Introduction: Contested narratives of the mind and the brain: Neuro/psychological knowledge in popular debates and everyday life

Introduction

Throughout history, the mind, the brain, and the qualities that have been ascribed to them have fascinated scientists and the wider public alike. While concepts of the mind and the brain are shaped partly by everyday experiences, scientific perspectives have contributed much to popular understandings of cognitive and mental capacities. The rise of evolutionary biology and comparative psychology in the 19th century, for instance, promoted the assumption that people could ‘have’ different levels of cognitive capacity (Danziger, 1997: 66–74; Daston, 2005: 48–51). Similarly, the invention of the IQ and the spread of intelligence measurement in the 20th century contributed to the conviction that individual brainpower could be evaluated and quantified (see, among many others, Carson, 2007: 197–228; Castles, 2012: 99–100; Sutherland, 1988[1984]: 128–63; more sceptical Thomson, 2006: 110–13). Neuroscientific discourses are increasingly being adopted in social and political life, and taken to provide objective information about human development and capabilities. This has already had tangible consequences for approaches to, for instance, parenting, education, mental health, and law (Lowe, Lee, and Macvarish, 2015; Schleim, 2020; Thomas, Ansari, and Knowland, 2019).

The relationship between science and everyday interpretations of the mind and the brain has long been a topic of social scientific and historical research. As Sysling (2018: 265) summarizes, ‘Breaking down the distinction between professional and popular science, historians have shown how consumers of science were not passive receivers of simplified scientific knowledge’. In addition, historians have explored ‘how individuals became experts and produced their own knowledge’. Many such scholarly perspectives equally value scientific and lay contributions to, and active participation in, the joint formation of knowledge, potentially conceivable as ‘a sort of endless ribbon where forms of knowledge and practice circulate in all directions’ (Vidal and Ortega, 2017: 4). At the same time, scholars have rightly stressed that it is also important to acknowledge the limits of the ability of certain neuroscientific claims to understand and influence people, and vital to remain open to alternative interpretations when dealing with a person’s behaviour and explanations in everyday life. In a recent contribution to History of the Human Sciences, Roger Smith (2019) has warned against taking neuroscientists’ claims to be able to offer explanations of social life and what it means to be human too seriously:

Everyday talk is not about brains but about people.…The humanities and social sciences provide knowledge of people, in all their unbounded complexity, including knowledge of people who say they are not people but brains. The intellectually ‘challenging’ questions are not about people becoming their brains but about how anybody could come to say such things. (Smith, 2019: 12)

In this special section, we heed these calls to remain critical of the way (neuro)psychological sciences configure and reconfigure people’s understandings of themselves. We do so through focusing on narratives and on contestation, and suggest that these concepts allow for a critical examination of the ways in which the larger public engages (or does not engage) with (neuro)psychological knowledge.

Let us turn to the issue of narration first, and the issue of contestation second.

Narratives of the mind and the brain

Our first thesis is that knowledge and assumptions about the mind and brain in popular contexts are not only negotiated in abstract, general terms or through the reception of certain scientific claims or methods, but are embedded in broader narratives that associate potentials of thinking and perceiving with concrete experiences, specific persons, and their everyday behaviour and explanations. Examining the narratives that are used to characterize potentials of thinking and perceiving in popular contexts, therefore, will increase our understanding of interactions between scientific and everyday interpretations of the mind and the brain.

Heuristically, such narratives can be analysed on different temporal scales. They range from more persistent figures through to concrete conversations that happen in the here and now.

Figures of the mind and the brain, such as the ‘feeble-minded’, the ‘mentally deficient’ or the ‘intellectually disabled’, the ‘idiot’ or the ‘fool’ (Goodey, 2011; Thomson, 1998: 1–35; Trent, 1994), the ‘genius’ (McMahon, 2013), the ‘scientist’ (Cohen-Cole, 2014: 141–64), the ‘egghead’ (Lecklider, 2013: 191–220), or the ‘intellectual’ (Collini, 2006: 15–44), can develop over decades and persist over centuries, and often amalgamate scientific knowledge and everyday experiences. Therefore, analysing these concepts allows us to avoid presupposing a dichotomy between scientific knowledge on the one hand and non-scientific knowledge on the other, as well as to spot the merging and mutual transformation of ‘popular’ and ‘expert’ discourses.

There are also narratives and images of the mind and the brain that are widely known and understandable, but shift over decades or years. Temporally, these narratives are best identified from a medium-term perspective. Changes occur, for instance, due to technological advancements, particular historical events, broader social transformations, changing patterns of explanation and classification in the sciences, or a combination of these. For example, when the first electronic computers were presented to a wider audience in the 1940s, metaphors of the computer as a ‘New Wonder Brain’, ‘Mechanical Brain’, or ‘Man-Made Mental Giant’ immediately started to circulate in newspaper articles (Martin, 1993: 125). These images encouraged common understandings of electronic calculations as analogous to mental processes and encouraged imaginations of the mind and the brain in terms of technological features and vocabularies. Such newly evolving tropes and images of the mind and the brain can also be used to claim relevance and garner attention. Recently, for instance, the long-term effects of Covid-19 have been described as ‘brain fog’, a characterization that has evolved from patients’ descriptions of their symptoms and potential neurological and cognitive damage (Davis, 2020; Yong, 2020).

Finally, we find situational ascriptions of matters relating to the mind and the brain that take place in concrete interactional situations. These are bound to oral, written, or other forms of conversation. Such situational ascriptions become manifest in ways of addressing people and dealing with a person’s mental and other attributes. In line with this perspective, Jacqueline J. Goodnow almost 40 years ago recommended a ‘shift from regarding “intelligence” as a quality people possess in varying degrees to regarding it as judgment – a quality attributed – when people display “intelligent behaviors”’. This approach, according to Goodnow, prompts scholars to ask ‘how the judgment “stupid” or “intelligent” is made and how it compares with other judgments: with the impression, say, that an individual speaks well, writes well, is witty, well-informed, well-bred, or attractive’, and she encourages researchers to ‘regard judgments such as “intelligent” or “stupid” as occurring in everyday life as well as in formal test-taking situations’ (Goodnow, 1984: 391–2). In addition to the content that is being communicated, we suggest that it is also important to analyse, through studying a range of forums, different modes of speaking, such as being objective or ironic, and how these relate to modes of authorization or empowerment.

Scientific and everyday interpretations of the mind and the brain can interact on all these different temporal levels. In order to examine exactly how neuroscientific and psychological knowledge and interpretations have been adapted, interpreted, and reconfigured historically, both long-term perspectives and studies concentrating on shorter periods are needed. This is also true for today’s interpretation of the mind and the brain, in which historical developments still impact on present assumptions, and today’s perspectives shape our interests and questions relating to history. In their studies of narratives of the mind and the brain, therefore, scholars from the social sciences and history are well advised to cooperate and learn from each other, and indeed, this special section contains articles dealing with both contemporary and historical concepts of minds and brains.

Contesting (neuro)psychological knowledge

Our second thesis concerns the role of contestation. We suggest that contestation could be used as a key to understanding interactions and entanglements between everyday interpretations and scientific concepts of the mind and the brain, their scope, and their limits. This thesis is based on a broad interpretation of contestation that encompasses social disagreements on different levels and of various intensities. Our understanding of contestation includes outright conflict and societal controversies. Yet it also comprises smaller disagreements with, and alternative interpretations added to, a common narrative; the gentle shifting of interpretative patterns; and small nuances in communication that serve to question or strengthen established viewpoints and perceptions.

There are several reasons to pay greater attention to contestation in our investigations. To start, the issue of contestation offers opportunities for opening our inquiry to a wide spectrum of historical and present-day actors. We already know that science and academic knowledge production are deeply affected by social movements, and that social movements themselves serve to generate knowledge and to do intellectual work (Choudry and Kapoor, 2010; Jamison, 2001; Schregel, 2018). Interpreting contestation in a broader sense allows us to pay attention to groups and individuals in contexts beyond those of outright protest and organized social action, and to study their role in the production of (neuro)psychological narratives. This is why, in this special section, we will encounter various actors and groups, such as parents, patients, members of a high IQ society, journalists, and film producers. What these actors have in common is that they engage in diverse yet complex ways with scientific discourses. In the four articles in the special section, such complex engagements with scientific discourses happen in and through different (popular) forums, such as newspaper articles, patient forums, popular movies, or drug advertisements.

A second reason for focusing on contestation is that it is a key concept for helping us understand historical change and persistence in debates about the mind and the brain. Considering issues of contestation allows for an in-depth examination of social struggles and power relations. Moreover, exploring contestation helps us describe how engagements with scientific knowledge link to broader social questions relating to social (in)equality, gender, assumptions about ‘race’, the individual, the nation, and so on. Putting contestation at the heart of the analysis encourages us to understand discourses about the mind and the brain in ways that go beyond a simplistic model of top-down power, and beyond putting citizens in the role of either ‘accepting’ or ‘rejecting’ scientific discourses. Indeed, it allows us to evaluate the scope and relevance of debates about the mind and the brain in everyday life, as well as to include the negotiations, limits, counterforces, ignorance, and outright rejection that scientific concepts may encounter each and every day.

The contributions in this special section

The special section consists of four articles, of which the first two discuss intelligence and cognitive enhancement, and the second two address the neurosciences and their complex influence on contemporary daily life. The first article, Susanne Schregel’s case study of Mensa in Britain from the 1940s to the 1980s, demonstrates what a focus on contestation may yield for historical analysis. Members of the group recommended intelligence testing for adults on a voluntary basis and adapted and promoted popular puzzles and riddles as ‘tests’ of and training opportunities for intelligence. These public activities point to the relevance of psychological knowledge and scientific interpretations for members of the group and underline their active role in shaping psychological methods and explanations. Yet negative reactions to Mensa in the press show that psychologically inspired conceptions of aspects of the mind and the brain were not easily accepted as social explanations by a wider audience. If we study these ensuing contestations in detail, we can learn more about the ways in which references to intelligence are connected to debates on differences, the attribution of social positions, and the legitimization of equalities and inequalities in a democratic society.

In certain circumstances, however, notions of the mind and the brain actually do take centre stage, as Brian P. Bloomfield and Karen Dale’s article on cognitive enhancement indicates. In such cases, being aware of potential contestations reminds us not to take their centrality as a given, but to make it a starting point for further analysis and interpretation. Setting cognitive imaginaries in a more contemporary light, Bloomfield and Dale examine a range of popular sources, such as movies, newspaper articles, and advertising for drugs that, in different ways, all portray pharmacologically enhanced cognitive capabilities. Of specific significance is the notion of ‘brain plasticity’, which underlies many of the imaginaries Bloomfield and Dale untangle. These imaginaries of cognitive enhancement reinforce, and are in turn reinforced by, a neoliberal focus on being productive at all times, and hence contribute to a particular political economy.

In the following article, Jonna Brenninkmeijer looks at concurring interpretations of the mind and the brain to explore how neurological explanations can become relevant for ideas of self, agency, and accountability. In particular, Brenninkmeijer examines the move from understanding unexplained neurological symptoms in terms of conversion disorder to conceiving of them as caused by functional neurological disorders. Whereas the first category is used mainly by psychiatrists, the second is more neurological in nature. Brenninkmeijer analyses how people who have been diagnosed with either of these disorders speak about themselves and their symptoms in patient forums. This focus on alternative interpretations that ‘explain’ unexplained symptoms in different ways makes evident how imaginaries of minds and of brains have become important for how people constitute themselves and think about their problems. This approach also illuminates how the particular diagnosis people receive may play a role in how exactly they constitute concepts of the mind, brain, and self.

Our final article concerns imaginaries of brain development that play a role in contemporary parenting practices and parenting advice. Tineke Broer, Martyn Pickersgill, and Sarah Cunningham-Burley draw on 22 interviews with parents of young children to examine how these parents engage with neuroscientific advice. Their interviewees did not uncritically adopt or accept (sometimes reductionist) neurobiological psychological knowledge. Instead, they reflected on the extent to which it would be relevant for raising their children, and applicable to the world in which their children were growing up. As a result, the authors argue that the ‘respondents draw on everyday epistemologies of parenting to negotiate brain-based understandings of infant development and behaviour’.

If we address minds and brains in everyday life from the perspective of contested narratives, we will not be able to deduce one answer or final relation between everyday interpretations and (neuro)psychological knowledge. Indeed, this collection shows that we will encounter a rich variety of interactions and entanglements, of knowing interpretations, rejections, and adaptations, and of conscious and unconscious ignorances between science and the wider public. Historical and contemporary approaches alike may thus help us uncover the fascinating complexity of minds and brains and what they mean for being human.