So Human a Brain: Knowledge and Values in the Neurosciences

ISBN-13: 9781461267409 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 355 str.

Harrington

Opis

WALTER A. ROSENBLITH Footnotes to the Recent History of Neuroscience: Personal Reflections and Microstories The workshop upon which this volume is based offered me an opportunity to renew contact fairly painlessly with workers in the brain sciences, not just as a participant/observer but maybe as what might be called a teller of microstories. I had originally become curious about the brain by way of my wife's senior thesis, in which she attempted to relate electroencephalography to certain aspects of human behavior. As a then-budding physicist and communications engineer, I had barely heard about brain waves, nor had I studied physiology in a systematic way. My work on noise dealt with the effects of certain acoustical stimuli on biological structures and entire organisms. This was the period immediately after World War II when many scientists and engineers who had done applied work in the war effort were trying to find their way among the challenging new fields that were opening up. Francis Crick, among others, has described such a search taking place in the cafes of the "other" Cambridge, the one on the Cam. At that time the brain sciences, in his opinion, offered much less promise than molecular biology. However, he was sufficiently attracted by what they might eventually have to offer to keep an eye on them, and several decades later his work turned toward the brain.

Spis treści

1. Knowledge of and by the Human Brain: Limits and Possibilities.- 1. Neuroethological Perspectives on the Human Brain: From the Expression of Emotions to Intentional Signing and Speech.- 2. Truth in Dreaming.- 3. Cognitive Neuroscience and the Human Self.- 4. Obtaining Knowledge of the Subjective Brain (“Epistemics”).- 5. Morality and the Limits of Knowledge: A Neuropsychological Meditation.- 2. Values and the Nature of the Neuroscientific Knowledge Game.- 6. What Is the Ethical Context of the Neurosciences?.- 7. The Gendered Brain: Some Historical Perspectives.- 8. Walker Percy: Language, Neuropsychology, and Moral Tradition.- 9. Walker Percy: Neuroscience and the Common Understanding.- 3. Neuroscientific Knowledge and Social Accountability.- 10. Reconstructing the Brain: Justifications and Dilemmas in Fetal Neural Transplant Research.- 11. Therapeutic Exuberance: A Double-Edged Sword.- 12. Brain Research, Animal Awareness, and Human Sensibility: Scientific and Social Dislocations.- 4. Sociohistorical Perspectives on Values and Knowledge in the Brain Sciences.- 13. Securing a Brain: The Contested Meanings of Kuru.- 14. The Skin, the Skull, and the Self: Toward a Sociology of the Brain.- 15. Other “Ways of Knowing”: The Politics of Knowledge in Interwar German Brain Science.- 5. Knowledge and Values across Disciplines: Reconstruction and Analysis of an Interdisciplinary Dialogue.- 16. At the Intersection of Knowledge and Values: Fragments of a Dialogue in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, August 1990.- 17. “So Human a Brain”: Ethnographic Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Conference.