Towards a (bio)cultural history of the brain?

Abstract

Histories of ideas about the brain, and of the brain itself, are relevant for historians studying mental health and madness. This review article outlines the development of the concept of ‘neurohistory’, its potential applications and pitfalls, as well as the benefits of engaging critically with neuroscience.

Keywords:

• Neurohistory
• psychiatry
• historiography
• emotions
• neuroscience

Acknowledgements

My thanks to special issue editors Catharine Coleborne and James Dunk for their interest in this review essay and to Philip Dwyer for reading several drafts.

Editors’ note

This review article has not been blind peer reviewed. It has been through a review process with the editorial team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

About the author

Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle. She works on the history of modern warfare, as well as the history of psychiatry and allied disciplines.

Notes

1 On the history of ECT, see G. E. Berrios, ‘The scientific origins of electroconvulsive therapy: a conceptual history’, History of Psychiatry 8, no. 29 (1997): 105–19; Edward Shorter and David Healy, Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

2 See Elisabeth M. S. Sherman, ‘Neuropsychological outcomes after epilepsy surgery: Systematic review and pooled estimates’, Epilepsia 52, no. 5 (2011): 857–69.

3 On the rise and fall of psychosurgery see Jack Pressman, Last Resort: psychosurgery and the limits of medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For lobotomies/leucotomies carried out in Australia, see Philippa Martyr and Aleksander Janca, ‘“A Matter of Conjecture”: leucotomy in Western Australia’, History of Psychiatry 29, no. 2 (2018): 199–215.

4 On the evolution of the idea that depression is ‘just chemical’, see Jonathan Sadowsky, The Empire of Depression: A New History (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), 103–34; see also Jonathan Sadowsky, ‘Before and After Prozac: Psychiatry as Medicine, and the Historiography of Depression’, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 45, no. 3 (2021): 479–502. The case for considering Prozac a kind of enhancement was put by Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (London: Fourth Estate, 1994).

5 See for example James Poskett, ‘Phrenology, Correspondence, and the Global Politics of Reform, 1815-1848’, The Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (2017): 409–42; James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Marius Turda, ‘New Perspectives on Race and Eugenics’, The Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008): 1115–24; Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Diane B. Paul, ‘Reflections on the Historiography of American Eugenics: Trends, Fractures, Tensions’, Journal of the History of Biology 49, no. 4 (2016): 641–58.

6 See, for example, Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From imprinting to attachment in Cold War America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); John C. Burhman, Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Craig Haney, ‘The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement: A Systematic Critique’, Crime and Justice 47, no. 1 (2018): 365–416.

7 Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

8 Ibid., 10.

9 Smail has also proposed that neurohistory can be regarded as a ‘branch of environmental history’: see Rob Boddice and Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Neurohistory’, in Debating New Approaches to History, ed. Marek Tamm and Peter Burke (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 316. For an extensive overview on some of these themes see Julie Adeney Thomas, ‘History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value’, American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1587–607, part of the ‘Roundtable: History Meets Biology’ section of that issue. See also J.R. McNeil, ‘Peak Document and the Future of History’, American Historical Review 125, no. 1 (2020): 1–18 for discussion of ‘the mounting flood of historical evidence from the natural sciences’. These issues are also of urgent importance to Australian scholars grappling with the intertwined legacies of settler colonialism and climate change: see for example James Taylor Carson, ‘Decolonisation and Reconciliation in the Australian Anthropocene’, Journal of Australian Studies 45, no. 1 (2021): 4–17; Alison Bashford, ‘The Anthropocene is Modern History: Reflections on Climate and Australian Deep Time’, Australian Historical Studies 44, no 3 (2013): 341–9.

10 Smail refers to the ‘brain-body system’, ‘brain-body states’ and ‘brain-body chemistry’ throughout On Deep History and the Brain, but see for example 128, 144 and 150.

11 On the contrary, research suggests that appetite and satiety are influenced by a combination of individual metabolic factors, childhood eating patterns, and our expectations about how often and how much to eat, which are formed by cultural norms as well as material circumstances. For useful discussions of the interactions of these multiple factors see Jennifer K. MacCormack and Kirsten A. Lindquist, ‘Feeling Hangry? When Hunger is Conceptualized as Emotion’, Emotion 19, no. 2 (2019): 301–19; Peter J. Rogers and Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, ‘Appetite and Energy Balancing’, Physiology and Behavior 164 (2016): 465–71; Jon D. Kassel and Saul Shiffman, ‘What can hunger teach us about drug craving? A comparative analysis of the two constructs’, Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy 14, no. 3 (1992): 141–67; Peter J. Rogers, ‘Eating habits and appetite control: a psychobiological perspective’, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 58, no. 1 (1999): 59–67. For discussion of the methodological challenges of investigating hunger in the past see Emma Griffin, ‘Diets, Hunger and Living Standards During the British Industrial Revolution’, Past & Present 239, no. 1 (2018): 71–111.

12 For arguments against ‘historical indifference’ to sleep and its meanings, see A. Roger Ekirch, ‘Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles’, American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (2001): 343–86. Conceptualising pain (physical and psychological) is complicated by the various ways patients experience, understand, and communicate that pain; in this sense it lies ‘halfway between the world of emotions and the realm of sensations’: Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History (London: Palgrave, 2012), 2. For discussion see Rob Boddice, ‘Introduction: Hurt Feelings?’, in Pain and Emotion in Modern History, ed. Rob Boddice (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 1–15; Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkiller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

13 Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 114 and 148.

14 See Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. ‘Epigenetics between the generations: We inherit more than just genes’, ScienceDaily, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170717100548.htm (accessed 21 November 2021). For a general overview see S.C.P. Williams, ‘Epigenetics’, PNAS 110, no. 9 (2013): 3209; though see also Mark Ptashne, ‘Epigenetics: Core misconcept’, PNAS 110, no. 18 (2013): 7101–3; David Penny, ‘Epigenetics, Darwin, and Lamarck’, Genome Biology and Evolution 7, no. 6 (2015): 1758–60.

15 Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 127–30.

16 Ibid., 6–7.

17 Ibid., 155.

18 Lynn Hunt, ‘The Experience of Revolution’, French Historical Studies 32, no. 4 (2009): 672.

19 See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 33. Individual texts or genres, such as the anchoritic guidance writing analysed by Julia Bourke, can also be conceptualised as evidence of psychotropy: see for example Julia Bourke, ‘An Experiment in “Neurohistory”: Reading Emotions in Aelred’s De Institutione Inclusarum (Rule for a Recluse)’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 42, no. 1 (2016): 124–42.

20 Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Neurohistory in Action: Hoarding and the Human Past’, Isis 105, no. 1 (2014): 121.

21 Boddice and Smail, ‘Neurohistory’, 314.

22 William M. Reddy, ‘The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day’, Emotion Review 12, no. 3 (2020): 168–78.

23 On this affinity see Larry S. McGrath, ‘Historiography, Affect, and the Neurosciences’, History of Psychology 20, no. 2 (2017): 129–147. On ‘looping’, see Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, ‘History from Within? Contextualising the New Neurohistory and Seeking Its Methods’, History of Psychology 15, no. 1 (2012): 84–99.

24 See Lynn Hunt, ‘AHR Roundtable: The Self and Its History’, American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1576–1586; Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, ‘History from Within? Contextualising the New Neurohistory and Seeking Its Methods’, History of Psychology 15, no. 1 (2012): 84–99; Boddice and Smail, ‘Neurohistory’, 301.

25 Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion, 2019), 10–11.

26 Boddice and Smail, ‘Neurohistory’, 307.

27 William Reddy, ‘Neuroscience and the Fallacies of Functionalism’, History & Theory 49, no. 3 (2010): 413 and generally 412-25.

28 Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1.

29 McGrath, ‘Historiography, Affect, and the Neurosciences’, 142.

30 Roger Cooter, ‘Neural Veils and the Will to Historical Critique: Why Historians of Science Need to Take the Neuro-Turn Seriously’, Isis 105, no. 1 (2014): 147.

31 On these issues see Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Alfred Freeborn, ‘The history of the brain and mind sciences’, History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 3 (2019): 145–54.

32 As Smail puts it, it is ‘important for cognitive neuroscientists to learn how to come to grips with the brain’s historicity’: Smail, ‘Neurohistory in Action’, 113.

33 Steve Fuller, ‘Neuroscience, Neurohistory, and the History of Science: A Tale of Two Brain Images’, Isis 105, no. 2 (2014): 104.

34 McGrath, ‘Historiography, Affect, and the Neurosciences’, 143.

35 Cooter, ‘Neural Veils’, 149.

36 Boddie makes a similar argument; that ‘[w]e can no longer think in terms of nature and nurture, but only in terms of bioculture, which is not immune to history, but mutable’: Boddice and Smail, ‘Neurohistory’, 301–2.

37 Cristian Berco, ‘Perception and the Mulatto Body in Inquisitorial Spain: A Neurohistory’, Past & Present 231, no. 231 (2016): 33–60.

38 See discussion in Charles T. Wolfe, ‘Introduction’, in Brain Theory: Essays in Critical Neurophilosophy, ed. Charles T. Wolfe (London: Palgrave, 2014), 1–13.

39 Reddy, ‘Fallacies of Functionalism’, 418.

40 ‘Psychohistory’ is to be distinguished from the history of psychoanalysis, which remains a rich field of inquiry: see for example Matt ffytche and Daniel Pick, eds., Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totaliarianism (London: Routledge, 2016); John Burnham, ed., After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller, eds., Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). For an Australian example see Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005).

41 Here I am thinking of the early work of Peter Loewenberg, particularly his article ‘The Psychohistorical Origins of a Nazi Youth Cohort’, American Historical Review 76, no. 5 (1971): 1457–502; as well as Klaus Theweleit’s study of the Freikorps, published in English as Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and 1989). Lyndal Roper’s, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Peter Gay’s, The Bourgeois Experience, 5 vols (New York: Oxford University Press and Norton, 1984–1998) also demonstrated how psychoanalytic insights might add to historical scholarship without overwhelming it. For contemporaneous critiques of psychohistory, see Jacques Barzun, ‘The Muse and Her Doctors’, The American Historical Review 77, no. 1 (1972): 36–64; Philip Pomper, ‘Problems of a Naturalistic Psychohistory’, History and Theory 12, no. 4 (1973): 367–88; Thomas A. Kohut, ‘Psychohistory as History’, American Historical Review 91, no. 2 (1986): 336–54. On the conceptual differences between history and psychoanalysis, see Joan W. Scott, ‘The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History’, History and Theory 51, no. 1 (2012): 63–83. For recent defence of psychoanalysis as illuminating the historian’s own subjectivity, see Michael Roper, ‘The Unconscious Work of History’, Cultural and Social History 11, no. 2 (2014): 169–93; Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds, ed., History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

42 William L. Langer, ‘The Next Assignment’, American Historical Review 63, no. 2 (1958): 286. Other writers on neurohistory have noted this connection: see Reddy, ‘Fallacies of Functionalism’, 419; Hunt, ‘AHR Roundtable’, 1576 (though her assertion that historians are inflexibly hostile to psychology is overstated).

43 Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 160.

44 Langer, ‘The Next Assignment’, 292–3.

45 On eclipse of psychoanalysis, see Nathan Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

46 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin, 2011), xxi. Other works in the category include Ian McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation (London: Penguin, 2012); and E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012).

47 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage, 2011).

48 A brief selection from the last decade: Kathryn Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Anne Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (London: Headline, 2021); Judith Grisel, Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (London: Scribe, 2019); Dean Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time (New York: Norton, 2018); Alex Rosenberg, How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018); Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (London: Penguin, 2018); Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017); Catherine M. Pittman and Elizabeth M. Karle, Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic and Worry (Oakland: New Harbinger, 2015); Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance (London: Icon, 2012); Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (Oakland: New Harbinger, 2012).