Plasticity and pathology: on the formation of the neural subject

This collection of essays brings together a diverse range of scholars to investigate how the 'neural subject' of the 21st century came to be. Taking approaches both historical and theoretical, they probe the possibilities and limits of neuroscientific understandings of human experience. Topics include landmark studies in the history of neuroscience, the relationship between neural and technological 'pathologies', and analyses of contemporary concepts of plasticity and pathology in cognitive neuroscience. Central to the volume is a critical examination of the relationship between pathology and plasticity. Because pathology is often the occasion for neural reorganization and adaptation, it exists not in opposition to the brain's 'normal' operation but instead as something intimately connected to our ways of being and understanding.;Toward an ethnography of experimental psychology / Emily Martin -- "You are (not) your synapses" : toward a critical approach to neuroscience / Catherine Malabou -- Plasticity, pathology, and pleasure in cold war America / Cathy Gere -- Epileptic insanity and personal identity : John Hughlings Jackson and the Formations of the neuropathic self / Nima Bassiri -- Integrations, vigilance, catastrophe : the neuropsychiatry of aphasia in Henry Head and Kurt Goldstein / Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers -- The history of a brain wound : Alexander Luria and the dialectics of Soviet plasticity / Hannah Proctor and Laura Salisbury -- Automaticity, plasticity, and the deviant origins of artificial intelligence / David Bates -- Plastic diagrams : circuits in the brain and how they got there / Joseph Dumit -- Imperfect reflections : norms, pathology, and difference in mirror neuron research / Katja Guenther -- On how adult cerebral plasticity research has decoupled pathology from death / Tobias Rees.