Neural imaginaries and clinical epistemology: Rhetorically mapping the adolescent brain in the clinical encounter
Neural imaginaries and clinical epistemology: Rhetorically mapping the adolescent brain in the clinical encounter
复制标题
DOI：
10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.04.012
复制
发表时间：
2015-10-01
影响因子：
5.4
通讯作者：
Buchbinder, Mara
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Buchbinder, Mara
脑图像的社会工作在最近神经科学与社会交叉的理论化中占据了中心位置。然而，神经影像学只是神经生物学的公共表征传播的话语模式之一。本文采用一种扩展的观点来研究神经科学思维的社会含义，以研究在缺乏视觉证据的情况下神经想象是如何构建的。根据在美国多学科儿科疼痛诊所进行的18个月（2008-2009）的人种学田野调查，我研究了以神经生物学形式代表模糊症状的实用临床工作。我以一位医生为重点，通过修辞性地把大脑描绘成一种治疗工具，来说明她是如何从事一种独特的表征形式的，我称之为神经想象。在将我的注意力从纯粹的大脑图像的物质维度转移的过程中，我将大脑扫描技术的文化工作与临床神经想象结合起来，在这种想象中，青少年的大脑成为了一个充满可能性的空间，不是描绘事物的本来面目，而是描绘我们希望它们可能成为的样子。这些神经想象依赖于一种独特的临床认识论，在揭示身体的真相时，这种认识论赋予想象的创造性工作特权，而不是可视化技术。通过为青少年创造一个治疗空间来锻炼他们的想象力和一个话语模板，神经想象重新定位了青少年关于身体知识的认识论和可视化实践在其中的作用的代理。在这样做的过程中，它提供了一个更有希望的替代方案，主要通过病理学的视角来看待青少年大脑的主流流行和科学表现。(c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd.版权所有。
The social work of brain images has taken center stage in recent theorizing of the intersections between neuroscience and society. However, neuroimaging is only one of the discursive modes through which public representations of neurobiology travel. This article adopts an expanded view toward the social implications of neuroscientific thinking to examine how neural imaginaries are constructed in the absence of visual evidence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 18 months (2008-2009) in a United States multidisciplinary pediatric pain clinic, I examine the pragmatic clinical work undertaken to represent ambiguous symptoms in neurobiological form. Focusing on one physician, I illustrate how, by rhetorically mapping the brain as a therapeutic tool, she engaged in a distinctive form of representation that I call neural imagining. In shifting my focus away from the purely material dimensions of brain images, I juxtapose the cultural work of brain scanning technologies with clinical neural imaginaries in which the teenage brain becomes a space of possibility, not to map things as they are, but rather, things as we hope they might be. These neural imaginaries rely upon a distinctive clinical epistemology that privileges the creative work of the imagination over visualization technologies in revealing the truths of the body. By creating a therapeutic space for adolescents to exercise their imaginative faculties and a discursive template for doing so, neural imagining relocates adolescents' agency with respect to epistemologies of bodily knowledge and the role of visualization practices therein. In doing so, it provides a more hopeful alternative to the dominant popular and scientific representations of the teenage brain that view it primarily through the lens of pathology. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.