Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain

Description

John Modern offers a powerful and original critique of neurology’s pivotal role in religious history. In Neuromatic, religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain. Contents List of Figures Prologue: Already Gone Introduction 1. Saturation 2. Approaching the Neuromatic (with a short engineering aside) 3. Blurred Lines 4. Cybernetics and the Question of Religion 5. Cybernetic Theses of Secularization 6. Poetics Synaptic Gap: Measuring Religion 1. Thinking about Cognitive Scientists Thinking about Religion 1. False Positives 2. The Cognitive Science of Religion 3. The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device 4. Distinguishing Marks on a Screen 5. Breaking the Spell 6. Northampton 7. Jonathan Edwards, Hyperactive Agency Detector 8. Detecting the Life of the Brain 9. Agents Like Us 10. Cheap Tricks Synaptic Gap: The Information of History 2. Neither Matter nor Spirit: Toward a Genealogy of Information 1. Hard Problems 2. Neuromatic Piety: An Overview 3. Ether and the Permeation of the Interspaces 4. Emanuel Swedenborg, Neuroscientist 5. Ghosts of Swedenborg 6. Mental Slavery and the Invention of Spirituality 7. The Diakka and Their Earthly Victims 8. The Mediomaniacal Origins of American Neurology 9. Prehistories of Electroencephalography 10. Brain Waves and Tremulating Information 11. Biofeedback and the Experience of Correspondence 12. The Ontology of Information 13. Concluding Thoughts on Perceptronium Synaptic Gap: Too Much Too Soon 3. Imagining the Neuromatic 1. Crash and Burn 2. Opening Scene from a Cybernetic Demimonde 3. Elective AffinitieS 4. The Mechanics of Mediumship 5. Images of an Oracle 6. Thought Dictated in the Absence of All ControL 7. The Cut-Up Experiments 8. From Voodoo Death to Virology 9. Engrams, Auditing, and the Appeal of Scientology 10. Past Lives of the Neuromatic Brain 11. Exteriorization, or the Ritual of Being Three Feet Back of Your Head 12. Break Through in Grey Room Synaptic Gap: White Machinery 4. Histories of Electric Shock Therapy circa 1978 1. Of Systems, Sex, and Secular Conversion 2. Moral Treatment and Heads That Differ in Shape 3. Gendered Electricity in the Neuromatic Groove 4. The Operationalization of Napa State Hospital 5. Patients’ Rights 6. The Shaving of Leonard Frank’s Beard 7. Electric Love Therapy 8. The Business of Marriage 9. The Union of All Contradictory Ideas 10. I Watch TV, I Watch TV 11. Live from Napa State Synaptic Gap: belief Molecules Conclusion: The Elementary Forms of Neuromatic Life 1. Totemic Systems 2. Big Science 3. Artificial Intelligence Acknowledgments Index