In the 'Pipeline'

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro was kind enough to include The Lying Brain in his latest 'Pipeline' for Salon Futura. Not only does Zinos-Almaro place the book placed alongside some pretty fabulous looking science fiction, (an exciting moment for someone like myself, who is a big sf fan), but he also recommend the book to his readers. His reasoning: he likes "studies that trace a particular subject through both science and popular culture, since one perspective often sheds light on the other." This kind of characterization makes me a bit giddy given that this is *exactly* the kind of study I hoped to write.  

Brain Facts? Neuromyths?

There's going to be a new website on the nets: brainfacts.org

The site is funded by the Society for Neuroscience and is considered an "initiative of the Kavli Foundation and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation." It's goal os to make emergent neuroscience research available to the public.


I'm curious about this new initiative for many reasons, not least of which is the rhetoric used to describe it's scope and purpose: a February 16th (2011) press release from the Society for Neuroscience calls brainfacts.org "a unique nonprofit online source for authoritative public information about the progress and promise of brain research." The trouble evidenced here for many scholars--not to mention practitioners and the public audience--is the unidirectional narrative of progress. Brain research is not about cautious investigation; it does not hinge on questions of 'personhood' (Dumit 2004), selfhood, or 'brainhood' (Vidal 2004); nor is it a process of fits and starts and paradigm shifts. Instead, we now have it on good authority that brain research is simply about progress and promise.


That said, I think we will all be watching to see exactly what kinds of information are deemed acceptable for a general audience. And how the new site will fulfill its mission: "Over time, the site will complement and leverage the field’s global commitment to public information by integrating multimedia resources from leading neuroscience centers worldwide. Moreover, in an era where scientific misinformation is rampant, BrainFacts.org content will be evaluated by leading scientists to ensure accuracy and to help dispel “neuromyths,” which range from poorly interpreted concepts of “left-brain or right-brain learners” to inaccurate claims of links between autism and childhood vaccines." One wonders how many of these so-called  'neuromyths' were once the working objects of neuroscience itself.


Clearly, brainfacts.org will be a site to watch in the coming years.


The original press release from Society of Neuroscience is available here.
Brainfacts.org

The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction

Published by the University of Michigan Press (avail. April, 2011)

From the Cover: Real and imagined machines, including mental microscopes, thought translators, and polygraphs, have long promised to detect deception in human beings. Now, via fMRI and EEG, neuroscientists seem to have found what scientists, lawyers, and law enforcement officials have sought for over a century: foolproof lie detection. But are these new lie detection technologies any different from their predecessors? The Lying Brain is the first book to explore the cultural history of an array of lie detection technologies: their ideological assumptions, the scientific and fictional literatures that create and market them, and the literacies required for their interpretation. By examining a rich archive of materials about lie detection—from science to science fiction--The Lying Brain demonstrates the interconnections of science, literature, and popular culture in the development and dissemination of deception detection in the American cultural imagination. As Melissa Littlefield demonstrates, neuroscience is not building a more accurate lie detector; it is simply recycling centuries-old ideologies about deception and its detection.

The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction (on Amazon)

The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction (Preview Here)