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Educating ‘cerebral subjects’: The emergence of brain talk in the Argentinean society

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Abstract

This article focuses on both the dissemination of neuroscientific knowledge and its social implications through the analysis of a television program entitled The Enigmas of the Brain hosted by an Argentinean neuroscientist. My main concern in this article is to analyze some of the discursive uses of brain talk, that is, the many ways in which brain terminology is engaged in accounts about what the brain does and how some terms are linked together in order to create a sense of brain causality in a number of heterogeneous processes. The research that led to this article follows a qualitative design. The content of the television show was transcribed and analyzed following a content analysis strategy. This data is part of a sociological research project about the cognitive neuroscience field in Argentina. I suggest that brain talk is more about creating new words to explain and make sense of life than about communicating scientific information to a lay audience. As it is explained in the program, the purpose is to educate the public, but I argue that not in the sense of giving new information, but in the sense of producing linguistic resources that encourage the emergence of new self-narratives.

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Notes

  1. In this regard, see Bianchi (2012), who shows the dispute around the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder diagnosis and Mantilla (2010a, 2010b, 2010c), regarding the different approaches in psychiatric hospital admission and in the diagnostic conception.

  2. Argentina’s health system is made up of three subsectors: public, private and social securities. The first one comprises public hospital and primary health-care centers providing free assistance under the coordination of the Ministry of Health. The social security system is made up of institutions that provide health services to workers on the payroll (who give a compulsory contribution through their salaries to support the system). Finally, the private health sector is made up of health-care institutions that provide paid services to their users.

  3. The practice of mindfulness meditation supported by the encounter of Buddhism and neuroscience is introduced by Dr John Kabat Zin at Massachusetts University and has a growing presence in Argentina through different non-government associations whose pioneers were trained in the United States. The mindfulness method is offered as an 8-week-stress-reduction program and is open to all the people.

  4. ‘Eye movement desentization and reprocessing’ (EMDR) is a psychological method developed in 1987 by Francine Shapiro, a researcher at the Mental Research Institute, for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorders and for anxiety disorders. It was introduced in the early 90s by Pablo and Raquel Ferrazzano de Solvey, among others, (www.terapiasdeavanzada.org, www.emdr.org.ar, Asociación Civil EMDRIA Latinoamérica), and has slightly developed since then.

  5. According to Korman et al (2010) the health system has incorporated contemporary criteria such as “efficacy”, “effectiveness” and “efficiency” into the psychotherapeutic treatments, which are closer to the cognitive model.

  6. The Instituto de Neurología Cognitiva (INECO) [Cognitive Neurology Institute],directed by the neuroscientist who also hosts the analyzed TV program and the laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience of the University of Buenos Aires.

  7. International guest interviewees have included Mike Gazzaniga, Joseph LeDoux, Antoine Bechara, John Cacioppo, Martha Farah, among others.

  8. Rose (2007) describes a series of mutations that characterize contemporary biomedicine and that, because of their impact, go beyond the medical field and show incipient processes of cultural transformation. The “molecularization of vitality” is key in this spectrum of mutations.

  9. It is important to note that several non-reductive materialisms can be advanced that sustain the view of a co-constitution of the biological individual and its historical, cultural social environment (for more references on this topic see Rose, 2013). For this reason, I have highlighted the importance of this interconnection between social and biology that is suggested through the claims made in the show.

  10. In this process, it is the notion of biology itself that is altered, as it is no longer a predetermined destiny but is open to intervention, to the redesign of our vital capacities. Therefore, the modern division between nature and society is re-signified.

  11. Even though this article does not interrogate the impacts of these claims from a lay viewpoint, the comments posed on the Website of the program contribute to generating an idea of the public reception of neuroscience. The next quotation comes from one of these comments: ‘Few are those who can see that the value of these documentaries is not in acquiring knowledge but in implementing it. Imagine how you could change the world thanks to these developments. We could combat behavioural problems, improve learning, be happier, etc. Thanks for sharing these videos’.

  12. There is a vast literature that indicates the combination of different practices and approaches (neurosciences and psychoanalysis). I may mention Luhrman (2000), Ortega and Vidal (2011) and Rose and Rached (2013) among others.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nikolas Rose for his insightful comments on a first draft of this article. This article has benefited from research support provided by an European Neuroscience and Society Network scholarship. I would also like to thank my colleagues at BIOS; Gabriel Abend and Juan Pedro Alonso for their helpful comments.

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  1. Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Uriburu 950, sexto piso, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1114, CP, Argentina

    María Jimena Mantilla

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Jimena Mantilla, M. Educating ‘cerebral subjects’: The emergence of brain talk in the Argentinean society. BioSocieties 10, 84–106 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2014.27

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