Vital brains: On the entanglement of media, minds, and models

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Vital brains: On the entanglement of media, minds, and models

Cornelius Borck1 € € Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies, University of Lubeck, Lubeck, Germany 1 Corresponding author: Tel.: +49-451-3101-3400; Fax: +49-49451-7099-9899, e-mail address: [email protected]

Abstract The advent of functional imaging, hailed as a breakthrough for marrying morphological and functional approaches in brain research, invites a reflection upon the interplay between models, instruments, and theories. Brain research and theorizing about the brain are generally mediated by the research technologies employed. Going back into the history of brain research, the chapter explores the epistemic effects of research technologies by focusing on the localization debate in relation to different visualization strategies. In this way, one can differentiate between abstracting and concretizing approaches to brain modeling. These approaches form the basis for introducing the concept of vital abstraction by revisiting Grey Walter’s The Living Brain. Walter’s adventures in visualizing brain activity and constructing lively toys are described as a form of brain theorizing that is anchored in empirical research but focuses on the brain’s vital activity instead of identifying morphological and structural details. The concept of vital abstraction is further explored by applying the concept of epistemic virtues to evaluate current brain models and for coming to terms with the dynamics of brain research.

Keywords Functional imaging, Electroencephalography, Research technology, Epistemic virtue, Abstraction

Today, brain research counts among the most productive and visible areas of science, rivaled perhaps only by genetics and molecular biology. The 20th century may have been the “century of the gene” (Keller, 2000), but it ended with the Decade of the Brain, as declared by the American President: The human brain, a 3-pound mass of interwoven nerve cells that controls our activity, is one of the most magnificent–and mysterious–wonders of creation. The seat of human intelligence, interpreter of senses, and controller of movement, this incredible organ continues to intrigue scientists and layman alike. […] Therefore, I, George Bush, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the Progress in Brain Research, Volume 233, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2017.06.005 © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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decade beginning January 1, 1990, as the Decade of the Brain. I call upon all public officials and the people of the United States to observe that decade with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities. Bush (1990)

Toward the end of the 20th century, national, international, and private institutions worldwide started to fund multiple research programs for investigating the brain and for “conquering brain disease,” as George Bush had stated (Bush, 1990). In a sense, the century really ended in a decade of the brain as these research initiatives garnered enormous public attention and turned brain research into a common concern. In particular, new visualization techniques such as functional imaging, with its spectacular colorful images of the working brain, kindled widespread interest far beyond the experts’ circles and fostered hopes to unravel this “most magnificent and mysterious wonder of creation.” This chapter takes the current fascination surrounding the visualization of the active brain as a starting point for a historical analysis of the interplay of instruments, media, and models. Contributing to the emerging field of ‘critical neuroscience’ (see Choudhury and Slaby 2011), this chapter looks into how the research technologies employed for exploring the brain and for visualizing its activity have shaped theories and models about the brain and its functioning. Using the analytical perspective of historical epistemology, the chapter investigates how research methodologies have guided brain research and formed theorizing about the brain. The focus is on visualization strategies and their common differentiation in either morphological or functional approaches. In light of this bifurcation, the arrival of functional imaging is often described as a breakthrough, finally marrying the two approaches under a uniting methodology. The visual cultures of present-day functional imaging have certainly left the initial reductionist realism behind and have opened up to the multiple opportunities presented by sophisticated visualization algorithms; but the question remains in how far this imaging culture is still haunted by the concrete presence of activity visualized as a structural entity. Reflecting on this situation, the following section revisits the history of brain theories in relation to visualization strategies in order to gain critical distance from current dynamics. The aim for doing so is twofold: the chapter intends to situate brain models in their larger technological and cultural context by exploring the interplay between brain models, theorizing about the brain, and the repercussions of this line of research generated in its respective sociopolitical context. More specifically, the chapter looks at the brain research and public-outreach work of British scientist and cybernetician Grey Walter. His brain models provide my chapter with the example of an abstract model of the Living Brain, as he entitled a monograph summarizing his research (Walter, 1953). In striking contrast to the current fascination with the concrete presence of brain centers or connections in visualizations derived by functional imaging, his self-moving toys and flickering oscilloscopes visualized brain function in decisively abstract, yet very lively form. By way of this example, I suggest to conceive of his brain models as vital abstractions—abstracting the brain from all the morphological specificities of particular brain regions in order to highlight the functional significance of vital activity.

1 The presence of the brain

Taking the presence of the brain in today’s “neuroculture” (Ortega and Vidal, 2011) as a point of departure (Section 1), the chapter revisits brain theories from the past beginning with Franz Joseph Gall’s stipulation of cerebral localization for psychic faculties at the turn of the 19th century (Section 2). Section 3 describes the entanglement of media and research technologies with theorizing about the brain, and Section 4 relates the discussion to a succession of particularly pertinent brain models and metaphors for explaining its functioning. Finally, I zoom in on Grey Walter’s Living Brain and the lively automata described therein as exemplary for what I want to describe as vital abstraction (Section 5). The concept of vital abstraction is introduced here to describe a form of theorizing that anchors the brain model in empirical data but abstracts it from biological, organic, or morphological specificity in order to model the brain’s activity—its functional significance. Regardless of the technological reductionism that went into Walter’s work, his abstract automata are revisited here as vital brain models in the sense that they demonstrate how complex activities may emerge from simple modules. Models and metaphors have played an important role in the history of brain research for elucidating the brain’s organic complexity and its supposed role as the body’s central organ of control and mindful activity (Draaisma, 2000; Finger, 1994). Combining models and metaphors analytically, I build on insights from linguistic studies which posit that metaphors, like models, blend and bridge between different conceptual spaces and thus serve more functions—such as epistemic goals—than their conventional understanding as mere rhetorical tropes affords. There is a growing body of literature on models, their epistemic status, and their role in scientific practice (de Chadarevian and Hopwood, 2004; Hesse, 1963; Morgan and Morrison, 1999; Sua´rez, 2009). This chapter intends to contribute to this discussion by exploring the dynamics of models and metaphors in the neurosciences, based on a comparison of conceptually as well as materially divergent approaches in visualization. While anatomical models reveal the brain’s intricate organization, metaphors like that of the musical instrument point to both the brain’s cultural value and sophisticated functioning; some models show the brain as a stable machine, while other emphasize its dynamic aspects. The case study presented here as exemplary for vital abstractions shall provide space for both dynamic research and breadth for reflection.

1 THE PRESENCE OF THE BRAIN The multiple research initiatives from the Decade of the Brain reverberated with rhetoric of progress and breakthroughs, and indeed, they yielded many new insights into the brain’s organization and the details of its operation. A comprehensive understanding of this organ in relation to cognitive processes, emotional qualities, or social activity, however, is still pending. At the moment, the success of the research initiatives since the Decade of the Brain can more easily be estimated in the budgets allotted to this domain and the new cultural value ascribed to the brain in Western societies than in new theories generated. Beyond millions of publications and amazing technological developments, the most visible success of the concerted efforts was

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the instigation of ever more research programs of an even grander scale, such as the American BRAIN initiative, launched by President Obama in April 2013, or the Human Brain Project, launched in October of the same year by the European Commission.a After 25 years, the American President’s announcement still holds: The brain “continues to intrigue scientists and layman alike. Over the years, our understanding of the brain – how it works, what goes wrong when it is injured or diseased – has increased dramatically. However, we still have much more to learn” (Bush, 1990). As a consequence of the massive concentration of research into studies on/of the brain, and regardless of the yet-to-materialize breakthrough in understanding mind and soul, a new anthropology seems to be emerging: an understanding of many if not most things human as being related to neuroscientific data. The current cultural condition, today’s predicament, can hence be described as a “neuroculture,” as Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal have argued (Ortega and Vidal, 2011). In 21st-century Western societies the brain gets increasingly conceptualized as the organic substrate of individuality and the material core of personality. In this more and more commonly recognized understanding, autonomy centers now on “brainhood” (Vidal, 2009), the neurophysiological basis of individual traits; and subjectivity can be characterized neuroscientifically as anchored in a “cerebral subject” (Ehrenberg, 2004), the neurophysiology and neuropsychiatry of lived experience. While Ehrenberg, Vidal, and others coined concepts such as “neuroculture” or “cerebral subject” in critical distance to the new emphasis on biological substitutes of psychosocial attitudes and with the aim to respond more generally to the hype surrounding the neurosciences, others have embraced this “neuroturn” wholeheartedly. To them, “neuroculture” is the perfect term for designating the brain sciences’ newly grown confidence in explaining culture and society. Edmund Rolls and his colleagues, for example, describe in their “Neurocultures” textbook how the new neurosciences can and should explain cultural phenomena and thereby gain new areas of competence, hitherto left to the allegedly less rigorous approaches from the social and human sciences (Rolls, 2012). New research fields such as neuroaesthetics or a journal for neurocinematics also testify to this trend.b This astounding double presence of the brain and of brain research in today’s culture calls for historical reflection and critical intervention. This becomes all the more pertinent when research proclaims a radical departure from history into bright futures or when research is simply ignorant of its past. When empirical neuroscientific research claims new territories of cultural competence, the history of brain research turns into a critical endeavor. In addition to putting today’s discussions into a comparative perspective, questions the current cultural dynamics and the emerging multiple roles of neuroscience in society. The history of brain research thus contributes to a history of the present in addition to an anthropology of the contemporary.c

a

Cf. https://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/index.htm; https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/. Projections: The Journal for Movies and the Mind, http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/projections. c History of the Present has meanwhile become the name of a journal, cf. http://historyofthepresent.org, my combining this with ethnography follows Paul Rabinow (2007), cf. http://anthropos-lab.net/about. b

2 Vital abstraction at work in past theories of brain work

Although visualizations played a major role in garnering public interest in brain research throughout history, from the phrenological chart via pathological specimens to 3D models of the brain, the excitement about neuroscience reached new levels when functional imaging became available, showing a living brain “at work.” With these visualization technologies, so it seemed, it had become possible to observe directly what a brain does when it processes information, initiates a movement, or relates to its sociocultural environment. Early critics responded to this enthusiasm for functional imaging by pointing to the highly problematic return of localization theory and of a strictly compartmentalized brain model, unwarranted by the brain’s dynamic complexity and simply following from the technological constraints of the experimental framework (Uttal, 2001). Social scientists explored the massive technological, epistemic, social, and political work that was required for turning functional imaging into a convincing technology—work which did not stop with the implementation of the technology as the images spread widely and quickly through society, courtrooms, and popular culture (Dumit, 2004). In the meantime, functional imaging as a field of study has moved in many different directions—because of technological advances in visualization strategies, because of the scientific competition pushing hard for innovative results, but also because of the pull from public interest in this research. The initial understanding of functional imaging as an ultimate breakthrough in observing the brain directly has been replaced by the recognition of how malleable the technology, the models generated, and also the brain are.

2 VITAL ABSTRACTION AT WORK IN PAST THEORIES OF BRAIN WORK Despite the neurosciences’ recent dynamics and the brain’s current cultural presence, brain research is a discipline with a long history. The term “neuroscience” may have been introduced only in 1962 when Francis O. Schmitt started the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT (Adelman, 2010), but many textbooks on the history of brain research (Clarke and Dewhurst, 1972; Finger, 1994; Wickens, 2015) go back to antiquity for the first ideas about localization, or start with the dispute on the primacy of the brain as the body’s leading center—and indeed, the “gut instinct” is somehow still valid. There can be no doubt that Descartes cast, with his dualism, the mindbrain problem in its inextricable form (Descartes, 1641/1980) which still haunts brain research today. Descartes also wrote a treatise on the machine-like nature of the human body that he did not dare to publish (Descartes, 1972), but the discussion on the bodily nature of human life was not to be stopped ever after. Most literature on the history of brain research focuses on the years around 1800 as the starting point for the brain sciences proper, when the discussion on the cerebral nature of the human self started (Hagner, 1997). At the turn of the 19th century, an effective though questionable initiator of this line of debate was Franz Joseph Gall, who suggested phrenology as the science to

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determine psychical faculties from the shape and bumps of the head (Gall, 1835; Young, 1990). The enormous public attention and scholarly debate he aroused point to the timeliness of such a position. Other physicians and naturalists also looked into the brain in their search for the soul. Many laughed at the naı¨vete of attempts to read the skull’s shape as a way of determining mental faculties, or to dissect the brain in order to find the soul (Harrington, 2009). Immanuel Kant, by contrast, was wise enough to grant the neuroanatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmering the privilege of a philosophical afterword to his revolutionary treatise On the Organ of the Soul. In his comment, Kant suggested to conceptually differentiate between a “local presence” under the dissecting knife and a “virtual presence” in the thinking mind (Kant in Soemmering, 1796, p. 82). Kant’s distinction between virtual and local presence provides a good historical starting point for my own differentiation between vital abstractions and concrete images, between abstract (virtualizing) and concrete (localizing) brain models. The epistemological relation between these two forms of presence—the brain’s anatomicophysiological nature and the sensing, feeling, and cognizing mind—has indeed remained a fiercely debated question up to this day (Bayertz et al., 2012a; McLaughlin, 1985). Perhaps this never-ending probing and questioning of the interrelatedness of mind and brain is itself the lasting achievement of the brain sciences and should be regarded as their most important accomplishment. Beyond doing research, neuroscientists repeatedly gain public attention when they talk about scientific achievements as advances for solving the riddle of mind and brain, but the neurosciences’ cultural function is probably better described as a form of curating the gap between mind and brain in the name of problem-solving and with the rhetoric of scientific progress (Borck, 2016a). Empirical approaches gained momentum during the 19th century, when localization theory gradually took shape. In particular, the identification of the pathological substrates of different types of aphasia fostered the belief that brain research would reveal the anatomical structure and physiological theory of mindful activity. A prominent example of the new confidence in brain research toward the end of the 19th century is provided in Paul Flechsig’s inaugural address as newly elected rector. Flechsig, a psychiatrist and brain researcher at the University of Leipzig, seized the opportunity to lecture a large audience on the physiological link between mind and brain. He presented the brain’s anatomical organization as the basis for the mind’s operations, thereby interpreting the observations yielded with his new staining technique as a physiological understanding of meaningful perception, intentional action, and a sense of reality (Flechsig, 1894). In light of the recent return of the debates on localization, the strength of Flechsig’s theory rested on combining localization and connectivity—the two rivaling concepts from anatomical research into the brain—into a philosophically convincing integration of brain work. In this model, nerve fibers were reevaluated as the connections between centers, responsible for the interpretation of sensory information, for processing multimodal information, and for orchestrating complex responses. With this example, a first distinction between vital abstraction and concrete presence becomes possible:

2 Vital abstraction at work in past theories of brain work

As centers and connections get visualized as anatomically present in the brain “under the dissecting knife” (Kant), both the localization of centers and its opposite in form of connectivity fall within the modeling regime of concrete imaging. Research into mind and brain did not develop along a linear trajectory and certainly did not unfold as a singular success story. A famous example, already from the 19th century, is of Emil du Bois-Reymond who founded electrophysiology in Germany and suggested a corpuscular model for explaining nervous electricity. Initially a strong advocate of materialist approaches, du Bois-Reymond revoked his earlier optimism in his notorious “ignorabimus” speech of 1872, when he declared that any full understanding of the material processes underlying thinking and consciousness were forever impossible on the grounds of principle (Bayertz et al., 2012b; Du Bois-Reymond, 1912). One could also mention Sigmund Freud here (Guenther, 2015), who in 1891 questioned the conclusiveness of localization theory for explaining the clinical variability of aphasia in a careful review of the then-existing literature (Freud, 1953). In this study on aphasia, Freud argued for a virtual localization of language beyond the physical space of the brain. Back then, Freud was still a clinical scientist with a thorough training in brain research; this was only his starting point, as is well known. Shortly afterward, Freud positioned himself as renegade of the mind sciences, when he dispatched The Interpretation of Dreams, stipulating intrinsic drives to be the forces of psychic life and providing his contemporaries, followers, and large portions of the public during the new century a powerful framework for self-interpretation (Freud, 1958). In light of the discussion on vital brain models, it would be suggestive to subsume psychoanalysis under the group of vital brain models. Instead, I point to his earlier work on aphasia for the idea of a virtual localization of language, thus prefiguring how he would later localize the unconscious within a virtual space or compare the memory apparatus to a Rome with all the buildings from all historical periods still standing (Borck, 1998). In the movement against localization, German neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein represents yet another important position. Based on his extensive experiences with the complex clinical conditions of brain-injured soldiers, which he had started to study in unprecedented detail during WWI, Goldstein developed a holistic theory of the brain. In his view, an empirically sound and philosophically valid understanding of the brain as organizer of perception and action could not start from investigating this organ as being strictly compartmentalized and as acting along dissectible reaction chains. For Goldstein, research and theory needed instead to take into account the brain’s dynamic nature as an intrinsically active and complexly integrated organ. During his emigration to the United States, he elaborated this view into a fundamental theory of the organism (Goldstein, 1939) which in turn inspired, among others, Alexander Luria’s (1973) ground breaking work in neuropsychology, French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1963) adaptation of phenomenology to a philosophy of corporeal existence, and philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem’s (1994) historical epistemology. The history of brain research thus provides a rich field for studying the interplay between empirical observation, brain theory, and cultural interpretation.

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Goldstein’s philosophy of the organism (which comprises, essentially, a vitalist brain model) presents probably the most fundamental understanding of vital abstraction. Goldstein conceives of vital abstraction as the brain’s integrated activity allowing the organism to situate itself reflexively in its environment to distance itself from the immediacy of the perceived situation. Describing the severe though subtle disabilities of some of his brain-injured patients without obvious neurological deficits, Goldstein differentiated between the concrete behavior of his patients, who got stuck in the overwhelming presence of the experienced and perceived situation, and the abstract attitude of healthy volunteers. Because of subtle brain traumas below the apparently intact anatomical organization of the brain, these patients, Goldstein argued, had lost an ability to abstract from the immediate environment. Goldstein thus provides another inspiring source for the argument developed here, together with Kant’s notion of virtual vs local presence, and Freud’s idea of virtual localization. Taking Goldstein’s differentiation between abstract and concrete attitude as two distinct ways of thinking for distinguishing between two visualization regimes and the conceptual models based on them, I do not intend to ascribe a pathological value to one of them. Instead, I follow philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1957) who recognized in Goldstein’s (his cousin) work the missing link for developing the final stage in his philosophy of symbolic forms: symbolic activity starts from abstraction.

3 ENTANGLEMENTS OF THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY: BRAIN MODELS IN RELATION TO VISUALIZATION STRATEGIES Along the winding path sketched out in the previous section, brain theory was always guided by research paradigms. With their choices for specific methodological approaches, scientists also decided about the respective brain model, as will now be described as the interplay of visualization regimes with the respective brain theories. Brain research requires a sophisticated interplay of instruments, technologies, and models for registering and interpreting empirical data. Guided by the opportunities and constraints of the methods employed, new research paradigms emerged, and the conditions of particular methodological approaches resonated with the cultural context and the sociopolitical setting of brain research (Borck, 2016b). Along these trajectories, brain research contributes to, and intervenes into, the ongoing questioning of human nature. Gall, for example, was an anatomist by training, and his localization theory followed the morphological perspective of this line of research, searching for structural specifications. In alliance with anatomical methodologies, localization dominated these disciplinary branches of brain research, even where Flechsig combined localization with connectivity, as determined by his staining technique. An exemption to this trend, however, is perhaps the anatomist Theodor Meynert, who developed a unique preparation technique for separating and visualizing the tracts and fiber connections instead of centers (Borck, 1999; Meynert, 1884). While Meynert dissolved localization macroscopically into the multiple layers of fiber connections, others did

3 Entanglements of theory and technology

so with microscopic approaches. Camillo Golgi developed a special silver staining technique which dyed only a small fraction of nerve cells in slices of brain tissue and thus allowed them to be studied in detail under the microscope. Based on this technique, Golgi famously concluded the nervous system to be a “reticulum” in the form of a single network and not made up of individual neurons, as his competitor Santiago Ramo´n-y-Cajal had argued on the basis of the same method with his neuron doctrine (Shepherd, 1991). Following up on their anatomical studies, German neurologist Korbinian Brodmann investigated every corner of the cerebral cortex and perfected localization to a cartography of microscopically identified cerebral organs. He characterized brain areas by their cytoarchitectural organization and derived with this method the still most widely used brain topography (Brodmann, 1909; Garey, 2006). Also based on cytoarchitectural characteristics, German physician and neurologist Oskar Vogt diagnosed, rather infamously, Vladimir Iljitch Lenin to have been an “athlete in reflection,” in light of the enlarged neurons Vogt found in the microscopic analysis of some cortical layers in Lenin’s brain after his death (Hagner, 2004). At about the same time, localization theory was clinically corroborated by the mapping of the bodily effects of electrical stimulation of cortical areas during neurosurgical procedures (Penfield and Rasmussen, 1968; Z€ ulch, 1969). Working in the opposite direction from Goldstein, pathologists like Karl Kleist exploited the opportunities provided by the casualties from WWI for extending the postmortem analysis of brains as established in the 19th century to a fine-grained mapping of clinical conditions and cerebral lesions (Kleist, 1934). These examples indicate the interplay between methods and interpretation in the realms of neuroanatomy, neuropathology, neurosurgery, and the histology of nervous tissue. Neurophysiology may be perhaps even more dependent on instruments, research technologies, and visualization strategies than neuroanatomy, as many of neurophysiology’s objects are naturally invisible. An example is the study of the transmission of electrical signals among nerve cells and to their receptive organs (Brazier, 1988), a major branch of neurophysiological investigation. Nobel laureates like Edgar D. Adrian or John Eccles dissected the neuronal signaling code by means of graphical recording (Adrian, 1932; Eccles, 1953) and paved the way for the current understanding of the brain as an electrical machine (Popper and Eccles, 1977). Eccles extended this electrical understanding of the brain in his “radio-receiver theory of the mind” where he postulated that the entire synaptic interface functioned quite abstractly as the mind’s mediating zone (Smith, 2014). It would hence be tempting to align Eccles’s functional approach with the concept of vital abstraction as developed in this chapter, but his theorizing followed more closely a dualist worldview in the Cartesian tradition (and his Catholic leanings) than the abstracting trajectory of his research technology—very much in contrast to the work on electric brain activity as recorded in the electroencephalogram (EEG), which will hence be my exemplary case here for vital abstraction (see Section 5). While electrophysiologists tinkered with their recording equipment to trace all possible details of the electric communication between nerve cells, neurochemists

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demonstrated that small molecules and hormones act as messengers between nerve cells and bodily organs (Dale, 1953; Loewi, 1954), which required the isolation, identification, and chemical preparation of these substances and resulted in a “chemical language of the brain” (Donnerer and Lembeck, 2006). The competition between electrical and chemical approaches resulted in the famous war of soups and sparks—a disagreement on whether the universal signaling code was all electrical or required chemical transmission at the synapse (Valenstein, 2005). But both strands of experimental investigation demonstrated how the specificities of particular research technologies provided specific windows onto the brain, its organization, and the analysis of its functioning: Electrophysiology looked at the brain as a (too) complicated extension of the peripheral nervous system, and neurochemistry searched for the distribution of different types of neurotransmitters. The very focus on substances and signal transmission prevented neuropharmacology and neurophysiology for quite some time from discovering and studying the EEG (Borck, 2005). Even with the majority of brain researchers following in some way or another the localization paradigm, this broad framework provided comfortable space for investigations into many different directions. Take, for example, reflex theory: in general, it helped to model the brain as a stimulus–response machine, but this should not be mistaken for a sweeping reductionism, as Canguilhem (1977) has shown for the earlier period. Some scientists studying the basic principles of nervous action focused, for example, on reflex activity exclusively in the peripheral parts of the nervous system. In the case of Charles Sherrington, this was a very intentional decision in order to avoid the conundrum of the mind–body problem (Smith, 2001). Sherrington studied stimulus–response mechanisms in various animal models, employing electrical stimuli and registering muscular contractions. Abstracting carefully from higher order nervous activity, he famously complemented his theory of the Integrative Action of the Nervous System (Sherrington, 1906) with the wondrous weaving machine as model for the brain (as will be discussed in the next section). Others like Ivan Pavlov (1960), for example, worked under the same paradigm at the opposite end and embraced vital abstractions head on, stipulating the reflex to be the basic and fundamental principle of all nervous action, including higher nervous and mental activity, and thereby providing the materialism of revolutionary Russia a fitting theoretical underpinning. For Pavlov, the dog, the bell, and the salivation process formed together a universal model of action and adaptation. Bridging directly from the salivation to an individual’s social behavior, Pavlov’s reflex theory abstracted from all specificities and positioned the brain as a dynamic system that actively adapted to its environment by means of conditioning. In contrast, reflexologist Bechterev (1933), Pavlov’s colleague and competitor in Petersburg, focused less on the single and isolated brain, but on vital abstractions in the collective actions of large groups of nervous systems interacting via association reflexes— a remarkable, but largely forgotten, position pointing to a malleability of abstract brain models that may regain relevance in light of the current emphasis on networks and collective action.

3 Entanglements of theory and technology

The Decade of the Brain may have started with fresh enthusiasm about the powers of new technological opportunities like functional imaging, but it was nonetheless part and parcel of such larger trends. Over the last 150 years, brain research differentiated along many different strands of competing research technologies. Just as the neurosciences today, historical variants of brain research followed different paths, clustering around instrumental approaches, thereby testifying to the usefulness of Hans-J€ org Rheinberger’s notion of “experimental systems” (Rheinberger, 1997). Particular instruments and techniques, such as the slicing, staining and microscopic inspection, the administration of chemical substances or electrical stimuli, the recording of muscular contractions or of electrical signals, clinical tests, or the observation of animal behavior, provide access to specific aspects of the form and function of the brain and its parts. Entire subdisciplines emerged along the trajectories of particular experimental strategies. Without going further into the details of the many different approaches, the divergence of instrumental approaches can roughly be ascribed to two different visualization regimes, pursing either anatomical, e.g., morphological investigations of structures, tracts, forms, and shapes within the brain’s topographical organization, or physiological observations of functions, processes, responses, and interactions as the brain’s or the nervous system’s mode of operation (Stahnisch, 2014). Until recently, the exploration of morphological details was based on invasive preparation techniques that required the opening of the skull and the cutting and slicing of the structures to be investigated. The technical specificities of most methods hence foreclosed any direct access to the functional aspects of the brain. Physiological methods, in contrast, focused on the registration of changes over time, often with utmost temporal precision, but typically, these approaches lacked yielding proper morphological information, especially in case of the human nervous system. Over more than a century, brain research engaged its own variant of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the strict either/or in complementary data, as information related to either form or function. This changed with the arrival of functional imaging, which was hence immediately celebrated as a breakthrough combining anatomy and physiology in the observation of the living brain (Posner and Raichle, 1994). Because these two different strands were typically regarded as complementary branches of research, its combination counted as perfect solution, revealing together a full picture. Such an additive understanding of competing research regimes is not entirely wrong, but ignores the differences in the dynamic interactions between research and its objects. This is illustrated by the unfolding of functional imaging. At its arrival, functional imaging operated by visualizing the difference between a state of activation and baseline as colorful spots in cross-sections of the brain. More recent functional imaging, and in consequence brain theorizing, opened from an emphasis on localization to the identification of connections and the characterization of networks involved in controlling brain activity and human behavior (Uttal, 2009). Again, this shift became possible by technological developments, this time within functional imaging with the development of new protocols for data acquisition and new algorithms of data

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analysis. The new developments, especially in the domains of software design and information processing, made new visualizations and the constitution of new scientific objects from very similar data sets possible (Coopmans et al., 2014), pointing to the productivity and plasticity of this research technology as a mediation device. In addition to the technology-driven dynamics of functional imaging, there are also important social factors at work. The field’s very emphasis on localization during the 1990s, for example, kindled and fostered tendencies to break with this dominance—for the simple reason of gaining attention for an alternative approach. The neurosciences are a very competitive research arena with thousands of scientists striving for symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1998). The current thriving of networkbased brain theories resonates well with the dominance of networks in contemporary society at large, from the Internet and worldwide web to network society and network theory. Here, the methodologically difficult question arises, whether this “resonance” of connectivity and networks as neuroscientific concepts with the dominance of network thinking in contemporary society is a mere coincidence or points to a mediating articulation of one with the other. How exactly does “resonance” operate, and what is it meant to imply beyond mere metaphorical allure? How does a new media technology articulate with a research regime and the material details of its protocols?

4 BRAIN MODELS FROM STATIC MACHINES TO DYNAMIC SYSTEM AND VIRTUAL AVATARS Research technologies generate data which, in turn, foster frameworks for interpretation and relate to brain models and brain theories: the characterization of reflex action generated reflex theory with the telegraph system or telephone switchboard as the guiding model, pathological localization and the microarchitecture of cerebral organs inspired localization theory and the classification of brain types, and the recording of electrical signals generated the notion of the “action” potential which, in turn, resulted in the theory of a universal signaling code in the nervous system—and from there to information theory and the computer model (Draaisma, 2000). Each of these frameworks and paradigms clustered around different instruments and disciplinary approaches. The 20th century certainly marked the peak of brain theorizing by means of models, though some models like the mechanical toys or the musical instrument have had a much longer history. These older brain models typically highlighted some particular aspect of brain function as the basis for the suggested analogy, but also implicitly underlined the differences with the brain’s intrinsic complexity and thus demonstrated its superiority (Borck, 2012). In this way, the toys and tools also safeguarded the brain against being conceived in toto as a machine. The supreme example for this strategy gave Charles Sherrington with his “enchanted loom.”

4 Brain models from static machines to dynamic system

In his Gifford lectures from the year 1940, the grand old man of neuroscience described with this metaphor the awakening of a brain from sleep: The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern. Sherrington (1942, p. 178)

Not the ordinary loom, not even the Jacquard loom he might have had in mind with his metaphor, but a magical instrument was required for describing the active brain— in fact, an instrument invoking the heavens. This is brain poetry at its best. Sherrington suggested a powerful metaphor, linking heaven and mind. It resonates with metaphysical energy and radiates it down to earth with the cosmic dance, bridging from heaven to the corporeal activity of the weaving machine inside the head. In less than 10 years, however, the war-related work by Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and many others changed everything. Exciting times, indeed: during these decades, neurophysiology discovered the nervous system’s operating mode to be a universal code of digital communication, while a mathematical genius postulated a universal problem solver. These were the days of the first electronic thinking machines, of cybernetics and the Macy Conferences. Cybernetics, the new science of “communication and control” (Wiener, 1948), integrated the realms of action and governance into the world of physical processes—and thus it provided a framework for explaining mental functions by taking recourse to the electrical communication between nerve cells. The computer was a materialization of just such electrical thinking and was thus a brain model of a new kind. In contrast to Sherrington’s metaphor of the enchanted loom and brain models like the musical instrument or the telephone exchange that explained a particular aspect of the brain, the computer was a real machine doing brain work. Regardless of the enormous material differences between brains and computers, these were immediately nicknamed “electronic brains.” The first computers filled entire rooms, required massive manual work for programming, and took several days for calculating, but they worked, demonstrating that machines could think and solve mathematical equations. And promptly, the computer served as the enchanted loom for much of brain theorizing during the rest of the century. It inspired the cognitive revolution in neuroscience, and later, the transhuman dream of uploading human consciousness onto a computer. This trajectory of the computer model for the brain is well known and needs no further repetition here. In retrospect, more telling is the immediacy with which the first electronic brains circulated through society and inspired widespread reflection about the nature of the mind. Already in 1950, Time Magazine reported on the topic with a famous cover illustration, showing Harvard University’s Mark III morphed into a human being and sitting in front of a keyboard typing. The article started with the question “Can man build a superman?” as if human action could be reduced to calculations, and as if the construction of an electric, programmable calculating device resembled creating a new form of mankind. Calculation,

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algorithms, and rational decision making became the key issues characterizing human as well as artificial intelligence. And a highly popularized effect of this new man–machine analogy in terms of computing was a fierce competition between the man and the machine. In this rivalry, the computer became the ultimate brain model that won the race, first with Deep Blue, when this IBM computer bet Garry Kasparov in a chess game, then with IBM’s Watson, and most recently with Google’s AlphaGo. But the latter two were hardly more than reinstantiations of a rivalry that had already expired. In these later instances, the question at stake was simply whether the computer system would match human competencies in yet another aspect. The computer as an idealized machine for understanding the brain’s complex organization stopped to serve its role as a brain model, when computers as machines started to model the brain and to simulate brain states. Paradoxically, the supercomputer expired as the brain model at that moment in time, when computers morphed from room size into desktop devices of (almost) human-brain size. This shift was further enhanced by the brain and cognitive sciences’ turn away from rational decision making toward new topics such as the emotional brain or (still later) the social neurosciences (Cacioppo and Berntson, 2005; LeDoux, 1996). The question remains, however, whether new models followed in the footsteps of the computer as brain model. Meanwhile, there are other forms of information technology intervening into daily life and taking on a life of their own, in particular the internet and large-scale computer networks. Haueis and Slaby (see chapter “Connectomes as constitutively epistemic objects: Critical perspectives on modeling in current neuroanatomy”) hence argue convincingly that computer networks (together with the dominance of the network metaphor in current theorizing far beyond the neurosciences) should be described as the brain’s next top model, shifting the emphasis from the individual brain as the seat of intelligence and ratiocination to the actions of massively distributed systems and collective action. Reflecting on the history of brain models, another bifurcation that emerged with the availability of computer technology seems to be equally important in this context: the availability of robots mimicking human behavior, and avatars taking human roles in games and virtual reality. With these developments, the computer and the brain swapped roles, so to speak, and human behavior, the human body, or the expressions on a human face started to serve as model for guiding the construction of new computer abilities (Ventrella, 2011). The decisive point here is the switch from the competition in intelligence as abstract rationality to the question whether a computer will match human activities in “natural” environments and in the social space of human action (Krichmar and Wagatsuma, 2011). Here, the more uncanny rivalry of being all too human emerges—a topic massively explored and exploited in the gaming and cinema industry, from Second Life to the Swedish TV series about cyborg slaves requesting autonomy. And yet, these developments also had their forerunners during the cybernetics frenzy, when scientists engaged in the construction of little electronic creatures that hardly lived up to similar expectations of being human but nonetheless had been designed to mimic some facets of human behavior, memory, or decision making.

5 Grey Walter, The living brain and vital abstraction

5 GREY WALTER, THE LIVING BRAIN AND VITAL ABSTRACTION In order to investigate these entanglements between models, toys, and society further, I suggest going back to the enthusiasm for such devices during the 1950s, when the computer had just emerged, and when Western societies already engaged in a thorough fascination with brain research. My example is the model building activity William Grey Walter described in his popular book under the telling title The Living Brain (Walter, 1953). Singling out this case moves the investigation some 60 years back in time to the postwar years in Britain, where Walter specialized early on in brain-wave recording and participated in the cybernetics movement. The brain was an exciting topic in the early 1950s—for scientists but also for the general public in Great Britain: the decade started with John Zachary Young delivering “A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain” as the third BBC Reith Lectures (Young, 1951). The same year, BBC television broadcast a documentary on some crude creatures that followed each other in dancing circles that clearly showed a gendered behavior of passionate attraction, although these toys were made up from some plastic and electrical tools with a surprisingly simple wiring diagram—Grey Walter’s famous tortoises. Walter sent three of them to the Festival of Britain in 1951, where they enthralled a large public in the newly built South Bank Centre (Pickering, 2010, p. 53). Eccles delivered the Waynflete Lectures in 1952 on “The neurophysiological basis of mind” (Eccles, 1953) as described earlier. In the same year, but in stark contrast to Eccles’s metaphysical deliberations, Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and theorizer on self-organizing systems, published his “Design for a Brain,” conceiving of the brain as an “ultrastable” cybernetic system (Ashby, 1952). Cybernetics has been described as the powerful product of war-related research and engineering (Galison, 1994) searching for technical solutions for problems of Control and Communication (Wiener, 1948) and culminating in the closed world of the cold war (Edwards, 1997). Applying the formalism of information theory with equal ease to engineering, physiology, psychiatry, or the social sciences, cybernetics indeed abstracted from any specific content of the respective sciences for making their problems amenable to the logic of control by feedback. However, as the concept of cybernetics circulated through society, and with the cybernetic models gaining wider reception in the general public, cybernetics migrated into various directions taking on different meanings (Turner, 2006). In Britain, the reception of cybernetics was particularly diversified, and brain researchers employed cybernetic ideas far beyond the closed world of cold-war rationality, embracing vital abstractions of (almost) all sorts, as Andrew Pickering has aptly shown (Pickering, 2010). He focused especially on the new ontologies opened up by cybernetic brain research, transgressing the limits of ordinary science and politics. For the purpose of my argument on vital abstractions, I take Pickering’s rich analysis and link it to the trajectories of research technologies, visualization strategies, and the modeling these inspired.

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In the same year 1953 that saw Curt Siodmak’s horror movie Donovan’s Brain, Grey Walter published his popular account of technology-based brain research, capturing in the foreword something of the period’s special flavor: To some, the subject itself may seem risky: after giving a series of talks on it in the Home Service of the B.B.C., I was told that one or two listeners said that they felt a kind of impudicity about brain surveying brain, as if suddenly coming upon themselves for the first time naked in a looking-glass. Our peeping here is as innocent as Alice and kinder than Analysis. While mirroring indeed some parts of the human organism too long hidden, this book will be found a gentle book. There is no immodest exposure, no baring of the soul; nor any shattering of illusions, except perhaps for those who may have been so simple-minded as to think the mechanism of mind simple. Walter (1953, p. xi)

With The Living Brain, Walter did indeed offer very technological reflections on the brain’s working, but not as shocking revelations, because he envisioned brain research to become a great means for arriving at a better future, for helping people to get on with their lives in socially more fulfilling ways. With his cybernetic toys and also in his book addressing a general audience, Walter presented a form of theorizing about the brain in very abstract terms—for arriving at a rather vital model like the tortoise mimicking human gendered behavior. Walter had been a pioneer of electroencephalography; he had jumped on this opportunity immediately after attending the meeting of the Physiological Society in 1934 where Adrian had demonstrated the new technology on himself to a perplexed audience. Part of the excitement about electroencephalography was that it allowed observing the active, thinking brain. As one of the pioneers with this technology, Walter had noticed differences in the recorded activity patterns that he believed to correspond with personality types. Although his personality typing was based on the rather simple difference between the idle brain generating large and regular alpha waves and the active brain engaging in faster and more irregular frequencies, Walter had found in group studies different types of reactions that, according to him, corresponded with different types of thinking. Persons hardly showing any alpha rhythms he believed to think “almost entirely in terms of visual imagery,” while people with a persistent alpha rhythm “do not use visual images … their mind’s eye is almost blind [and] they think in abstract terms” (Walter, 1953, pp. 148 and 150). Walter eventually even suggested diplomats having their alpha type stamped into their passport in order to prevent international crises arising from the clash of incongruent brain-wave types (Walter, 1968, p. 184): “It may even be that serious crises between nations […] have arisen because the negotiators have different types of imagery and can only talk at cross-purposes.” Walter obviously understood his research to be a socially engaging activity. Without going any further into this problematic theory, it should be noted how this theorizing started from the limited space of the traces generated with graphical recording, showing only a correlation of mental processing with changes in rhythmic

5 Grey Walter, The living brain and vital abstraction

patterns. The technology extracted from the brain an abstract trace that invited Walter to read styles of thinking and types of personality into it. A similar abstraction from all physical specificities for focusing exclusively on vital functions applied to the tortoises mentioned at the beginning of this section. Electronically speaking, these cybernetic models of brain work were rather simple creatures, combining a driving apparatus with a light-sensing diode and a search light. However, the little automata showed remarkably sophisticated behavior, especially as they interacted with each other and with their environment. Driving around in search for light, they attracted each other (and sometimes female members of the human species with white, light reflecting stockings), engaging each other in dancing circles, until too close a contact made them deviate. The electric tortoises demonstrated clearly social behavior like attraction and avoidance and impressed as living electric machines. There was no way for mistaking them as biological organisms as they lacked any naturalness in appearance, and yet their performance impressed as all the livelier. Walter engaged in many more construction projects bridging between life and technology (Hayward, 2001), because “the machines that flash and click in our laboratories now are the first forms of the living brain’s extended life” (Walter, 1953, p. 193). Like the EEG abstracting a comprehensive rhythm from the myriads of electrical signals inside the brain, Walter intentionally implemented simple circuitry in his toys as this abstraction matched the vitality of the function to be modeled. The most sophisticated technology constructed in Walter’s lab was probably “toposcopy,” some kind of brain television, visualizing electrical brain activity and their phase relations on a display system consisting of 20 oscilloscopes, indicating the shape of the head’s surface. Walter knew firsthand how electroencephalography accessed the living brain in real time but provided hardly any details about the relevant structures or connections involved. Hence, he searched for alternatives and worked on his brain television as a new, alternative projection mode for EEG recordings, visualizing potential strength and rhythmic couplings between distant areas together with phase relationships across the head. Toposcopy was meant to provide a technological interface to the living brain, visualizing its dynamic activity in all accessible detail, and although the method never left the spaces of his laboratory, he had chosen it as motif for the dust cover of his book. In a way, toposcopy materialized Sherrington’s enchanted loom as a set of flashing and spinning lights. One could conclude in light of the argument presented here that Walter arrived with toposcopy at visualizing the vital, living brain as a concrete image of flickering bulbs, thereby reducing the imaginary space of the vital brain (as in his abstract models) to the surface of the display system. There are several reasons for suggesting Walter’s models and his popular book as an exemplary case for vital abstraction, especially Walter’s enthusiasm for cybernetic tinkering with simple automata and his reliance on electroencephalography. With the various technicalities going into these approaches, Walter’s work may at first glance contradict the vitalism in the title of his book. Already by the limitations of the technology, electroencephalography—the recording of brain waves— had to operate with many abstractions: the opaqueness of the recorded signal, and

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the inaccessibility of the neuronal activity at its core. These were further enhanced by the strictly abstract attitude of cybernetics, bridging between the different sciences and technologies by abstracting from their specificities and in the intellectual climate of the emerging cold war. Going back to Walter can thus enrich the discussion on abstract brain models and modeling based on concrete images. The cybernetics revolution that brought about the computer model conceived of the brain very abstractly: abstracted from all material differences between organic and electronic implementation, abstracted from the differences between the minuteness of biological computing and the room-size dimensions of calculating machines, abstracted from the differences between electronic communication at the speed of light and the rather slow travel of nervous signals along organic matter, abstracted from the differences between sensory modalities, corporeal proprioception and electronic information input, and abstracted from the cultural embedding of human language, social exchange, and collective intelligence. And yet, the pioneers of cybernetics and the public took these abstract models to represent some human faculties in a very lively fashion. They were perceived as vital abstractions; there was no contradiction between the vital and the abstract brain in many of the cyberneticians’ understanding, as Pickering has shown. Perhaps this was not only a question of the prevailing attitude but can be linked to the specific entanglement of media and models in electroencephalography. Like functional imaging today, the older technology of the EEG had been employed to address all kinds of questions, from intelligence and personality types to diagnosing brain tumors or epilepsies. Companies sought to get the relaxation effect of their especially designed chairs confirmed, and psychiatric patients felt their brain waves being controlled. The EEG provided an enormous projection screen for all kinds of psychosocial and cultural–political implications of brain waves, but it hardly kindled reductionist fantasies of an erasure of culture and social life out of brain physiology. Obviously many more factors contribute to the cultural evaluation of research data than their mere technicality. The systematic and structural differences between EEG and functional imaging, however, point to the framing effect these approaches have as two distinct visualization strategies. As two distinct research technologies with markedly different entanglements of media and models, functional imaging and EEG embody different epistemic virtues.

6 CONCLUSION: ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE BRAIN MODELS In their history of objectivity, Daston and Galison have shown how the understanding of objectivity changed dramatically during the 19th century, and that each of these changing understandings was intimately related to different moral values of scientific attitudes (Daston and Galison, 2007). In this way, epistemic virtues shaped what counted as trustworthy scientific representations of reality. Epistemic virtues like patience, attention, precision, objectivity, or strength are usually conceived as the attitudes or personal dispositions of a scientist. Building on their analysis, I ask

6 Conclusion: Abstract and concrete brain models

how research technologies mediate epistemic virtues: what ideals of scientific representation did the EEG foster and in what respects did they differ from the epistemic spaces opened by functional imaging? The temporal precision of the EEG together with its arcane resistance against immediate physical significance opened up a space for abstract brain theorizing, whereas the convincing presence of something depicted in fMRI images fostered, at least initially, reductionist attitudes toward the significance of these representations. Describing electroencephalography and functional imaging as visualization strategies embodying distinct epistemic values depersonalizes the concept of epistemic virtue and ties it to the mediating effects of the research technologies implemented. One tension here extends between the tendency to concretize in form of local presence and the tendency to abstract for functional significance. This has been the guiding thread for my analysis of the theorizing about the brain in the history of the neurosciences. When Kant urged S€ ommering not to mistake the intracerebral objects identified by means of the dissecting knife for the virtual objects of the thinking mind, he alerted him to the objectifying effects of his research method. With his concept of a virtual presence, Kant abstracted the thinking mind from any local presence in the brain. Along similar lines, Freud respected the clinical evidence for language disturbances resulting from localized brain lesions but argued for a virtual localization of language as a more abstract function of the brain. Extending the anatomical approach to the microscopic level, Kleist, Brodmann, and Vogt arrived at comprehensive theories of localization, whereas Goldstein based his theory of the organism on an integrated activity of the brain as abstraction from the concrete responsibility of individual brain areas. With the arrival of electroencephalography, the observation of the living, active brain reached a new level as the method recorded distinctive patterns in strict relation to psychic states and mental activity. However, the method did not allow relating these patterns to particular organs or structures within the brain but invited abstraction from biological specificities and theorizing about brain work as electric operations. The research technology not only confirmed electricity as the functional principle of brain activity, but paved the way for conceiving of the brain as an electrical machine in abstract terms—which materialized at about the same time in form of the first electronic brains. The computer was a concrete physical object but a universal machine and served as the brain model in this way. The research technology opened a productive exchange between empirical research, abstract theorizing, and a new trajectory of brain modeling. This trajectory is what I want to propose here as an argument for vital abstraction based on the media and materialities of the experimental system. The attention to or negligence of the context of the brain is not so much a matter of choice by the scientist but of the media and instruments employed in the research process. Grey Walter is my case in point here, as he provided an example of research on the abstract brain that nonetheless arrived at the living, the vital brain. Functional imaging shares with the morphological tradition in brain visualization the identification of bodily structures. The images are not photographs, but they

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function as such, as they insinuate a particular place or structure to be the material substrate of the object searched for. An entire cascade of data capturing, aligning, filtering, analysis, and refinement is required for visualizing something, but this something gets eventually visualized as an object being present in the brain. This was different in the days of electroencephalography. The technology provided exciting access to the vital activity of the living brain, but the visualizations did not show any responsible structure. There was no substrate, but only function. The EEG came as a graphical recording requiring an interpretation, not in the form of a topographical identification, but as some kind of deciphering or translation. EEG recordings emerged as abstract visualizations and it was precisely their abstractness that invited scientists and the public alike to project all kinds of meaning into them. Much has been written about the initial revival of phrenology with the advent of functional imaging, which demonstrates according to my analysis the mediating effect of the research technology as embodying a specific epistemic virtue. Meanwhile, functional imaging has advanced massively and comprises a very heterogeneous field revolving around multiplied visualization strategies. Beyond depicting circumscript brain areas as centers of a particular activity in 2D scans, areas of interest can be visualized in 3D in real time, the intrinsic fluctuations of brain activity have been visualized, or the fiber connections involved in an activity or entire systems in the waxing and waning of activity. Functional imaging has left phrenology with its naı¨ve reductionism of complex functions behind. By doing so, it has the presence of plainly visible objects in the image replaced by a sophisticated discourse on the malleability of visualization strategies. Has functional imaging thus finally arrived at the dynamic spaces of vital abstraction because it has become obvious that the concrete images constructed with this technology rely on interpretation, invite debate, and are amenable to the concerns of human activity? The convincing presence of the brain in functional imaging has certainly moved the field closer to both the social spaces of culture and the dynamic models of networked activity. The Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis recently convened “numerous artists and scholars from diverse backgrounds” to “address the ubiquity of the human brain in contemporary science and culture.” Worlding the Brain, as this conference was entitled, took (again) the current American BRAIN initiative and the European Human Brain Project as its points of departure in a decisive gesture of distancing: New research has begun to address how the brain responds to specific social and discursive practices or cultural information and how it is influenced by art, social interactions and technology. Conference Booklet of Worlding the Brain, download available at: https://worldingthebrain2016.com/program/

So, perhaps we are witnesses to a growing collective interest in cultural brains and socialized “neurocultures”, following swiftly upon the new brain sciences’ cultural and political dominance. The brain is—as it turns out—no stable object.

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