Some more information about the Critical Neuroscience conference taking place at UCLA later this month. Thanks to Suparna Choudhury and Jan-Christoph Heilinger for sending this along.

Critical Neuroscience Conference: Challenging reductionism in psychiatry and social neuroscience

In response to recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, our aim is:
– to bridge perspectives from multiple disciplines
– to critically investigate the historical, cultural and political context of neuroscience
– to incorporate a critical awareness to the practice of cognitive neuroscience in the laboratory

The project of Critical Neuroscience is driven by the recent and unrelenting emphasis on the brain, in scholarly and popular discourses.

Since the decade of the Brain, this has included the emergence of several neuro-disciplines and neuro-cultures which have given a new primacy to the brain in knowledge about behaviour ranging from love and hate to trust, empathy, depression and autism. As social neuroscience increasingly focuses on the neural bases of categories of people such as gender, political orientation and psychiatric phenotype, our aim is to bring together insights from experimental neuroscience, psychiatry and philosophy to find new ways of studying the role of the brain in cognition and psychiatric theories without reducing complex behaviours to an individual’s biological processes. Ultimately we hope to develop an approach that attends to the context and experience of the person, as well as the processes, dispositions and plasticity of the brain.

January 30, 2009
Semel Institute Auditorium
760 Westwood Plaza
UCLA

Free admission
Please register before January 19 at criticalneuro@gmail.com

www.thefpr.org
www.nic-online.eu
www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych
www.semel.ucla.edu