The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

289 Pages·2018·5.742 MB·English

by  Jason Tougaw

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the elusive brain
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jason tougaw
The Elusive
Brain
literary experiments
in the age of
neuroscience
foreword by joseph e. ledoux
new haven & london
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Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley Cooper of the
Class of 1865, Yale College.
Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole
or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108
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Higashida, translated by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell, translation copyright © 2007 by Naoki
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For Nancy,
whose brain has etched so many tracks in mine.
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CONTENTS
Foreword, by Joseph E. LeDoux ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: You Are Your Brain, You Are Not
Your Brain 1
1 Before Neuromania 39
Interlude: Neurodiversity in the Age of the Brain Atlas 65
2 Brain Memoirs 74
3 Three Autistic Autobiographers 93
Interlude: If You’ve Met One Autistic Reviewer . . . 121
4 Narrating Neurological Difference 130
5 Touching Brains in the Neuronovel 156
Interlude: Interview with Maud Casey 179
6 Neurocomics and Neuroimaging 186
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viii CONTENTS
Epilogue: Reading Organisms in the Age of Neuroscience 228
Notes 235
Bibliography 247
Index 263
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FOREWORD
Joseph E. LeDoux
THE HUMANITIES AND SCIENCES HAVE OFTEN been at odds, sometimes at war, in
modern times. Philosophers and poets have seen scientists as hopeless reduction-
ists, and scientists sometimes assume that in the humanities “anything goes,”
since there is no requirement for grounding in reality, since “reality” is, for the
humanist, a relative proposition. While I can’t speak for all scientists, my personal
view is that both approaches have more to gain than to lose by interacting in an
open- minded way.
As a scientist, I have tried to cross the great divide between the sciences and
humanities in my books, especially in Synaptic Self and most recently in
Anxious. Traveling in the other direction, Jason Tougaw’s The Elusive Brain is
exemplary in treating science and the humanities as complementary endeavors.
Both enable us to extract meaning about our inner selves and the physical and
social contexts in which we exist.
Our ability to explore how the brain works is only as good as our under-
standing of what we are trying to learn about the brain. We can pinpoint exactly
what it is we are measuring when we study how an external stimulus, say an
apple, is processed by the brain. The apple has certain features (shape, color),
the processing of which can be understood in fairly precise terms. We can also
explore how features like shape and color come together to give rise to a visual
representation of the object. These processes are now well understood.
Less is known about how fi rst- person subjective experience comes about in
the brain. As the philosopher David Chalmers has noted, this is a “hard problem”
ix
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