Figuring a Grotesque Norm 1954 Homunculus: Penfield Archives, Osler Library of the History of Medicine This hand drawn illustration rendered in black ink shows two mirror image outlines…
Neuroscience The brain is a wild and wonderful thing. Even in a damaged, broken, or diseased state, it performs wonders. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and prolific writer, knew this…
Lives change dramatically as dementia progresses. Using observations of people suffering from obsessions and compulsions, I will analyse this change along three dimensions. Obsessive-Compulsive Disord…
Warm haze As I spoke, people looked at me worriedly. The kindness in their eyes was mixed with curiosity and concern. Rather than answering me, they turned to…
Among the many tech-focused booths at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) early this year, one stood out in particular: an exhibition of manufactured bodies, or “sleeves,” into which…
Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega’s Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject is a fine-grained account of the “neuro-” in a range of disciplines, and, importantly––crucial…
Des Fitzgerald writes of his book, Tracing Autism, “This is a book about scientists talking about their own practice, in tones that are beset by ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity,…
Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism revisits feminism’s traditionally antagonistic engagement with biology with a call to reposition the body in feminist thought. As Wilson critically explores relationsh…
Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Tobias Rees University of California Press, 2016, 352 pages In the prefatory pages of Plastic Reason,…
An important new meta-analysis of brain imaging research came out this week in JAMA Psychiatry, “Identification of a Common Neurobiological Substrate for Mental Illness” which highlights t…