The language of visual representations in the neurosciences — relating past and future

A brain worth keeping? Waste, value and time in contemporary brain banking

If a temporal rather than spatial concept of waste is adopted, novel categories emerge which are useful for identifying and understanding logics of temporality at play in determining what is kept in contemporary brain banks, and reveal that brain banks are constituted by more than stored materials. First, I apply the categories analytically on a recent UK brain banking discussion among professionals. This analysis highlights the importance of data in brain banks, as well as the centrality of ideas about pasts and futures in the discussions. Secondly, I investigate the case of a seven decades old, Danish brain bank which had been reduced to its physically stored material for 24 years, before being reinstituted in 2006. This case demonstrates the importance of material and conceptual infrastructures that co-constitute a collection, as they make up an experimental system that is crucial to maintaining the collection's continued relevance and usefulness as a scientific institution.

Vital brains: On the entanglement of media, minds, and models

The advent of functional imaging, hailed as a breakthrough for marrying morphological and functional approaches in brain research, invites a reflection upon the interplay between models, instruments, and theories. Brain research and theorizing about the brain are generally mediated by the research technologies employed. Going back into the history of brain research, the chapter explores the epistemic effects of research technologies by focusing on the localization debate in relation to different visualization strategies. In this way, one can differentiate between abstracting and concretizing approaches to brain modeling. These approaches form the basis for introducing the concept of vital abstraction by revisiting Grey Walter's The Living Brain. Walter's adventures in visualizing brain activity and constructing lively toys are described as a form of brain theorizing that is anchored in empirical research but focuses on the brain's vital activity instead of identifying morphological and structural details. The concept of vital abstraction is further explored by applying the concept of epistemic virtues to evaluate current brain models and for coming to terms with the dynamics of brain research.

How we may think: Imaging and writing technologies across the history of the neurosciences

In the neurosciences, two alternative regimes of visualization can be differentiated: anatomical preparations for morphological images and physiological studies for functional representations. Adapting a distinction proposed by Peter Galison, this duality of visualization regimes is analyzed here as the contrast between an imaging and a writing approach: the imaging approach, focusing on mimetic representations, preserving material and spatial relations, and the writing approach as used in physiological studies, retaining functional relations. After a dominance of morphological images gathering iconic representations of brains and architectural brain theories, the advent of electroencephalography advanced writing approaches with their indexical signs. Addressing the brain allegedly at its mode of operation, electroencephalography was conceived as recording the brain's intrinsic language, extending the writing approach to include symbolic signs. The availability of functional neuroimaging signaled an opportunity to overcome the duality of imaging and writing, but revived initially a phrenological conflation of form and function, suppressing the writing approach in relation to imaging. More sophisticated visualization modes, however, converted this reductionism to the ontological productivity of social neuroscience and recuperated the theorizing from the writing approach. In light of the ongoing instrumental mediations between brains, data and theories, the question of how we may think, once proposed by Vannevar Bush as a prospect of enhanced human-machine interaction, has become the state of affairs in the entanglements of instruments and organic worlds.

Objectifying "Pain" in the Modern Neurosciences: A Historical Account of the Visualization Technologies Used in the Development of an "Algesiogenic Pathology", 1850 to 2000

Particularly with the fundamental works of the Leipzig school of experimental psychophysiology (between the 1850s and 1880s), the modern neurosciences witnessed an increasing interest in attempts to objectify "pain" as a bodily signal and physiological value. This development has led to refined psychological test repertoires and new clinical measurement techniques, which became progressively paired with imaging approaches and sophisticated theories about neuropathological pain etiology. With the advent of electroencephalography since the middle of the 20th century, and through the use of brain stimulation technologies and modern neuroimaging, the chosen scientific route towards an ever more refined "objectification" of pain phenomena took firm root in Western medicine. This article provides a broad overview of landmark events and key imaging technologies, which represent the long developmental path of a field that could be called "algesiogenic pathology."