Probing the Limits of Method in the Neurosciences

Over the past decades, the neurosciences – in the wider plural meaning of the term¹ – have attracted great interest both from a historical perspective as well as from a science and technology studies perspective. Of note is the remarkable fact that the very methods that the modern neurosciences have used in their research programs in the past have rarely been analyzed and comparatively criticized from a culturally contextualizing historical perspective. This special issue of the CBMH/BCHM, entitled “Probing the Limits of ‘Method’ in the Neurosciences,” is comprised of seven distinct articles from known experts in the field, which aim to analyze contemporary neuroscientific methods in their historical development. The individual contributions assembled in this special issue tackle the problem of methodology in the neurosciences from specific historical perspectives. In considering particular research questions, the articles expose the constraints of neurological and psychiatric methods in relation to external influences, such as migration patterns, technological interventions, forms of heroic experimentation, as well as changing patient and physician communications, as they emerged since the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century.

Since the “Decade of the Brain” in the United States during the 1990s,² the modern neurosciences have strongly influenced, if not thoroughly encroached on, many academic medical meanings, along with broad social interpretations of human behaviour, political negotiations, and economic decision-making processes.³ Even central working concepts in the discipline of history, such as human memory or forms of political and military decision making, have come to be reinterpreted through cognitive neuroscience angles. This process has given rise to the formation of new postmodern discourses, which have subsequently led into interdisciplinary exchanges that have been guided by ever more comprehensive neurological insights.⁴ A steadily growing body of scholarship has recently addressed the ensuing hybrid notions and concepts, such as those of the “mind-brain relationship,” neurological “therapeutic promises,” issues of “socio-evolutionary thought,” along with “psychological and somatic traumata” that were used in literary, as well as medico-scientific discursive, contexts. These profound topical currents seem to indicate that academic and social entities, which were formerly deemed to be the subject of psychology, philosophy, and sociology, could now be solely reduced to neuroscientific knowledge. In particular, neuro-physiological interpretations of brain functioning, such as the imperceptible influences of neuro-genes that are switched on and off in the human organism or the communication of neuronal networks across the cerebral hemispheres, have been taken to reinterpret previous humanities and social science concepts of “memory,” “reasoning,” “self-understanding,” and so on. This process has been particularly intensified with the increasing use of the latest neuro-imaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography or functional magnetic resonance imaging, since the 1990s, which appear to have made traditional concepts about the mind and psyche superfluous.⁵

Over the past two decades, historians and philosophers of medicine and of psychiatry have addressed the impact of the neurosciences on the social sciences and the humanities from multiple theoretical perspectives.⁶ Fernando Vidal from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, for instance, has addressed the philosophical and juridical implications of the change from previously rationalistic enlightenment notions of “personhood” to the perspective of “brain-hood.” This transition is also mapped as an analytical device that draws our attention to the somatic limitations and implicit reductionisms of human faculties to diverse neuronal activities and structural interpretations. As Vidal has pointed out in an intriguing essay on “Historical and Ethical Perspectives of Modern Neuroimaging,” the products of particular types of visualization technologies have become almost synonymous with most cutting-edge research profiles and approaches in the modern clinical neurosciences.⁷ Even the recently developed scholarly field of “neuroethics” has become intimately connected with the neuroimaging approaches themselves, both in their social contexts and in the definition of their research tasks (for example, patient test protocols or the use of neuroimaging data as evidence in modern court cases).⁸ Thus, neuroimaging in its local uses, communication practices, its media presence, and public understanding has developed as one of neuroethics’s primary...