain, as a central object of neuroscience study, is able to connect

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ideas, practices, materials and scientists that all have a role in shaping how an understanding of the human through the brain is taking shape. Along with the theories that I employ, this approach has allowed me to consider the meaning that the brain is given within the world of neuroscience (Appadurai 1986) as both a scientific object as well as an everyday human one (Daston 2000). The three boundary objects that I have described in the thesis - the tangible, projected, and versatile brain - capture important needs of neuroscientific work, and provide tools for thinking about its contemporary appeal and its ability to expand into the investigation of broad human phenomena.

Contributions of this research In this research, I sought to understand the neuroscience explosion, the rapid growth of neuroscience since the 1990s, and the incorporation of increasingly broad phenomena within the scope of its research programme. I was interested in what sort of view of human beings was taking shape in societies like Australia where neuroscience is seen to provide an authoritative explanatory framework for human problems. My methodological and theoretical approaches aimed to understand how neuroscience’s continuing expansion was being sustained and to consider the links that were taken for granted between the field of neuroscience, the brain and the human.

To understand the broadening of neuroscience’s scope that has occurred since the Decade of the Brain, I delineated my field of study by conducting an object ethnography, focusing on the brain as neuroscience’s object. I drew from theories in STS that encouraged me to consider neuroscience relationally, particularly in thinking about its interdisciplinary nature, as well as to consider a broad range of entities (contemporary and historical) beyond the scientists who make up neuroscience (Clarke & Fujimura 1992; Thompson 2005; Clarke 2005). These perspectives encouraged consideration of materials, technologies, processes, relationships, concepts, work, careers and a host of other entities that are not usually accounted for in the finished products of scientific work. To understand what was compelling about neuroscience as an explanatory framework, I incorporated the interpretive approach that Good (1994) takes in his study of biomedicine which provided a way of considering the role of the imaginative in neuroscience.

Methodological contributions This thesis contributes an ethnography of neuroscience through its central object, the brain. The brain is crucial to neuroscience’s organisation as an interdisciplinary field and to its

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ability to assert its relevance across many different domains of knowledge. Ethnographies of biomedical science have previously employed the strategy of following objects, ones that may be overlooked, allowing them to lead the researchers into unexpected places: a courtroom in a study of PET scanning (Dumit 2004) or an agricultural show in a study of cloning (Franklin 2007). In contrast, this ethnography focused on a very obvious object, one that, in the context of a neuroscience explosion, is very prominently there and everywhere. Instead, my methodological tools led me to take a closer look at this conspicuous thing, neuroscience’s brain. I adopted the method of object ethnography used in STS as a strategy of ‘studying boring things’ (Star 1999, p. 379), meaning, studying things normally not considered worthy of social scientific investigation. This approach makes use of theoretical tools that facilitate an understanding of sociality through objects (Knorr Cetina 1997, 2001). Conducting an object ethnography was thus a way of ‘forcing’ a consideration of the way the brain and ideas about it have supported the development of a discipline where broad human phenomena are studied in neural terms.

My research demonstrates the methodological value of the approach of taking an object to be what one’s participants say it is (Henare et al. 2007), but also of staying attuned to diversity in the ways that people relate to this object (Graeber 2015). This approach has allowed me to highlight the productiveness of neuroscience’s central organising principle, the articulation and understanding of its object to be mind/brain. Adopting these analytical strategies has also allowed me to distinguish official versions of neuroscience’s brain from the ways scientists from different disciplines think about it. It has enabled me to highlight the differences between the object that is articulated in the way neuroscientist talk and write about the significance of their work, and the object that is encountered in the neuroscience laboratory. Through an approach of ‘creative respect’ (Graeber 2015, p. 21) towards my participants and the central object of their trade, this research underscores the ways that it is possible for neuroscientists to relate to neuroscience’s brain, as well as the limits to this variation.

Madden (2010) argues that ethnography, particularly in its writing up, sits at the border between the humanities and the natural sciences with its aim of producing a coherent, ethnographically meaningful picture of particular societies and cultures. While committed firmly to producing an empirical account of what is true, ethnography involves an imaginative telling of a compelling story, what Madden refers to as a ‘storied reality’ (p. 126). In the telling of this story of neuroscience, neuroscience’s brain, as it did for my participants, also provided me with ‘infrastructure’ in my explication of a context in which a

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particular view of the human is taking shape. Just as I have argued that this brain provides coherence for neuroscience, so too the strategy of object ethnography focused on the brain provided me with a means of telling a coherent story. It has allowed me to connect the neuroscience laboratory to processes beyond it, and to integrate three different sources of data - participant observation, key informant interviews and textual analysis of popular neuroscience books by neuroscientists - into a holistic account of a neuroscientific culture.

The thesis contributes an anthropologically orientated ethnography of neuroscience that begins with the perspectives of neuroscientists themselves (Hess 1997b). The making of neuroscience and its connections to the brain and the human, as well as its expansion into the study of increasing broad phenomena, are ongoing projects. This account of neuroscience will inform engagement with neuroscientists as the work of building the discipline proceeds (Choudhury & Slaby 2012). My research provides a brain-based ethnography of neuroscience at a specific moment in time when most senior neuroscientists (my key informants and the authors whose books I have analysed) were trained in the different sciences that make up the interdisciplinary field. Neuroscientific culture and its objects will inevitably change as more of the senior scientists in the field become scientists inducted into the discipline through undergraduate neuroscience courses.

Conceptual contributions This research contributes to theorising neuroscience’s expanding scope via its central signifier, the human brain. I developed the concept of ‘neuroscience’s brain’ by drawing from the theories of boundary infrastructure (Bowker & Star 1999) and Cassirer’s symbolic form (Good 1994). This overarching theoretical framework synthesises the multiple elements that are part of the making of neuroscience. The approach facilitates an understanding of neuroscience through its material, practice and imagination; it allows the consideration of the brain as both an object of science as well as a human object (a mundane physiological one as well as one imbued with special significance); it connects neuroscience’s brain, scientist, and interested public in the work of neuroscience and the quest of understanding the brain and the human being. The theoretical apparatus of ‘neuroscience’s brain’ that I have assembled in this thesis provides a way of simultaneously conceptualising the ongoing discipline-building of neuroscience, as well as the development of a compelling explanatory framework for human phenomena.

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The three boundary objects that I have identified, the tangible, projected and versatile brains, highlight the multiplicity that underlies and facilitates the singularity (Dugdale 1999) of neuroscience’s official object, the biological brain. While neuroscience is a discipline gathered around this biological brain as its primary object (Knorr Cetina 1997), in articulating a brain that spans molecules to mind, and endeavouring to study in brain terms whatever ‘mind’ can be conceived to contain, neuroscientists face both practical and conceptual challenges. The tangible, projected and versatile brains theorise the way in which a single object, neuroscience’s brain, is used in multiple ways that address these challenges. These three boundary objects address the work needs of neuroscientists (Star 2010) within a neuroscience enterprise, namely, the project of understanding mind in terms of the brain.

Cassirer’s concept of the symbolic form (in Good 1994) adds an imaginative component to the idea of neuroscience’s brain. I illustrate in this research how neuroscience’s brain provides an imaginative schema in which the biological brain is able to span the molecular to the transcendental. In the way that a symbol represents what is beyond the senses (Barash 2008), neuroscience’s brain stands for the unseen, whether a neural process in a social encounter or the ‘ephemerality’ of personality in a nerve cell. While neuroscientists regularly engage with the normally unseen via their techniques, tools and technologies, neuroscience’s brain, through its symbolising and schematising functions (Barash 2008), brings concrete, tangible biological processes into the way human behaviour is imagined, and intangible mental processes into encounters with the brain’s biological reality.

While my ethnographic focus was on an object, in the end, this thesis is about human activity, and about the way in which that activity is shaping a very particular type of knowledge about the human. The thesis contributes an understanding of neuroscience’s situatedness and contingency (Haraway 1988; Clarke 2005). I have emphasised how this approach to understanding human beings through the brain is taking shape through the ongoing effort of building an interdisciplinary field with the specific project of understanding mind in terms of the brain. Within this enterprise, the links between the brain and the human, and neuroscience and the brain, are considered to be self-evident, resting on an assumption of the unity of science and knowledge. Through the theoretical tools that I have employed, this research presents an alternative account of the nexus between neuroscience, brain and human. It highlights the material, conceptual and processual resources that contemporary neuroscience is able to draw on (Choudhury & Slaby 2012), showing how neuroscience’s ability to be a

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compelling explanatory framework for a broad range of human phenomena is an achievement rather than a natural given (Berg & Mol 1998; Young 1995).

Significance of this research: understanding neuroscience’s expanding scope This research has demonstrated how neuroscience’s brain is an object that facilitates the building of an interdisciplinary field with a growing scope to investigate complex human issues at a neural level. Some of my participants may have considered their work to sit on the peripheries of neuroscience, thinking of themselves more as psychologists, as Simon of the Self-Control Lab did, or finding, like the Memory Lab members, that their area of research was underrepresented at neuroscience conferences. Yet, whether they were a geneticist or a psychologist turned neuroscientist, my participants’ accounts of their careers as neuroscientists illustrated the dynamism of neuroscience as an evolving field and its ability to accommodate scientists with a diverse set of skills and expertise. Indeed, as John and Sarah of the Memory Lab found when they attended a neuroscience conference in Europe (described in chapter five), their area of expertise, behavioural neuroscience, appeared to be moving from the margins of neuroscience towards its centre.

These differences amongst neuroscientists who study human thought, behaviour and feeling have played an important role in shaping the breadth of neuroscience research. Galison (1999) has argued that contrary to popular belief, science is characterised by disunity rather than unity, and that this disunity is part of its robustness. Indeed, the Memory Lab’s Sarah, in describing how she had been comfortable reading notoriously difficult theorists like Lacan and Derrida in a psychotherapy course she had taken, said that, as a scientist, she was accustomed to reading texts where you ‘don’t get what the words mean’. Even in conference sessions that were specific to his area of expertise, John (as noted in chapter four) struggled to understand the work of other presenters who might have been studying memory in a completely different way than he was.

Despite these differences, neuroscience holds together as a discipline with a growing research scope. My research has indicated that the field not only provides a broad range of scientists with the space to engage with its official object in their own way, but that the conceptualisation of this object also provides the field with a powerful directive that drives research into increasingly complex phenomena. The brain, conceived of as ‘mind/brain’, is a fluid object, able to be imagined, recognised, and deciphered in a myriad of human issues. While some have questioned the utility of work whose only purpose (at present) is to

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discover the neural correlates of various processes (Dumit, 2012), I have shown how there is a strong impetus to ‘[go] underneath the hood’ (John, Memory Lab). Neuroscientists acknowledge that they are only at the ‘tip of the iceberg’ (Thomas, behavioural neuroscientist) in terms of coming to an understanding of the human brain. ‘Neuroscience’s brain’ provides a projection into the future where mind already lines up with brain, and within this frame, discovering neural correlates is only the beginning.

Possibilities for and limits to diversity in neuroscience Within such a diverse field, the need for boundary objects and boundary infrastructure (Bowker & Star 1999; Star and Griesemer; Star 2010) is clear. Knorr Cetina’s suggestion that an object in science serves as an ‘embedding environment’ (1997, p. 25) for the group of scientists gathered around it provides helpful imagery for thinking about the ability of neuroscience to accommodate difference. As work progresses under the banner of neuroscience, and an ever-growing range of phenomena are seen to be investigable through neuroscientific methods, neuroscience’s object inevitably changes, and so too do the possibilities for accommodation within it.

My research demonstrates how neuroscience’s brain functions as effective boundary infrastructure within neuroscience. In the neuroscience enterprise of understanding mind in terms of the brain, neuroscience’s brain works effectively as boundary infrastructure to ‘keep things moving along’ (Bowker & Star 1999, p. 313) driving research that increasingly explores complex human issues. Yet, while neuroscience’s brain is demonstrably a space that provides multiple possibilities for the mixing of knowledge, this mixing occurs along the lines of a particular logic. This logic is one that adheres to the unity of science perspective that was at the heart of Schmitt’s project (Adelman 2010) where the biological is considered to be ‘ontologically prior’ (Good 1994, p. 76) to the mental or social processes studied in terms of the brain.

Bowker and Star (1999) note that the concept of the ‘boundary object’ was developed to be used in situations of relative equality. In situations of inequality, they argue, interactions are structured differently. As Fitzgerald et al. (2015, 2014) found (discussed in chapter one), attempts to simultaneously address the informational needs of neuroscience, as well as the other fields that it draws from, run into trouble when the neural becomes the fundamental point of interest in these transdisciplinary encounters. As the data that I presented in chapter six indicates, in the combination of neuroscience and philosophical approaches to human

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experience, only material where neural processes are recognisable remain intact, while concepts that fly in the face of tangible, concrete brain processes are trimmed away. There is thus a limit to the diversity that ‘neuroscience’s brain’, in its current configuration, can accommodate. Indeed, Dumit (2012) explicitly argues that, in the case of developing neuro- fields where neuroscience is brought together with the humanities and social sciences, the brains that are the objects of interdisciplinary research do not yet function as boundary objects, though they ought to 1.

Within the confines of ‘neuroscience’s brain’ that I present in this thesis, the ability for the brain to be genuine boundary infrastructure, where different approaches to understanding the human complement each other, is doubtful. Callard and Fitzgerald (2015) argue that, in fact, in the transdisciplinary encounters between neuroscience and the humanities or social sciences, mutuality is a fantasy. As I have shown in this research, particularly through my analysis of Damasio’s (2003) Looking for Spinoza , while other orders of knowledge are drawn on in making sense of neuroscientific information, an exclusively biological logic dominates (Franklin, 2013, Strathern, 1992).

Strathern (cited in Street and Copeman 2014) argues contra Galison (1999) that in cross- disciplinary knowledge-making where different epistemic systems meet, the idea of trade, or of ‘benign tolerance of parallel perspectives’ (Street & Copeman 2014, p. 30) does not provide a helpful model for engagement. Galison’s work deals with exchange across different scientific disciplines rather than exchange between science and the humanities or social sciences. Even so, Galison (2011) too, in describing the meeting of mathematics and physics, acknowledges the tension in these interdisciplinary meetings, noting that it is not merely the kind of results produced that are at stake, but disciplinary values as well. Strathern’s recommendation for an approach to transdisciplinary engagement is one that preserves the ‘distinct epistemic integrities’ (Kelly 2001 cited in Street and Copeman 2014, p. 30) of different disciplines. In this scenario, the late Oliver Sacks’s (2007) stubborn, and, in the midst of a neuroscience explosion, jarring insistence on distinguishing the psychic and the neural would serve as a model.

On the other hand, Haraway (1988), writes that science has always been ‘about a search for translation, convertibility, mobility of meanings, and universality’ (p. 580). I share my key

1Dumit (2012) discusses the brain as a boundary object in interdisciplinary encounters. I have applied the plural here to reference his point to avoid confusing my discussion of neuroscience’s brain as comprising multiple boundary objects.

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informant Bryan’s sentiment (described in chapter six) in his response to my question of why he thought the general public was so interested in neuroscience. How could we not be interested? There is no question that, even aside from discovering treatments for crippling brain disorders, research about the brain is important and relevant to understanding human beings. As neuroscience discovers more about the processes of the human brain, whether it should inform and be informed by other modes of understanding the human is not in question. Science, Haraway (1988) argues, is only reductionist when there is the expectation that all registers be translated into a single language.

Callard and Fitzgerald suggest that, while humanities and social science scholars cannot expect a mutuality of engagement with neuroscience, scholars should nevertheless commit to ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2010 cited in Callard and Fitzgerald 2015, p. 109), and to ‘learning different ways of being unsettled together’ (p. 109). My research provides the basis for understanding the kind of ‘trouble’ that scholars in the humanities and social sciences who engage with neuroscience are likely to face. These difficulties can be understood within the context of ‘neuroscience’s brain’, namely, the disciplinary structures (material, practical and imaginative) that make reciprocity difficult. Dumit (2012) argues that for the brain to be a genuinely shared object in interdisciplinary encounters, despite the brain’s very obvious relevance and importance to questions about human experience, a willingness on the part of neuroscientists to consider the limits of brain-based explanations is necessary. Within the interpretive schema I have argued that neuroscience’s brain provides, such limits are difficult to imagine.

Considering the inventiveness of neuroscience’s brain In this thesis, I have emphasised the role of the imaginative, along with the material and processual, in how neuroscience has come to be seen as a compelling framework for understanding human issues. I have shown how this imaginative element is highly productive, driving research forward and allowing neuroscience to expand into the investigation of increasingly complex issues. Neuroscientists study the brain and nervous system. Those who study human thought, behaviour, and feelings, though their approaches and perspectives may vary, do so through the object of the mind/brain in part; they would not be neuroscientists otherwise. Within this disciplinary structure, the question is not how best to understand the phenomenon being studied, but how to understand the brain responsible for the phenomenon.

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When it comes to science, creativity and imagination are treated with mistrust, having the connotation of ‘invention’, in contrast to that of ‘discovery’ that is the cornerstone of the modern conception of what it is that scientists do (Daston, 2000). Daston notes that ‘discovery’ and ‘invention’ were synonyms prior to the eighteenth century. In this research, I have depicted the understanding of the human taking shape within neuroscience as a result of human activity, in other words, a result of invention. In her well-known essay, ‘Situated Knowledges’, Haraway (1988) argued for a way of doing science that is explicit about where it is located. Recognising the situatedness of science is not only to acknowledge its partiality (Haraway 1988) and in the case of neuroscience, as Dumit (2012) notes, the limits to brain- based explanations. It is also to recognise the way in which its objects, in the sense that Daston (2000) argues, are ‘invented’. I suggest that an appreciation by neuroscientists of their object’s inventiveness would provide a basis on which to work towards greater reciprocity in the interactions between neuroscience and the fields of knowledge that it draws from. By ‘inventiveness’, I mean both the sense of how neuroscience’s brain, as the object of neuroscience work, is a novel entity that inspires the creativity of research occurring in neuroscience, as well as in the sense of it being a construction born out of human activity.

Haraway (1988) and Daston (2000) argue that a recognition of science’s situatedness and of the historicity of its objects strengthens rather than weakens science’s commitment to truth. To highlight explicitly the way in which neuroscience forms a unique cultural approach to the way in which human beings are understood is not to say that the knowledge that neuroscience produces is only as valid as that produced by any other culture (Schneider, 2005). Haraway (1988) explicitly denounces such relativism, describing it as reliant on a similar ‘god trick’ (p. 582) that characterises the all-seeing, totalising version of science. Haraway argues for an approach that is even more committed to truth. Denying how the knowledge that one produces is situated, Haraway argues, may make things neater, but would close the researcher off from seeing fully what is really there (Haraway in Schneider 2005).

In his book Historical Ontology , the philosopher of science Ian Hacking (2002) describes his approach to understanding science as ‘dialectical real[ism]’ (p. 2), concerned with ‘what there is’, and how it interacts with the way in which human beings conceptualise it. The brain that comes to account for human thought, behaviour and feeling through neuroscience is just the sort of scientific object that can be approached through a dialectical realist lens. Such an approach in neuroscience would involve an awareness of how the field’s central object has come to be what it is, and how the investigation of this object is facilitated by the formation

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of the discipline with its supporting technologies, techniques and concepts. The idea of the brain being always already there in any kind of human situation is a mundane fact of existence. However, it is through the prism of what I have called ‘neuroscience’s brain’ - where neuroscience, brain and human are tightly linked - that this mundane fact gives legitimacy to the investigation of all manner of human thought, behaviour and feeling in terms of the brain.

Limitations of research This study is necessarily a partial account (Haraway 1988), constrained in similar ways, like the science that I have studied, by location and resources, and crafted with a particular aim in mind. Just as neuroscience research utilising mouse models or blood oxygen levels in the human brain must place restrictions on its claims to assure its legitimacy (Beaulieu, 2002, Nelson, 2013), so too the conclusions that I draw in this chapter should be considered with a few caveats in mind.

This thesis is based on empirical research in one Australian city, as well as an analysis of the popular writing of international neuroscientists whose books have an international readership. The story that I tell of neuroscience’s brain rests on an investigation of behavioural and cognitive neuroscience and closely linked areas. The rationale for this was that these areas fall within mainstream neuroscience (i.e. are not one of the new neuro-fields). These areas deal with entities that are recognisable as ‘mind’, and would thus support an understanding of the broadening of neuroscience’s scope. However, as I have emphasised throughout this thesis, neither neuroscience nor its object are static (Borck 2016), and in the context of the ‘Century of the Brain’ (Yuste and Church, 2014), even if they are momentarily so, do not remain static for very long. Just as neuroscientists who thought of themselves as being on the margins of neuroscience suddenly find themselves at its centre, others in areas overlooked in the planning of this project suddenly appear potentially relevant. As I wrote my research proposal for the project, I explicitly noted that I was excluding areas such as enteric neuroscience. Since then, a joint Swedish/Singaporean study on the role of the gut in brain development and behaviour (Heijtz et al., 2011) has attracted international attention and has led to growing interest in the role of gut-brain connections in questions of emotion and wellbeing (see for example ‘Think twice: how the gut’s “second brain” influences health and well-being’, Scientific American MIND , 12 February 2010). It is possible that the inclusion of

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areas such as these could perhaps have resulted in a more ‘embodied’ account than I have produced here.

Neuroscience is not restricted to the study of the brain but encompasses the entire nervous system. My methodological approach of object ethnography involved a deliberate focus on the brain. While the brain is the primary signifier of neuroscience, it is by no means the only possible metonym for it. What might have been the result if I had chosen to follow the neuron, for example, through a series of different areas of neuroscience? The way in which Kandel (2006), in In Search of Memory, describes the investigation of the human mind ‘one [nerve] cell at a time’ (p. 55), or how LeDoux (2002) makes the argument that the self is synaptic in The Synaptic Self , indicate that a focus on the neuron could have been equally productive.

My position as a non-neuroscientist has produced a particular kind of ethnography. Just as ethnographies by physician medical anthropologists are of a different sort than those of non- physician medical anthropologists, an ethnography of the brain in neuroscience by a neuroscience insider would look quite different from the one produced here. Each group inevitably brings with it different sets of knowledge and assumptions, and what would strike one as important and significant would be quite different from the other. In order for the reader to judge how my status as an outsider has shaped this ethnography, I have tried as far as possible to state what my assumptions were at the outset, and to provide the steps in my reasoning that have led me to focus on particular things and to draw the conclusions that I have.

Possibilities for future research In addressing the questions that were the central goal of this study, it was necessary to strike a balance between breadth and depth. I have focused generally on the development of the field of neuroscience, and have centred my analysis on developments in the United States, particularly in terms of MIT’s Neuroscience Research Program (1962) and the Decade of the Brain declared by George Bush Senior in 1991. This is in part the nature of contemporary science, where the US dominates research in the biosciences (Nature, 2014). All the authors that I analysed, considered to be the main popular neuroscience writers who are or were also neuroscientists, spent or have spent their careers as neuroscientists in the United States. My studies of the laboratories have been in-depth, though looking at general themes around the

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organisation of a new field and its investigation of mind/brain. Future possibilities exist for both macro and micro studies.

A more macro approach to the development of neuroscience in Australia might attend more to the growth and establishment of neuroscience as a discipline in Australia, and to the present and very different settings in which neuroscience work occurs compared to the US. In this thesis, I have attended to both material conditions and ideas. However, there is a much wider set of material and ideational arrangements that could be studied, encompassing institutions, funding bodies, the state and the role of institutions that inevitably shape the work of neuroscientists in Australia.

Within the laboratories, my initial approach was broad and open-ended as I looked at the work of the lab as a whole. The boundaries that I dealt with had to do with thinking about the fields of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience as hybrid areas and about the professional biographies of the laboratory scientists who had been trained in a range of disciplines. A more focused project might investigate at closer range the way that knowledges are combined, and the logics that in the work of doing neuroscience come to dominate or be subsumed (Fitzgerald et al. 2015), both in the work of individual scientists, but also specifically in collaborative work involving scientists with different disciplinary commitments.

The thesis is focused on what could be said to be the public presentation of neuroscience’s object, articulated by neuroscience’s most prominent members such as Eric Kandel. However, as I have shown in this thesis, different versions of this brain operate in different areas of neuroscience, and neuroscientists position themselves differently in relation to it. The story I tell is a general one, woven together from the accounts of neuroscientists from diverse backgrounds, involved in very different projects, whose common characteristic was that their work focused on human thought, behaviour and feeling. A focus on particular areas of neuroscience may reveal quite a different picture of how human behaviour is understood in terms of the brain. There is a need for closer attention to the epistemological consequences of the movement of knowledge that occurs in neuroscience. Research dealing specifically with the mixing of knowledge from neuroscience and other knowledge domains might also involve a comparative study of the extent to which contemporary neuroscience shares the goals, principles and strategies employed in the project of sociobiology.

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When I began research for this project, there were few social studies of neuroscience. Since then, many studies have been conducted on neuroscience in developed, usually Western, countries. In this thesis, the picture that I present of ‘neuroscience’s brain’ is constructed against the background of ideas of mind and brain in the history of Western philosophy and science. The categories and concepts that are translated and materialised in the brain are culturally specific, and yet are assumed to possess a universality that applies to all brains, in all places, at all times.

At the same time as neuroscientists such as Richard Davidson (Davidson et al., 2003) investigate the neural processes involved in Buddhist meditation, the ‘mindfulness movement’ strips meditation of its Eastern religious baggage and remakes it as a technology of the self that resonates with neoliberal versions of selfhood (Reveley, 2016, Barker, 2014). This is further complicated by the role of colonialism in drawing the line between science and non-science (Harding, 1994) as well as the way in which science is seen as a powerful way of legitimising previously suppressed knowledges (Chen, 2003, Langwick, 2011). Studies of the way ideas of the brain travel into different contexts, how neuroscience is done in non- Western settings, as well as the way so-called traditional systems of knowledge are investigated via neuroscientific method (e.g. cognitive neuroscience of yoga, Yang et al., 2016, Brunner et al., 2017) are important future areas of study in understanding the role of neuroscience in society.

Conclusion As I began my exploration of the cultural world of neuroscience, watching neuroscientists work, talking to them about their research, and reading their accounts of the brain in human thought, behaviour and feeling, I imagined that I would be able to show what kind of rich imaginative world a neuroscientific understanding provided. Recalling the illumination that I experienced as an undergraduate student of psychology learning about brain processes, I was curious how the neuroscience explosion and the popularity of neuroscience might have been shaping a new understanding of ourselves and each other based on how the brain worked. But ‘how the brain works’ does not merely involve the accommodation of bare mechanical processes into existing explanations of the human. My research has certainly shown the compelling nature of neuroscience as an explanatory framework, and the ways that imagining the human through the brain provides myriad opportunities for a creative mixing of knowledge. This mixing however, produced in the context of a neuroscience enterprise to

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understand a brain that is already both mind and brain, occurs according to a logic in which other ways of knowing are discounted unless they can be mapped onto the neural.

When I suggested to the Memory Lab that the knowledge produced by neuroscience was not inevitable, John’s response indicated that neuroscientists, because of their commitment to empiricism and the scientific method, are prepared to be wrong. The expectation is that, as neuroscience becomes more sophisticated and its technologies more powerful, the theories derived through its methods will more closely approximate the truth. In this thesis, I have shown how neuroscience is organised in a way that facilitates the productivity of the field. Neuroscientists, committed to understanding the reality of the human brain, engage in problem-solving with the tools, concepts and materials that they have available to them. The brain being made more ‘richly real’ (Daston 2000, p. 13) through neuroscience, is known through the creativity and imagination of human beings. Perhaps, as neuroscientists develop more sophisticated ways of arriving at the truths that the human brain holds, it might be possible to ask them to imagine not only that the information they produce could be wrong, but that it could be different.

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Glossary

ACTION POTENTIAL A brief change in the electrical potential across a neuron’s membrane due to the influx of negatively charged sodium ions. The action potential constitutes the way in which nerve impulses are conveyed between neurons.

AFNI Analysis of function neural images (AFNI) is a suite of open-source computer programmes that facilitate the management and analysis of data from brain scanning experiments.

AMYGDALA An almond shaped structure in the brain that plays a role in processing and reacting to emotional information. It is most often associated with processing fear and triggering appropriate fear responses.

APLYSIA Californian sea slug with large neurons and simple neural circuits that has been used in studying memory processes in the nerve cell. Most famously used by neuroscientist Eric Kandel in his studies of the molecular processes involved in memory formation.

ASSOCIATIONISM A body of theories in the philosophy of mind and psychology that take mental phenomena to be the result of associations between sensory experiences.

AXON A neuron’s long, threadlike extension emerging from its cell body, along which action potentials are conducted.

BEHAVIOURAL NEUROSCIENCE The area of neuroscience that makes connections between behaviour and its underlying neural structures and processes. Behavioural neuroscience commonly (though not necessarily always) employs the use of rodents in experimentation.

BOLD RESPONSE The blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response is the measure of change in blood oxygen levels that in fMRI studies is taken to be an indicator of relative brain activity.

CEREBELLUM Literally ‘little brain’, the cerebellum is a brain structure situated towards the back of the skull beneath the cerebral hemispheres. The cerebellum is involved in the coordination of movement and the maintenance of muscle tone.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING The process of learning identified by Russian Physiologist Ivan Pavlov where an organism begins to associate a neutral stimulus (such as the ringing of a bell) with a significant (thus unconditioned) stimulus (such as food) when the two are repeatedly paired.

COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE The area of neuroscience that makes links between cognitive and neural processes. Research in cognitive neuroscience most commonly involves research with human beings and employs the use of imaging technologies.

DENDRITE Short branch-like extensions from the cell body of the neuron that, like the longer axon, make connections with other neurons.

EEG Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method of studying brain activity by measuring electrical signals from parts of the brain via electrodes attached to the scalp. The result is a visual graph depicting brain activity called the encephalogram.

ENGRAM The physical representation of memory in the brain.

FEAR CONDITIONING A fear learning paradigm used in memory research in which a naturally fearful stimulus (such as a shock to the feet) is paired with a normally innocuous one (such as a tone) that causes an organism to react fearfully to the innocuous stimulus.

GLIA CELL Cells in the nervous system that support neurons.

HABITUATION The process through which an organism responds less strongly to stimuli that it is repeatedly exposed to. (The opposite of sensitisation )

HIPPOCAMPUS (pl. hippocampi) Seahorse shaped structures in the brain that are involved in motivation and emotion as well as the formation of long-term memory.

IFG Inferior frontal gyrus, part of the frontal cortex. A gyrus (pl. gyri) is a ridge in the brain’s folds.

LONG-TERM POTENTIATION A long term change in the strength of transmission across a synapse, thought to be associated with the formation of long-term memory.

MEG Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a method of studying brain activity that measures the magnetic signals produced by the brain’s electrical activity.

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MIRROR NEURONS Neurons observed in the brains of monkeys that fire not only when an action it performed, but when the monkey observes another performing the same action. Mirror neurons are hypothesised to play a role in empathy and social learning.

NMDA (N-METHYL-D-ASPARTATE) RECEPTOR The neuroreceptor for NMDA, one of the brain’s excitatory glutamate neurotransmitters that, thought to play a role in memory and learning.

NEUROTRANSMITTER The chemicals in the brain through which neurons communicate across their synapses .

NEUROGENESIS The generation of new neurons in the brain, until the 1990s, not thought to occur beyond early infancy.

NEUROPSYCHOLOGY The study of the relation between brain function or dysfunction and psychological phenomena.

PERFUSION Process in the Memory Lab of flushing out the dead mouse’s blood with the anticoagulant heparin to prevent it from coagulating.

PLASTICITY (NEUROPLASTICITY) The ability of the brain to change and adapt to new conditions throughout life. This ability was previously thought to be limited beyond childhood.

PSYCHOPHYSICS Study of the relation between perception and sensation and physical stimuli.

PREFRONTAL CORTEX The part of the brain’s frontal lobe thought to be associated with higher cognitive processes such as reasoning and abstract thought.

REAGENT A substance used the laboratory to cause a particular reaction.

RECEPTOR Receptors or neuroreceptors are the sites to which neurotransmitters bind to trigger AFNIs .

SENSATIONALISM The philosophical perspective that human knowledge is possible only via the senses.

SENSITISATION The process through which an organism responds more strongly to stimuli that it is repeatedly exposed to. (Opposite of habituation )

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SYNAPSE The space between neurons across which information is conveyed, normally by neurotransmitters .

TRANSCRANIAL MAGNETIC STIMULATION The application of magnetic current to the scalp to change the activity of neurons in the brain.

VOXEL A volume pixel or 3D version of the pixel where a volume of brain tissue is represented in a pixel.

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Appendices

Appendix A: Plain language statement for participant observation SHAPING THE CEREBRAL PERSON: CONTOURS OF MEANING IN CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE

Investigator:

Samantha Croy PhD Student, Centre for Health and Society, Ph: XXXX XXX XXX. University of Melbourne Email: [email protected] Supervisors: A/Prof Marilys Guillemin Director, Centre for Health and Society, University of Ph: +61 3 8344 0827 Melbourne Email: [email protected] Dr James Bradley Lecturer, History and Philosophy of Science, Ph: +61 3 8344 3851 University of Melbourne Email: [email protected]

You are invited to participate in the research study entitled “Shaping the Cerebral Person: Contours of Meaning in Contemporary Neuroscience”. This is a student project that will form the basis for Samantha Croy’s PhD thesis. Study aims and background The central aim of this project is to produce a detailed account of the world of contemporary neuroscience that will make a contribution to understanding how the field is shaping the way we think about ourselves. Developments in brain science are often reported in the popular media with much hype, ranging from excitement to suspicion. Our aim in this study is to explore the question of what the neurosciences mean for human identity from the point of view of scientists who are involved in brain research. This will contribute to an understanding of the significance of neuroscience that is grounded in what neuroscientists are actually doing in their work. What your participation will involve The main way in which data will be collected in this study is through participant observation. This will involve Samantha Croy “hanging out” at your place of work and observing the life of the lab and centre. Samantha is interested in learning as much as possible about the projects that you are working on, watching experiments that you conduct, sitting in on work meetings with your permission, and accompanying you to seminars and other work events where possible.

You may also be asked to take part in an interview. Your participation in an interview is entirely up to you, and you may choose to participate in the research but not in an interview. Interviews will last for between thirty minutes to an hour and will be conducted at a location that is suitable for you. With your permission, the interviews will be recorded and transcribed.

Neuroscience’s brain: an ethnographic study of material, practice and imagination in contemporary neuroscience

If you would prefer not to participate in this study at all, you are free to opt out at any point by informing Samantha. While Samantha will still be observing activity in your lab, she will not focus on what you are doing. You will not appear in any publications that result from this study, even in a de-identified form.

Project Outcomes The results of this study will appear in Samantha’s PhD thesis as well as conference presentations and journal articles. All names will be changed, including the names of your lab, institute, and city. While every attempt will be made to preserve your anonymity in these publications, there is a chance that readers may be able to identify you from descriptions of your research. The findings of this research will be made available to you. You will be able to discuss with Samantha how the results of the study can be presented in a way that would be most useful to you and other neuroscientists. The data you provide will be kept for a minimum of five years from the completion of the project, in accordance with the requirement of the University of Melbourne’s Code of Conduct for Research. Once analyses have been exhausted, the data will be destroyed securely by specialized data management services. Ethics Approval This project has been approved by the University of Melbourne Human Ethics Committee. Any questions or complaints about this project can be directed to Samantha Croy on Ph: XXXX XXX XXX or her primary supervisor, Marilys Guillemin on Ph: +61 3 8344 0827. If you have any complaints or queries that the investigator or her supervisor have not been able to answer to your satisfaction, you may contact: Executive Officer, Human Research Ethics, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010. Tel: (03) 8344 2073

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Appendix B: Plain language statement for key informant interviews

SHAPING THE CEREBRAL PERSON: CONTOURS OF MEANING IN CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE

Investigator:

Samantha Croy PhD Student, Centre for Health and Society, Ph: XXXX XXX XXX. University of Melbourne Email: [email protected] Supervisors: Prof Marilys Guillemin Director, Centre for Health and Society, University of Ph: +61 3 8344 0827 Melbourne Email: [email protected] Dr James Bradley Lecturer, History and Philosophy of Science, Ph: +61 3 8344 3851 University of Melbourne Email: [email protected] You are invited to participate in the research study entitled “Shaping the Cerebral Person: Contours of Meaning in Contemporary Neuroscience”. This is a student project that will form the basis for Samantha Croy’s PhD thesis. Study aims and background The central aim of this project is to produce a detailed account of the world of contemporary neuroscience that will make a contribution to understanding how the field is shaping the way we think about ourselves. Developments in brain science are often reported in the popular media with much hype, ranging from excitement to suspicion. Our aim in this study is to explore the question of what the neurosciences mean for human identity from the point of view of scientists who are involved in brain research. This will contribute to an understanding of the significance of neuroscience that is grounded in what neuroscientists are actually doing in their work. What your participation will involve This project has involved observation with neuroscience labs, as well as interviews with neuroscientists. You have been invited to participate in an interview. The interview will last up to an hour and will be conducted at a location that is suitable for you. It will include questions about your research, about the ideas that inform your work, as well as your thoughts on the significance of neuroscience in general. With your permission, the interviews will be recorded and transcribed. Project Outcomes The results of this study will appear in Samantha’s PhD thesis as well as conference presentations and journal articles. All names will be changed, including the names of your lab, institute, and city. While every attempt will be made to preserve your anonymity in these publications, there is a chance that readers may be able to identify you from descriptions of your research.

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The findings of this research will be made available to you. You will be able to discuss with Samantha how the results of the study can be presented in a way that would be most useful to you and other neuroscientists. The data you provide will be kept for a minimum of five years from the completion of the project, in accordance with the requirement of the University of Melbourne’s Code of Conduct for Research. Once analyses have been exhausted, the data will be destroyed securely by specialized data management services.

Ethics Approval This project has been approved by the University of Melbourne Human Ethics Committee. Any questions or complaints about this project can be directed to Samantha Croy on Ph: XXXX XXX XXX or her primary supervisor, Marilys Guillemin on Ph: +61 3 8344 0827. If you have any complaints or queries that the investigator or her supervisor have not been able to answer to your satisfaction, you may contact: Executive Officer, Human Research Ethics, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010. Tel: (03) 8344 2073

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Appendix C: Notice informing laboratory visitors about study in progress

NOTICE

This laboratory is participating in a research study. SHAPING THE CEREBRAL PERSON: CONTOURS OF MEANING IN CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE This laboratory is taking part in a social research study aimed at understanding the world of contemporary neuroscience research. While you are working or visiting the laboratory, you may encounter a social researcher, Samantha Croy, who is here to learn about the life of the laboratory and centre, and will sometimes be present in the laboratory and at other laboratory meetings or events. If you would prefer not to participate in this study, you may opt out by informing Samantha. Project summary This is a PhD project based at the Centre for Health and Society, Melbourne School of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. The central aim of the project is to produce a detailed account of the world of contemporary neuroscience that will make a contribution to understanding how human thought, feeling and behaviour are understood. Our aim in this study is to explore the question of what the neurosciences mean for human identity from the point of view of scientists who are involved in brain research. This will contribute to an understanding of the significance of neuroscience that is grounded in what neuroscientists are actually doing in their work. This project has been approved by the University of Melbourne Human Ethics Committee. For more information, you may contact Samantha at: Ph: XXXX XXX XXX, Email: [email protected] You may also contact Samantha’s supervisors: A/Prof Marilys Guillemin Director, Centre for Health and Society, University of Melbourne Ph: +61 3 8344 0827 , Email: [email protected] Dr James Bradley Lecturer, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne Ph: +61 3 8344 3851, Email: [email protected]

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Appendix D: Interview schedule INTERVIEW QUESTIONS The following questions are a guide to promote discussion during the interview. Participants will be reminded that the y can choose not to answer particular questions if they wish, and may add points they think are important. Pathways/experience Could you tell me about your research? What led you to this field? Have you always worked in neuroscience? Do you think of yourself primarily as a neuroscientist? (as distinct from e.g. molecular biologist, biochemist, pharmacologist etc) Knowledge about the brain Do you think that you being a neuroscientist makes you think about things differently? How? (e.g. conversations with non-neuroscientist friends) How does understanding the physiological underpinnings of a particular process change the way that thing is understood? Significance How would you describe the significance of your research? What have you been trying to do throughout career as scientist? What do you think about the way neuroscience is represented in popular media? Does public have accurate pic of neuroscience? Misconceptions? What do you think neuroscience’s contribution to humanity is/will be? How much do you think neuroscience will be able to explain? Most exciting thing in neuroscience? Important ideas What other things are you interested in that informs the way you think about your research? What would you read for fun (that’s related?) Where do you look for relevant information/what you find interesting in relation to your work/ How do you keep up to date What kind of things do you talk about when you are with other neuroscientists? (seminars/conferences?)

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Appendix E: Proforma for textual analysis

STEP ONE Structure Who is the author? How does the author structure him or herself in the text? How does the author’s work as a neuroscientist or physician figure in the book? Who is the reader? How does the author appeal to the reader’s interest? Content What substantive area of neuroscience does this book cover? What is the author’s reason for presenting this work? What are the human actors, non-human actants, material objects that make an appearance in the book? (silent actors?) What is the main argument and conclusion of the book? How does the author support this argument? What non-neuroscience authors are cited?

STEP TWO Language use/discourse/semiotics Metaphors and imagery What historical and cultural symbols are evoked? How are effects created through metaphor, repetition and binary opposites? What is the meaning of signs in context and in culture? From post-structuralism: Are there contradictions/inconsistencies? Alternative readings? What is marginalised? Narrative How is the story of neuroscience told? Are there particular narrative styles used in these books? Beginning, middle, resolution?

STEP THREE Comparing books Shared meanings (explicit and implicit)? Contestations? Are there different versions of cerebral person? Do the books refer to similar events, experiments, people? Beyond the text What work does the text do in the world? How is the field of neuroscience constructed? How to link what’s presented in text with broader sociocultural structures? What is assumed? What’s contested? What’s missing

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Croy, Samantha

Title: Neuroscience’s brain: a study of material, practice and imagination in neuroscience’s expanding scope

Date: 2017

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/208896

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