Brain culture : neuroscience and popular media / Davi Johnson Thornton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thornton, Davi Johnson, 1978-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Neurosciences.

Science in popular culture.

Science in mass media.

Physical Description:

vii, 199 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [2011]

Summary:

Brain Culture investigates the American obsession with the health of the brain. The brain has become more than a bodily organ, acquiring a near-mystical status. The message that this organ is the key to everything is everywhere-in self-help books that tell us to work on our brains to achieve happiness and enlightenment, in drug advertisements that promise a few tweaks to our brain chemistry will cure us of our discontents, and in politicians' speeches that tell us that our brains are national resources essential to our economic prosperity.

Davi Johnson Thornton looks at these familiar messages, tracing the ways that brain science and colorful brain images produced by novel scientific technologies are taken up and distributed in popular media. She tracks the impact of the message that "you are your brain" across multiple contemporary contexts, analyzing its influence on child development, family life, education, and public policy. Brain Culture shows that our fixation on the brain is not simply areaction to scientific progress, but a cultural phenomenon deeply tied to social and political values of individualism and limitless achievement. Book jacket.

Contents:

The rhetorical brain

Visualizing the new brain

"How do you know unless you look?" : practical neuroscience and brain-based self-help

Babies, blank slates, and brain building

Pills, power, and the neuroscience of everyday life

Mental health care, the rhetoric of recovery, and entrepreneurial lives

The brain is the frontier : the subjectifications of neuroscience.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813550121

0813550122

9780813550138

0813550130

OCLC:

662152840