Analyzing the effects of mask-wearing and social distancing on brain development in children
Throughout Homo sapiens’ rich history, our species has evolved to become deeply social animals. For instance, the first hunter-gatherers lived in bands, …
homunculus Revolts: Re-Figuring the Neurological Subject by Zoë Wool
Figuring a Grotesque Norm 1954 Homunculus: Penfield Archives, Osler Library of the History of Medicine This hand drawn illustration rendered in black …
Art, neuroscience and ethnography
Neuroscience The brain is a wild and wonderful thing. Even in a damaged, broken, or diseased state, it performs wonders. Oliver Sacks, …
Opening up shrinking life-worlds by Maarten van Westen
Lives change dramatically as dementia progresses. Using observations of people suffering from obsessions and compulsions, I will analyse this change along three …
Peripheral participants: Thinking through distortion, displacement, nullification by Henrik Vigh
Warm haze As I spoke, people looked at me worriedly. The kindness in their eyes was mixed with curiosity and concern. Rather …
Web Roundup: Death, Life, and the Immortal Brain by Kathleen Lynch
Among the many tech-focused booths at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) early this year, one stood out in particular: an exhibition of …
Book Forum––Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega’s Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject by Todd Meyers
Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega’s Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject is a fine-grained account of the “neuro-” in a range …
Book Forum––Des Fitzgerald’s Tracing Autism: Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience by Todd Meyers
Des Fitzgerald writes of his book, Tracing Autism, “This is a book about scientists talking about their own practice, in tones that …
Book Forum–Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Gut Feminism by Alexandra Sarkozy
Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism revisits feminism’s traditionally antagonistic engagement with biology with a call to reposition the body in feminist thought. As …
Tobias Rees’s Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Nima Bassiri
Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Tobias Rees University of California Press, 2016, 352 pages In …
Common Brain Mechanisms in Mental Illness
An important new meta-analysis of brain imaging research came out this week in JAMA Psychiatry, “Identification of a Common Neurobiological Substrate for …