As the NFL continues to dominate headlines in both sports and politics, there was a renewed focus this month on CTE and its impact on the lives of players from youth to professional football. CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, is a degenerative brain disorder resulting from repeated, sub-concussive blows to the head causing the buildup of an abnormal protein called …
Tag Archives: Brain
Book Forum–Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Gut Feminism
This article is part of the series: Book forum
Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism revisits feminism’s traditionally antagonistic engagement with biology with a call to reposition the body in feminist thought. As Wilson critically explores relationships between guts and melancholia, pharmacokinetics and bile, psyche and soma, she generates tools and insights for a new feminist reading of biology, and articulates the role of aggression as a necessary condition for feminist …
Tobias Rees’s Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms
Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms
by Tobias Rees
University of California Press, 2016, 352 pages
In the prefatory pages of Plastic Reason, Tobias Rees explains that his ethnographic study of the lab of French biologist Alain Prochiantz — one of the earliest proponents, technicians, and conceptual architects of neuronal plasticity — is ultimately “about …
Experimental anthropology in the making: a conversation with Andreas Roepstorff
This article is part of the series: The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences
Andreas Roepstorff is Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he is also Director of the Interacting Minds Centre. Since the early 2000s, he has pursued an intensely interdisciplinary and collaborative research-programme at the intersections of anthropology, science and technology studies, and cognitive neuroscience – while also using his ethnographic training to reflect back on this his own …
Concussion’s Memory Problem
In the lead-up to this year’s Superbowl, a surge of scientists, celebrities, athletes and everyday citizens all weighed in, many with tongues-in-cheek, to a so-called scandal about the deflation of game balls prepared by one of the competing teams. While popular media bubbled with the latest news for nearly two weeks, a simultaneous commentary was launched by some…
Brain
The brain speaks the truth of the self. I imagine it would not be controversial by now to suggest that this general formulation indexes a set of implicit constraints that have to some significant degree underwritten and informed the historical ontology of the modern self since the nineteenth century.
But let me be clear: to assert that the brain speaks …