Philosophy’s Other is a blog that provides abstracts, excerpts and other materials from a wide range of material online. Always something interesting every weekday.
Just today they link to “Darwin to the Rescue,” on the emerging trend to use evolutionary theory in literary criticism.
During the Critical Neurosciences Workshop in Montreal, one of the main questions we addressed was, What exactly do we mean by critical neuroscience? What is this field going to be?
But in taking a larger look at the conference, I see a set of admirable characteristics in the young scholars there. Interdisciplinary. Not ready to accept the status quo of either just-do-lab-research or criticism-deconstruction-interpretation. Ready to take risks to work towards something that offers more possibilities than doing “good science” accompanied by the inevitable stereotypes and business applications.
And these scholars are working in three broad areas, which if developed together, will strengthen and enrich each other.
The first area is the obvious one, the emphasis on critical. Drawing on the Frankfurt school and its analysis of science as a core part of modernization and on Foucault and how ideologies and power shape the practice of science, a major theme of the overall conference was to examine how political economy and societal ideals shapes both neuroscience and its impact on society. Neuroscience can reinforce stereotypes, offer tools to companies who seek only profit, and rarely question its own assumptions as it proudly proclaims some aspect of human nature confirmed by its science.
It is not a lily white science, protected from the world by the boundaries of lab, producing knowledge unsullied by outside interests. The images of brain, the proclamations of hard-wired differences, its use in law and in advertising—these are things that fall squarely in the public domain.
PZ has hosted two great carnivals over the past days. First he filled in for The Tangled Bank, compiling a collection of evolution-related posts. And up last night is the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, celebrating – obviously – elitist bastardry among people who believe in ideas, science, and the like.
I’ve created a new category “Fun” which gathers together our humorous, amusing, and otherwise entertaining posts. Below I’ve listed the collection at present, starting with one of our most popular posts overall.
Psychopharma-parenting Stephen Colbert brings us his Word, and the latest on modern parenting techniques
Prof. Joseph Biederman, MDAlthough I really enjoy psychology, like many anthropologists, I feel a deep ambivalence about some contemporary psychological theory and research.
Some of these problems are trivial and tendentious, to be honest, more the effects of pushing our own disciplinary preferences in the way research is presented or semiotic hair-splitting in theoretical terms than substantive concerns. But there are some more profound issues, touched on in recent posts like Daniel’s Neurotosh, Neurodosh and Neurodash and my post, Bench and couch: genetics and psychiatry. Ironically, I was reminded of one of the more serious issues while reading a piece a few weeks ago by psychologist and psychologist-sceptic Bruce Levine on Alternet, The Science of Happiness: Is It All Bullshit?
In a meandering way, this post is a reflection on one of anthropology’s consistent criticisms of psychology; the often unacknowledged role of psychiatry in shaping psyches. That is, the difficulty of studying a phenomenon when one is helping to create it and one’s theories influence your subjects’ accounts. When psychology is successful in breaking through into popular awareness, it becomes entangled with its subject, a kind of folk theory operating in the same space that psychologists seek to study. So this post is a kind of neuroanthropological reflection on clinical psychology as both research enterprise and world-making project, and the way the two come into conflict.
Specifically, Daniel’s post on Neurotosh and Levine’s story of John Stewart confronting Harvard happiness researcher, Prof. Tal Ben-Shahar, reminded me of the recent scandal surrounding psychiatrist Prof. Joseph Biederman. Biederman took large unreported consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies who manufactured anti-psychotic medicines while he was simultaneously encouraging psychiatrists to diagnose children with bipolar disorder, and then to prescribe their young patients anti-psychotic medicines. Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) held hearings on the financial conflicts of interest as reported in The New York Times in Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay, by Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey. (For an earlier critical article, see the Boston Globe piece, Backlash on bipolar diagnoses in children.)
Neurotosh. The best word from the entire Montreal Critical Neurosciences conference! There was Cordelia Fine, capturing perfectly her frustration at the manipulation of data and science in the service of stereotypes. Just pure neuro-nonsense.
The neurotosh in question was Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain, an excellent representative of the neurosexism sold in recent popular books. It is popular, a bestseller translated into many languages, and it is simply bad science. In Nature Rebecca Young and Evan Balaban describe the book as “dressing the [gender] myth up in new clothes” and selling a “melodrama,” noting that “The Female Brain disappointingly fails to meet even the most basic standards of scientific accuracy and balance.”
Cordelia Fine took us step-by-step through several passages, examining the supposed citations and supporting evidence. Gender differences were confirmed by (a) studies with only women, (b) studies on a different topic entirely, and (c) personal communication. Ouch.
Plenty of other people have gotten on the bash-Brizendine-bandwagon, helping to undermine the moral authority that Dr. Brizendine wields through her academic credentials and “scientific” claims. Language Log has several critical analyses of the gender difference claims about language (see here, here and here). Mother Jones takes Brizendine to task on her approach to medicine. The most popular Amazon reviews of the book lead with titles calling The Female Brain “disappointing” and “nonsensical.” Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks gets in on the pile-on-party as well.
Still Simon Cohn, a British anthropologist at the meeting, was rather nonplussed at Cordelia’s agonizing over the data and methods and claims made by Brizendine. As Simon said to me, “It’s called ‘The Female Brain.’ Doesn’t that tell you everything right from the start?” His point was that knowledge gets turned in the service of ideology and profit and power all the time.
Neuroanthropology 