Abstract
It is nearly impossible to avoid the growing presence of neuroscience. Over the last decade or so, we have seen an explosion of neuro-based subdisciplines, propelling the limits of the new era of the brain far beyond the walls of the lab or clinic. Developments such as neuro-law, neuro-marketing, and, yes, even neuro-sociology demonstrate how the recent emergence of the neurosciences are influencing the ways we approach questions about human behaviors, bodies, and the self. A growing number of sociologists are hoping that a merger between neuroscience and sociology will help provide more complete answers to some of the most vexing social problems and questions. In The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics, Victoria Pitts-Taylor explores the sociological significance of the neuroscientific turn. She does not question the need to explore better the inextricability of the biological and social worlds, but is concerned with limitations of the “social brain” (pp. 5–6): the re-envisioned image of the brain as a malleable, culturally situated, and embodied object.
If today’s neurosciences are thinking more seriously about the potential interactions between sociality and the body, Pitts-Taylor asks, what are the political and material consequences imbued within and through these epistemic claims about the social brain? For Pitts-Taylor, the question is not if biosociality matters; the material experiences and consequences of the human body surely matter for our understanding of sociality. Instead, Pitts-Taylor urges us to examine the “corporeal politics” of such knowledge claims. What types of brains and bodies are made to matter, and how? How is, or will, the social brain be shaped, calculated, and measured? And, importantly, how do social norms, power, and inequality inform and/or limit neuroscientific understandings, practices, and conclusions? Thus the goal of The Brain’s Body is to illuminate the limits of and tensions surrounding the social brain in order to understand its empirical and sociological potentials.
The Brain’s Body is a short book, yet it is a well-written and powerful contribution to sociological theory of health and the body, feminist theory, and science, knowledge, and technology studies. The first two chapters provide the theoretical backdrop of the text. Chapter One is an in-depth background of the development and current directions of brain plasticity research, and Chapter Two uses feminist theory on the embodied mind to develop the foundation for the author’s key contribution, embodied multiplicity. As the brain was reworked into the site of biosociality, Pitts-Taylor finds that such conceptualizations simultaneously constrained the possibilities of capturing the diversity of embodied minds and experiences.
Some of the most significant restrictions of the social brain thesis are explored in Chapter Three on the neuroscience of mirror neurons. In its most basic terms, mirror neuron research argues that during social interactions we simulate the neuron firing patterns of an observed individual to help us “know” the actions and “feel” the emotions of that individual. Pitts-Taylor uses the painful example of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was shot and killed by police officers, to help illustrate that racialization and other power relations undermine the epistemological assumptions of this seemingly prototypical experience. According to Pitts-Taylor, mirror neuron research has led to a dominant or normalized understanding of neural simulation that has very little room to explain when one individual fails to witness, know, and/or reciprocate the same type of empathy or sociality as expressed by the person being observed. Her argument is not simply that behavior and emotions are embodied differently and unevenly, but that “perception takes place in worldly contexts that render automatic simulation a poor model for intersubjective understanding” (p.125).
Chapter Four turns to the neurobiology of kinship. Here, the author is concerned with the way neuroscientists understand the making and experiences of kinship bonds. Again, Pitts-Taylor finds that this science, while drawing on a more fluid and complex vocabulary that both ostensibly eschews biological determinism and demonstrates a willingness to explore seriously the messy interactions between the brain and social, still restricts a more dynamic investigation of the social and embodiment. Pitts-Taylor does not dismiss the importance of neurobiological knowledges of kinship, but calls upon us to rethink what it means to be (neuro)biologically related to each other. She notes that this form of social neuroscience draws on heteronormative ideas of reproduction and the family, which overlooks, and essentially erases, queer experiences and familial ties, effectively restricting whose kinship bonds and embodied experiences are biologically “real.” Moreover, Pitts-Taylor rightly argues that this “[heteronormative] logic does not merely exclude some bodies in favor of others, but obscures the complexity of the experiences it is trying to explain for all bodies” (p.115).
The sociological consequences of a strict understanding of embodiment or biosociality result in more than the (bio)medicalization of social problems/experiences, but also the real potential to either enact or reinforce specific types of (neuro)governance. Rather than increasing the capacity to understand the relationships between the biological and social, such research in its current form normalizes a particular standard of the neurobiological body, which silences and/or erases socially marginalized and stratified bodies, identities, and experiences. Meaning, if the epistemology of neural plasticity is bounded by rigid understandings of the brain-social relationship or evolutionary prefigured social bodies and subjectivities, then brain-based biosocial explanations are vulnerable to biological determinism and reductionism and may potentially naturalize the very social inequalities they seek to avoid and/or address. The way forward, as Pitts-Taylor outlines, is a queering of brain plasticity and/or biosociality to help avoid limiting what the social brain can and should be. That means developing a multiplicity of embodiment: “a way of looking at the neurobiological body that neither presupposes universality nor overlooks the pitfalls of addressing difference” (p.15). This more complex understanding of embodiment accounts for the multiple and entangled ways that subjectivity, life, and health are brought to experience, modified, and/or made meaningful (or not) through our explorations of biosociality.
In exploring the neuroscientific approaches to biosocial research, Pitts-Taylor refuses to settle for what she sees as a limiting (neuro)biological framing of biosocial entanglements. Her plea for multiplicity of embodiment opens up a space to understand better biosocial potentialities and what it means for our social experiences to be truly embodied or “complexly embrained” (p.10). She shows convincingly that if a new science of biosociality is needed, social scientists must have input in its conceptualization, design, and execution and not simply be users or ethical endorsers of such neuroscientific practices and technologies. In conclusion, as we continue to wrestle with how the brain informs our sociological awareness and investigation, we will look to The Brain’s Body as a blueprint to help us untangle fully the sociological usefulness, uncertainties, and risks in exploring the relationships between our brains and sociality.