Neurocomics and Neuroimaging

This chapter examines a small number of recent graphic brain narratives that experiment with novel methods of visualizing the brain—including David B.’s Epileptic, Ellen Forney’s Marbles, and Matteo Farinella and Hana Ros’s Neurocomic. Tougaw argues that these narratives both draw from and challenge cultural responses to high-profile neuroimaging techniques, including PET and fMRI. Graphic narratives are a subcultural genre celebrated for their rebellious aesthetics and emphasis on narratives that challenge mainstream social and political assumptions. Brain scanning technologies are highly specialized tools that have revolutionized brain research and gained considerable mainstream attention. The mainstreaming of these technologies oversimplifies the images they produce, creating a widely held sense that they offer direct access to the brains they visualize. By contrast, graphic narratives put heavy emphasis on the aesthetic process involved in their making of brain images. While careful not to minimize these differences, the chapter argues that key similarities between neurocomics and neuroimaging techniques can be a means for clarifying the roles played by the sciences and the humanities in the cultural laboratory of contemporary neuromania.

Interlude: Interview with Maud Casey

In this interlude, Tougaw and Casey discuss her novel The Man Who Walked Away in the context of cultural and historical fluctuations in the diagnosis of mental experience as pathology. The conversation ranges through discussions of Ian Hacking’s book Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, nineteenth-century theories of “moral treatment,” Casey’s approach to historical fiction and narration, and contemporary debates about diagnosis and labeling of mental illness.

Touching Brains in the Neuronovel

In contemporary fiction, the appearance of a physical brain leads swiftly to explicit focus on questions that proliferate from the explanatory gap. Writers don’t use the term, but they explore and contextualize its implications in considerable detail. In this chapter, Tougaw examine the portrayal of those three pounds of intricately designed flesh in five novels: Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (1999), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2009), John Wray’s Lowboy (2010), and Maud Casey’s The Man Who Walked Away (2014). These novels are representative of a common literary phenomenon: the dramatization of a fantasy whereby touching brains may reveal the stuff of which self is made. In each of these novels, the representation of physical brains provokes questions about the relationship between physiology and the self that become central to narrative closure.

Interlude: Neurodiversity in the Age of the Brain Atlas

In this interlude, Tougaw examines two major cultural responses to advances in neuroscience: neurodiversity politics and the U.S.-European race to “map” the brain in the hope of creating a dynamic digital “brain atlas.” While neurodiversity activists emphasize the difference from one human brain to another, the brain atlas projects aim to create a composite of the human brain. The interlude examines the inevitable contradictions that arise from both points of view, arguing that both are valuable but that neurodiversity politics and scientific efforts to map the composite brain would benefit from more mutual dialogue.

Epilogue: Reading Organisms in the Age of Neuroscience

In the epilogue, Tougaw asks, “What does it mean to read as a human organism?” The epilogue surveys recent accounts in “Neuro-Lit-Crit,” emphasizing fledgling attempts to bridge the humanities and the neurosciences—and the controversies that have arisen in the process. Tougaw concludes with a set of propositions: the brain is a representational organ, and we need sophisticated theories of representation to understand it; the efflorescence of brain research in the last three decades has led to more questions than answers, multiplying the variables and angles necessary for understanding relations between brain and behavior; difference is a motivating force in much literature and therefore both neuro-literature and “Neuro-Lit-Crit” must engage with disability studies and politics; literary representations of neurological difference emphasize complications and disjunctions more than they resolve social, political, or philosophical debates; and the sciences and the humanities are converging in their conceptual understandings of the making of self and relations between biology and culture, even though their very different languages often make it appear as though they are diverging; and, therefore, it’s the responsibility of both scientists and humanists to translate disciplinary languages, with the aim of strengthening both disciplines.

Narrating Neurological Difference

In this chapter, Tougaw examines novels by Christopher Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Tom McCarthy, all of which narrate neurological difference in fiction, translating traits associated with autism, Tourette’s, PTSD, amnesia, or Capgras into a narrative voice. As an aesthetic strategy, narrating neurological difference in fiction is fraught, likely to reinforce cognitive norms in some ways and challenge them in others. The chapter argues that the ethical questions raised by appropriating neurodivergent experience for the sake of aesthetic experiment are unresolvable, but important to consider. What we can—and should—learn from these novels is that the affordances and misfittings involved in the representation shape understandings the circulation of ideas about neurological difference. We won’t understand the potential of neurodiversity politics or the implications of neurodivergent identities unless we attend to the specific representational techniques that construct the cultural niches that make debates about the brain possible and necessary.

Interlude: If You’ve Met One Autistic Reviewer …

In this interlude, Tougaw examines cultural responses to Christopher Haddon’s highly acclaimed and controversial novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Building on a mantra of activists in the autistic community—“If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person”—the interlude argues that debates about whether the novel represents autism accurately or even responsibly are unresolvable, precisely because there is no single or unified autistic experience. Instead, the interlude emphasizes varying responses to the novel by reviewers who identify as autistic (and those who do not). Tougaw concludes that the most responsible approach for educators is to teach the novel in the context of these debates.

Three Autistic Autobiographers

In this chapter, Tougaw examines multiple autobiographies by three autistic writers: Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, Naoki Higashida, and John Elder Robison. Like other brain memoirists, these authors write to craft agency in response to the accidents of physiology and culture that shape their identities. But they also write more explicitly as rhetoricians, makers of emergent and rapidly evolving autistic culture and neurodiversity politics. The marketing of their books, as with most autistic autobiographers, tends to focus on the power of the writing to take readers “inside” autistic minds or worlds. In their writing, though, they emphasize writing as the power to challenge stereotypes about autism, assert their authority, and shape cultural debate.

Before Neuromania

Chapter 1 examines influential texts published during the 1990s, by Oliver Sacks, Kay Redfield Jamison, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, and David Lodge. The argument of the chapter is that these writers had not yet coalesced into a school or tradition but that they shared a set of implicit assumptions. All of these texts emphasize the fundamental roles of physiology in the making of identity but suggest also that physiology is meaningful only in the personal, social, and political contexts of live experience. In addition, they represent their writers’ attempts to blur lines between C.P. Snow’s infamous “two cultures”—science vs. the humanities—by emphasizing the phenomenology of living with a brain. While these texts helped established a zeal for neuroscience that would later be termed neuromania by theorists critical of simplistic cultural responses to neuroscience, they also contained the seeds of more sophisticated approaches to understanding relations between brain, self, and culture.

Brain Memoirs

In this chapter, Tougaw argues that brain memoirs evolve from a long tradition of autobiographical writing that chronicles mind-body relationships and their implications for selfhood, including the work of Augustine, Montaigne, Thomas De Quincey, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Broadly speaking, brain memoirs make at least five significant contributions to culture—in varying degrees for each particular memoir: 1) they enable their writers to gain a sense of agency or control in the face of the accidents that shape lives, including the accidents of genes, disease, or physical injury; 2) they offer much-needed solace and information to readers who suffer in ways similar to the writer as well as the loved ones and caretakers who support them; 3) they provide detailed, first-person accounts of neurological difference that have the potential to inform and influence brain research and clinical practice; 4) they renew and invigorate philosophical debates about mind and body, qualia, memory, and relationships between self and narrative; and 5) they develop narrative strategies for representing the complexities of the minds and bodies of their authors.