Analyzing the Analyst: Theater as Method in the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

• In Event: The Ethnographic Effect: Imagining a Next Generation of Methodological Possibilities III

Abstract

Embodiment theory, a view increasingly popular in the cognitive sciences, suggests that social, political, emotional and cognitive processes cannot be separated from the ways that they form through, and are maintained by, bodily action. This project, through an experimental theater intervention, explores the ways that embodied responsiveness pertains to the researchers’ process of analyzing human behavior in the laboratory.

Cognitive neuroscience seeks to identify neural correlates of human behavior, and thus researchers must create laboratory spaces and conditions to evoke behavior that can allow for brain imaging and analysis. This project, a collaboration with a cognitive neuroscientist, uses video recordings of performance interactions as an empirical object to discuss, observe and analyze. The interactions resist easy analysis; they are uncanny, ongoing, encultured, full bodied. Sitting in front of video recordings of uncanny interactions, my collaborator and I also record our own interactions as we analyze the interactions of others, and attend to the resources we ourselves use in making sense of others. Interestingly, we find that we lean heavily on two resources: one is a strategy for creating order by identifying a logic/language by which to code the behavior we see. The other is a strategy for understanding situated meaning on behaviors by mimicking, trying out, and otherwise physicalizing the gestures of others. Rather than existing as two separable processes, these strategies are nested in complex ways.

This projects contributes to a longstanding STS concern with reflexivity (Mol 2002) and performativity (Law 2004) of STS methods, as well as to STS work on cognitive science and interdisciplinarity (Fitzgerald and Callard 2015).

Author

• Yelena Gluzman, UCSD