A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities-Neuroscience Divide (review)

Any book that helps demolish the stubbornly ingrained gospel of Cartesian bifurcation is, indeed, welcome. This book is a fairly major contribution to this deconstruction project, not only exposing Cartesian fallacies but also suggesting positive, practical ways of putting "Humpty Dumpty back together again." The humanities and the neurosciences are two powerful "ways of knowing," and as all contributors to this volume agree, these two disciplines must start working cooperatively if we are to advance in unraveling the mysteries of existence and the part that our minds, brains and bodies play in this existence.

Stafford's aim in creating this book was not to provide definitive guidelines for bridging the humanities-neuroscience divide per se but to develop literally a field guide that would point the way for future research. She uses the term "Meta-Field" to describe this new approach: "In addition to being a field guide, this book serves as a primer to intellectual possibilities and best practices in a metadiscipline that does not yet exist" (p. ix).

A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field is a scholarly collection of essays from leading thinkers in both the humanities and brain sciences. As such it is not really suited to general, popular readership. The essays presuppose a broad knowledge of modern critical/cultural theory and at least a basic familiarity with neuroscience terms and principles. The book is illustrated with numerous black-and-white drawings, diagrams and photographs. There are nine wide-ranging chapters, preceded by Stafford's own introductory essay, "Crystal and Smoke." One thing that stands out from the research that produced the essays in this book is that the brain, mind and embodiment are far more complex than most researches ever dared imagine. As Stafford mentions:

A major message of this book is that one way of getting past what Damasio saw as the "abyssal [Cartesian] separation between body and mind" is for neuroscientists not to limit their cultural considerations to the evidence provided by grammatically complex symbolic languages. We know that our gesturing and tool-making hominid ancestors lacked such syntactical activity. What they had, and we still have, are sophisticated compositional structures for mirroring complex mental and social situations by performing them as intersubjective events

(p. 45).

The new story beginning to unfold, as encapsulated in Stafford's new meta-field, is a Kuhnian paradigm-breaking work in progress. The essays in this book will challenge many hidebound academics' stale and outmoded paradigms and certainly make most readers sit up and think very seriously about the future direction of their research.

The essays . . . are proof that the neurosciences cannot dispense with the humanities in their analyses of the brain. Equally, the humanities must reckon with scientific findings. Desegregating those who address the outer and inner worlds gets rid of warring over prestige and funds

(p. 58).