An excellent website has been set up to showcase recordings of lectures and discussions from the Neurocultures workshop, held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in February 2009. Following many other similar initiatives in the human sciences, the workshop’s mandate was to examine a contemporary moment in which the brain is increasingly “the bodily organ with which humans have come to identify,” and in which “neuroscientific knowledge is spreading rapidly beyond the confines of brain research proper into different areas of life and our culture as a whole.” At the moment, four talks are available as videos, and apparently the others will soon be made available in audio format.

A really excellent aspect of these videos is that they include the full record of the discussion as well as the talk itself. Additionally, the media folks at the Max Planck Institute have done a really admirable job in producing the videos themselves. Quite remarkably for recordings of conference talks, these videos are nicely edited with multiple camera angles and even brief interludes with a jazz soundtrack! All of the lectures are also available as audio mp3 files and as video mp4 files for the iPhone.

Here’s the list:

Emily Martin
Identity, Identification and the Brain

Nikolas Rose
Screen and Intervene: Governing Risky Brains
(with commentary by Hans Markowitsch)

Allan Young
Psychopathy in the Social Brain
(with commentary by Hauke Heekeren)
(the embedded video is not working, but the lecture can be downloaded)

Fernando Vidal
Notes on Neuroethics