The human in the brain: opportunities and challenges in neuroscience’s expanding scope

• In Event: Neurosocieties: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Brain, Culture and Ethics 2

Abstract

Neuroscience incorporates a growing range of human phenomena within its research scope. This paper explores the dynamism of neuroscience as an evolving field that successfully accommodates a broad range of expertise, as well as some of the challenges that this presents. The paper focuses on the tension between the mobility of knowledge that neuroscience engenders and the difficulty of preserving the epistemic integrity of the participating disciplines.

The brain that is the central object of neuroscientific investigation is conceived of as ‘mind/brain’, spanning molecules to mind, and can be seen to be relevant to all manner of human phenomena. This conceptualisation of neuroscience’s primary object of research is an important factor in sustaining the field’s ever-expanding scope, allowing neuroscience to hold together as a coherent field. Yet scholars who study interdisciplinarity in neuroscience indicate that there may be a limit to genuine reciprocity.

I draw on my research that investigated how neuroscience’s expansion into the study of increasingly broad, complex human phenomena was being sustained. This research included participant observation with behavioural and cognitive neuroscience laboratories in Australia, interviews with neuroscientists investigating human thought, behaviour and feeling, and textual analysis of popular neuroscience books written by prominent neuroscientists. Through this empirical work, I explore how neuroscience is an evolving multidisciplinary field organised around the human brain as its central object. I consider the material, practical and imaginative components that make up this organisation, and how these both facilitate and limit reciprocity between the disciplines that study the human.

Author

• Samantha Croy, University of Melbourne