Plasticity and Pathology Berkeley Forum in the Humanities Plasticity and Pathology On the Formation of the Neural Subject Edited by David Bates and Nima Bassiri Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California, Berkeley Fordham University Press New York Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publishers. The publishers have no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and do not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. The publishers also produce their books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plasticity and pathology : on the formation of the neural subject / edited by David Bates and Nima Bassiri. — First edition. p. cm. — (Berkeley forum in the humanities) The essays collected here were presented at the workshop Plasticity and Pathology: History and Theory of Neural Subjects at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6613-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-6614-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Bates, David William, editor. II. Bassiri, Nima, editor. III. Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, sponsoring body. IV. Title. V. Series: Berkeley forum in the humanities. [DNLM: 1. Neuronal Plasticity—Congresses. 2. Brain— physiopathology—Congresses. 3. Synaptic Transmission—Congresses. WL 102] QP355.2 612.8'1—dc23 2015026932 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition Contents List of Illustrations vii Contributors ix Preface David Bates and Nima Bassiri xi 1. Toward an Ethnography of Experimental Psychology Emily Martin 1 2. “You Are (Not) Your Synapses”: Toward a Critical Approach to Neuroscience Catherine Malabou 20 3. Plasticity, Pathology, and Pleasure in Cold War America Cathy Gere 35 4. Epileptic Insanity and Personal Identity: John Hughlings Jackson and the Formations of the Neuropathic Self Nima Bassiri 65 5. Integrations, Vigilance, Catastrophe: The Neuropsychiatry of Aphasia in Henry Head and Kurt Goldstein Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers 112 6. The History of a Brain Wound: Alexander Luria and the Dialectics of Soviet Plasticity Hannah Proctor and Laura Salisbury 159 7. Automaticity, Plasticity, and the Deviant Origins of Artificial Intelligence David Bates 194 8. Plastic Diagrams: Circuits in the Brain and How They Got There Joseph Dumit 219 9. Imperfect Reflections: Norms, Pathology, and Difference in Mirror Neuron Research Katja Guenther 268 10. On How Adult Cerebral Plasticity Research Has Decoupled Pathology from Death Tobias Rees 309 Index 343 vi CONTENTS Illustrations 4.1 Nervous dissolution 99 5.1 Henry Head and W. H. R. Rivers 119 5.2 Case of nominal aphasia 128 5.3 Case of semantic aphasia 129 5.4 Tonus changes and abnormalities 141 5.5 Image from Tonus 142 5.6 Pointing test 143 5.7 Use of ear puffs 144 8.1 McCulloch-Pitts “neurons” 226 8.2 McCulloch’s “irreducible nervous net” 229 8.3 Goldstine–von Neumann flow diagrams 236 8.4 Goldstine–von Neumann coding problems 238 8.5a Turing’s flow diagram 240 8.5b Noble’s flow diagram 241 8.6a Miller et al.’s TOTE diagram 244 8.6b Miller et al.’s TOTE diagram 244 8.7 Colby’s simulation of a neurotic process 250 8.8 Colby’s model of self-reference 252 8.9 Abelson’s “Flow Chart for Cognitive Balancing” 253 8.10a Atkinson-Shiffrin memory diagram 255 8.10b Atkinson-Shiffrin memory diagram 255 9.1 Penfield map of brain 272 9.2 Rizzolatti et al.’s map of brain 274 9.3 Rizzolatti et al.’s diagram of neural activity 277 9.4 Rizzolatti et al.’s responses of a strictly congruent neuron 281 9.5 Mukamel et al.’s single-neuron responses 286 9.6 Wicker et al.’s neural representation of emotion 290 viii ILLUSTRATIONS David Bates and Nima Bassiri Preface THE ESSAYS COLLECTED here were presented at the workshop Plasticity and Pathology: History and Theory of Neural Subjects at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley. As co-organizers of this event, we were trying to put together several different strands of scholarship that have taken up the challenge of critically engaging with contemporary neuro- science research. As the neurosciences have gained considerable popular interest in the past decade or so, the impact of this work on the humanities and social sciences has been less clear. While some have embraced with great enthusiasm the findings of neuroscience and used them in their own research, others willfully ignore the field altogether despite the obvious relevance to anyone working on the way human beings think, act, and are fashioned in the world. This volume is an effort to explore how scholars in the humanities and social sciences might begin to think critically about the histori- cal and conceptual (not to mention institutional) development of the human subject in the age of neural science, as a way of raising questions about who we are and who we might be. We have chosen the intertwined fields of plasticity and pathol- ogy as our starting point because they reveal most clearly that the history of neuroscience is hardly one of strict reductionism. Both of these conceptual fields are and have been highly ambivalent, suggesting in their own way the degree to which the nervous system—and especially its central organ, the brain—has often been considered an ever-evolving, dynamic, and transformative space. Plasticity is essential to, for example, the developmental potential of the infant brain and therefore an essential dimen- sion of the human self. Plasticity also marks the possibility of a radical change. It is precisely this flexibility that helps the ner- vous system respond to injury and pathological conditions. And yet to transform the brain so radically—in reaction to injury or through internal transformations—is to transform the subject itself, to make in a way a new human being. Therefore, rather than trying to stabilize the concepts of plasticity and pathology as definitive categories, we actually want to emphasize the under- lying fluidity at the heart of these concepts—not just according to their contemporary prominence in neuroscience but because they also index a set of important conceptual developments and possibilities in the history, anthropology, and philosophy of mind and brain medicine. The scholars collected here represent different ways of approaching the question of the neural foundations of a human subject. The essays range from anthropological accounts of sub- ject formation, investigations of contemporary neuroscientific research, and historical analyses of key theoretical debates in the formative decades of neuroscience to forays into artificial nervous systems with their own artificial forms of plasticity, narrative interpretations of neural subjects, and philosophical reflection on the nature of the mind. They are intended to display the con- ceptual variability of these terms and to indicate a way of think- ing about their varied historical development and their continued transformation in the present and into the future. Plasticity and xii DAVid Bates and NIMA Bassiri pathology, as neurological concepts, point to complicated phe- nomena in the history and theory of the human sciences. To grasp the significance of these phenomena we need an open and multidisciplinary approach. WE WOULD LIKE to thank Alan Tansman, director of the Townsend Center, for his intellectual and material support for this project, which is part of a broader initiative on “Thinking the Self.” We would also like to thank Anthony Cascardi, dean of arts and humanities, and Carla Hesse, dean of social science, as well as the Department of Rhetoric for generously funding the original workshop. We are indebted to Teresa Stojkov, associate director of the Townsend Center, for all her help making this edited collec- tion a reality. Preface xiii Contributors NIMA BASSIRI is Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. DAVID BATES is a professor and chair of the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. JOSEPH DUMIT is a professor of anthropology and director of Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. CATHY GERE is a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. STEFANOS GEROULANOS is an associate professor of history at New York University. KATJA GUENTHER is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. CATHERINE MALABOU is a professor of philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School. EMILY MARTIN is a professor of anthropology at New York Univer- sity. TODD MEYERS is an assistant professor of anthropology at Wayne State University. HANNAH PROCTOR is a graduate student in English and humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. TOBIAS REES is an assistant professor of anthropology and social studies of medicine at McGill University. LAURA SALISBURY is a senior lecturer in medicine and English lit- erature at Exeter University. x CONTRIBUTORS Emily Martin 1 Toward an Ethnography of Experimental Psychology AN ENDURING QUESTION in the history and philosophy of science is: What do we mean by objectivity and subjectivity?1 In their historical overview Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison set out three phases of scientific knowledge over the centuries, from “truth to nature,” to “mechanical objectivity,” to “trained judgment.” On the one hand, the epistemic virtue of “mechanical objectivity” strives to “capture nature” while eliminating any intervention on the part of the researcher.