Suparna Choudhury

Critical Neuroscience: Linking Neuroscience and Society through Critical Practice

We outline the framework of the new project of Critical Neuroscience: a reflexive scientific practice that responds to the social, cultural and political challenges posed by the advances in the behavioural and brain sciences. Indeed, the new advances in neuroscience have given rise to growing projects of the sociology of neuroscience as well as neuroethics. In parallel, however, there is also a growing gulf between social studies of neuroscience and empirical neuroscience itself. This is where Critical Neuroscience finds its place. Here, we begin with a sketch of several forms of critique that can contribute to developing a model of critical scientific practice. We then describe a set of core activities that jointly make up the practice of Critical Neuroscience as it can be applied and practised both within and outside of neuroscience. We go on to propose three possible areas of application: (1) the problems related to new possibilities of neuropharmacological interventions; (2) the importance of culture, and the problems of reductionism, in psychiatry; (3) the use of imaging data from neuroscience in the law as alleged evidence about ‘human nature’.

Critical neuroscience : a handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience

About the editors. About the contributors. Preface. Introduction: Critical Neuroscience: Between Lifeworld and Laboratory (Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby). Part I Motivations and Foundations. Chapter 1: Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience(Jan Slaby and Suparna Choudhury). Chapter 2: The Need for a Critical Neuroscience. From Neuroideology to Neurotechnology (Steven Rose). Chapter 3: Against First Nature. Critical Theory and Neuroscience (Martin Hartmann). Chapter 4: Scanning the Lifeworld: Toward a Critical Neuroscience of Action and Interaction (Shaun Gallagher). Part II Histories of the Brain. Chapter 5: Toys are Us. Models and Metaphors in Brain Science (Cornelius Borck). Chapter 6: The Neuromance of Cerebral History(Max Stadler). Chapter 7: Empathic Cruelty and the Origins of the Social Brain(Allan Young). Part III Neuroscience in Context: From Laboratory to Lifeworld. Chapter 8: Disrupting Images: Neuroscientific representations in the lives of psychiatric patients (Simon Cohn). Chapter 9: Critically Producing Brain Images of Mind(Joseph Dumit). Chapter 10: Radical Reductions. Neurophysiology, Politics, and Personhood in Russian Addiction Medicine(Eugene Raikhel). Chapter 11: Delirious Brain Chemistry and Controlled Culture: Exploring the Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects (Nicolas Langlitz). Part IV Situating the brain in context: from lifeworld back to laboratory? Chapter 12: Critical Neuroscience: From Neuroimaging to Tea Leaves in the Bottom of a Cup (Amir Raz). Chapter 13: The Salmon of Doubt: Six Months of Methodological Controversy within Social Neuroscience(Daniel Margulies). Chapter 14: Cultural Neuroscience as Critical Neuroscience in Practice(Joan Y. Chiao and Bobby K. Cheon). Part V Beyond neural correlates: Ecological approaches to psychiatry. Chapter 15: Re-Socializing Psychiatry: Critical Neuroscience and the Limits of Reductionism(Laurence J. Kirmayer and Ian Gold). Chapter 16: Are Mental Illnesses Diseases of the Brain?(Thomas Fuchs). Chapter 17: Are there neural correlates of depression?(Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega). Chapter 18: The Future of Critical Neuroscience (Laurence J. Kirmayer).

Big data, open science and the brain: lessons learned from genomics

The BRAIN Initiative aims to break new ground in the scale and speed of data collection in neuroscience, requiring tools to handle data in the magnitude of yottabytes (1024). The scale, investment and organization of it are being compared to the Human Genome Project (HGP), which has exemplified “big science” for biology. In line with the trend towards Big Data in genomic research, the promise of the BRAIN Initiative, as well as the European Human Brain Project, rests on the possibility to amass vast quantities of data to model the complex interactions between the brain and behavior and inform the diagnosis and prevention of neurological disorders and psychiatric disease. Advocates of this “data driven” paradigm in neuroscience argue that harnessing the large quantities of data generated across laboratories worldwide has numerous methodological, ethical and economic advantages, but it requires the neuroscience community to adopt a culture of data sharing and open access to benefit from them. In this article, we examine the rationale for data sharing among advocates and briefly exemplify these in terms of new “open neuroscience” projects. Then, drawing on the frequently invoked model of data sharing in genomics, we go on to demonstrate the complexities of data sharing, shedding light on the sociological and ethical challenges within the realms of institutions, researchers and participants, namely dilemmas around public/private interests in data, (lack of) motivation to share in the academic community, and potential loss of participant anonymity. Our paper serves to highlight some foreseeable tensions around data sharing relevant to the emergent “open neuroscience” movement.

Cultural neuroscience and psychopathology: prospects for cultural psychiatry.

There is a long tradition that seeks to understand the impact of culture on the causes, form, treatment, and outcome of psychiatric disorders. An early, colonialist literature attributed cultural characteristics and variations in psychopathology and behavior to deficiencies in the brains of colonized peoples. Contemporary research in social and cultural neuroscience holds the promise of moving beyond these invidious comparisons to a more sophisticated understanding of cultural variations in brain function relevant to psychiatry. To achieve this, however, we need better models of the nature of psychopathology and of culture itself. Culture is not simply a set of traits or characteristics shared by people with a common geographic, historical, or ethnic background. Current anthropology understands culture as fluid, flexible systems of discourse, institutions, and practices, which individuals actively use for self-fashioning and social positioning. Globalization introduces new cultural dynamics and demands that we rethink culture in relation to a wider domain of evolving identities, knowledge, and practice. Psychopathology is not reducible to brain dysfunction in either its causes, mechanisms, or expression. In addition to neuropsychiatric disorders, the problems that people bring to psychiatrists may result from disorders in cognition, the personal and social meanings of experience, and the dynamics of interpersonal interactions or social systems and institutions. The shifting meanings of culture and psychopathology have implications for efforts to apply cultural neuroscience to psychiatry. We consider how cultural neuroscience can refine use of culture and its role in psychopathology using the example of adolescent aggression as a symptom of conduct disorder.

Proposal for a critical neuroscience

We outline the perspective of ‘critical neuroscience’: a stance of informed critique pertaining to neuroscientific methods, research practices, concepts, discursive effects, formative backstories and societal impacts. We bring together work from various disciplines with the aim to engage neuroscience practitioners as well as decision-makers, stakeholders and the public. Critical neuroscience is a critical stance towards the entirety of the ‘Neuro complex’ in its present guise, including its broader impacts on scholarship, academia and the wider society. The text is a programmatic outline tracing major lines of influence and theoretical backgrounds. It is an invitation to neuroscientists and critical scholars from different fields to engage in collaborative reflection on the present and future of human neuroscience.

Digital media, the developing brain and the interpretive plasticity of neuroplasticity:

The use and misuse of digital technologies among adolescents has been the focus of fiery debates among parents, educators, policy-makers and in the media. Recently, these debates have become shaped by emerging data from cognitive neuroscience on the development of the adolescent brain and cognition. “Neuroplasticity” has functioned as a powerful metaphor in arguments both for and against the pervasiveness of digital media cultures that increasingly characterize teenage life. In this paper, we propose that the debates concerning adolescents are the meeting point of two major social anxieties both of which are characterized by the threat of “abnormal” (social) behaviour: existing moral panics about adolescent behaviour in general and the growing alarm about intense, addictive, and widespread media consumption in modern societies. Neuroscience supports these fears but the same kinds of evidence are used to challenge these fears and reframe them in positive terms. Here, we analyze discourses about digital media, the Internet, and the adolescent brain in the scientific and lay literature. We argue that while the evidential basis is thin and ambiguous, it has immense social influence. We conclude by suggesting how we might move beyond the poles of neuro-alarmism and neuro-enthusiasm. By analyzing the neurological adolescent in the digital age as a socially extended mind, firstly, in the sense that adolescent cognition is distributed across the brain, body, and digital media tools and secondly, by viewing adolescent cognition as enabled and transformed by the institution of neuroscience, we aim to displace the normative terms of current debates.

Mindful interventions: Youth, poverty, and the developing brain

Mindfulness meditation is being advocated as a promising new educational, clinical, and social intervention for youth, fueled by new evidence from neuroscience about the benefits of “growing the brain through meditation,” convergent with recent data on developmental neuroplasticity. Although still marginal and in some cases controversial, secular programs of mindfulness have been implemented with ambitious goals of improving attentional focus of pupils, social-emotional learning in “at-risk” children and youth and, not least, to intervene in problems of poverty and incarceration. In this article, we present insights from an ongoing study involving teachers and mentors working with young people using mindfulness education from an emerging project on the social and cultural contexts of “neuroeducation.” Our analysis points to the role of neuroscience in positioning these programs as legitimate and progressive, based on state-of-the-art science. We discuss the tensions arising from their moral reframing of social problems associated with poverty and inequality.

A “Mechanism of Hope”: Mindfulness, Education, and the Developing Brain

Mindfulness meditation has recently become mainstream, secular, and backed by evidence from neuroimaging studies about the benefits of “growing the brain through meditation.” Touted as the latest tool for educational curricula, psychotherapy, and intervention for at-risk or disenfranchised youth, it has garnered widespread excitement and investment for its promises to help cultivate self-regulation, empathy, and attentional focus, while being both non-invasive and empowering for young people. The mindfulness movement has, however, also been subject to skepticism, with critics raising caution about the “shadows” of mindfulness, pointing to its (often inadvertent) effects of depoliticizing social problems associated with inequality and poverty, occasional association with adverse behavioral effects, and its instrumental use as a technique for boosting productivity in the corporate workplace. In this paper, we present insights from a project on neuroscience and education, and illustrate some of the tensions surrounding mindfulness as seen from the perspectives of educators and policy makers. We apply a critical neuroscience framework to analyze the role of the brain in underpinning and undermining the mindfulness movement and to understand the reported challenges and promises of mindfulness. We point to a general ambivalence surrounding the potential of mindfulness meditation as an intervention for youth.