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

By John Lardas Modern

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226799599

Book preview

Cover Page for Neuromatic

NEUROMATIC

EDITED BY Kathryn Lofton AND John Lardas Modern

Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism

by Brenna Moore

Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona

by Susannah Crockford

Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation in the Jain Path to Liberation

by Ellen Gough

The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris

by Elayne Oliphant

Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

by J. Brent Crosson

The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity

by Maia Kotrosits

Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

by Peter Coviello

Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala

by Kevin Lewis O’Neill

NEUROMATIC

or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain

JOHN LARDAS MODERN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79718-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79962-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79959-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226799599.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Modern, John Lardas, 1971– author.

Title: Neuromatic; or, a particular history of religion and the brain / John Lardas Modern.

Other titles: Particular history of religion and the brain | Class 200: new studies in religion.

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Class 200: new studies in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020056567 | ISBN 9780226797182 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226799629 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226799599 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Brain—Religious aspects. | Neurosciences—Religious aspects. | Cognitive neuroscience. | Neurosciences—History. | Religion and science.

Classification: LCC BL65.B73 M63 2021 | DDC 612.8/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056567

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Somewhere a machine began to hum and I distrusted the man and woman above me.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

In memory of Dorothy Dale Flay (1913–1991)

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

Footnotes

Figures

Frontispiece: Welcome to the Neuromatic Brain

1   Silly Bandz® bracelets

2   NVivo banner

3   Magnetom 3T Trio

4   Author’s MRI scan

5   A mathematical theory of communication

6   Neural nets schematic

7   Plate of Thomas Willis’s anatomy of the brain, ca. 1664

8   Cartoon from Y. Saparina, Cybernetics within Us (1967)

9   Kappa wave

10   Four still images from 1944 Heider and Simmel film

11   William Grey Walter and a 16-channel EEG, 1964

12   Grey Walter’s laboratory

13   Grey Walter’s laboratory (close-up)

14   Grey Walter’s laboratory (closer-up)

15   Selective chronology of events in the scientific conceptualization of information

16   Different speeds of tremulations

17   Portrait of Christopher Polhem (1661–1751)

18   Right side of the skull of the Swedish King Charles XII

19   The Brain Exposed

20   Past, Present, and Future

21   The Reflective Group

22   Symbolical Head

23   Portrait of Emanuel Swedenborg

24a, 24b, 24c   Triptych: a) Vertical section of motor cerebral convolutions of man, b) Motor Areas, and c) Excitations

25   Branched dendritic surface of a human nerve cell

26   Encephalogram of the Company Brain

27   Album cover of Psycho-Cybernetics

28   Modified tachistoscope

29   Police and officials searching through wreckage of R101 airship

30   The Dream Machine

31   Scientology advertisement

32   L. Ron Hubbard conducting a Dianetics seminar in Los Angeles, 1950

33   Electrode placement on the scalp of Eileen J. Garrett

34   Eileen J. Garrett, ca. 1930

35   Scene from the Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, ca. 1963

36   Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs

37   Excerpt from Brion Gysin’s I Am That I Am (1960)

38   The Mind Schematic from Dianetics

39   Mark V E-meter

40   Scene from the Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, ca. 1963

41   Planning Model for Mental Health Services

42   Ediswan Electric Convulsion Apparatus

43   Schematic arrangement of electroconvulsive treatment apparatus

44   Electroconvulsive therapy machine

45   Eliza Farnham, June 1857

46   Nervous schematic for moral treatment

47   Napa State Hospital

48   Cover of Women against Electric Shock Treatment (1975)

49   Computer Shrink cartoon from Madness Network News (1979)

50   Dr. H. C. Tien at his desk

51   Information flow chart of television-linked cybernetic system

52   Group therapy session

53   Steps of electrolytic therapy

54   Dr. Tien in action

55   Lytic Step

56   Bottle feeding of patient (close-up)

57   The self-regulation of female sexuality

58   Dr. Tien on couch and on television

59   Cameramen, Michigan Institute of Psychosynthesis

60   Dr. Tien on TV

61   Telefusion advertisement

62   Patient rewatches their own psychic rebirth

63   The Cramps at Napa State Mental Hospital

64   Lux Interior at Napa State Mental Hospital

65   The Cramps backstage at Napa State Mental Hospital

66   Pattern-matching rules

67   General Outline of PARRY’s operations

68   The Brain, Life Magazine (1971)

69   God Helmet replica

70   The prestige of present-day science

71   Cover of Edmund C. Berkeley, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think (1949)

72   The Thread (1986)

73   Brain (1987)

NEUROMATIC

Welcome to the Neuromatic Brain. By Libby Modern.

Prologue

Already Gone

Leave my head demagnetized

Tell me where the trauma lies

In the scan of pathogen

Or the shadow of my sin

Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM (2009)

---

It was a cool and rainy October day as I made my way to Dr. Patrick McNamara’s neuroscience laboratory. In through the glass doors, past the PatriotMart Cafeteria and convenience store, the ground floor lobby at the Jamaica Plain VA Hospital in Boston was full of aging soldiers in various states of disrepair. Memories of service and discipline and the blood traumas of war. Folding tables lined the entrance hall with Silly Bandz® bracelets. Hand-drawn placards issued a vaguely therapeutic invitation to veterans to stop, enjoy, and take in the effervescence of youth. The display of intricately threaded and multicolored wristbands, however, was falling flat.

This labor of elementary school children—congealed in bracelets whose components were manufactured by Brainchild Products of Toledo, Ohio—was failing to register with veterans and their caregivers as they walked or strolled past the folding tables. Some people had their route down. Others were actively searching for where to go, asking staff for directions, or else content sitting against the wall, seemingly waiting, as if their stilled presence would somehow make it all better. Walkers and oxygen tanks and wheelchair chatter leading the way. The whiff of sterile bureaucracy enveloping claims made by those who had been subject to the vicissitudes of generals and stray bullets.

Figure 1. Silly Bandz® bracelets. Photo by author.

Dr. McNamara, the founding director of the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion, and his team of researchers at Boston University have begun to discover fascinating correlations between left-onset Parkinson’s disease and two things: 1) the erosion of religious interest and 2) increased difficulty in accessing religious concepts. By subjecting the brains of those who have been diagnosed with left-onset Parkinson’s disease to intense forms of measurement, including magnetic resonance imaging, Dr. McNamara hopes to glimpse, in this particular form of neural degeneration, the fleeting fundament of human religiosity.¹

These investigations into left-onset Parkinson’s are part of a larger research agenda, one distilled in the inaugural issue of Religion, Brain, and Behavior, a journal cofounded by McNamara in 2011. And I quote:

Over the past two decades scholars in the historical, cultural, and psychological study of religion have been joined by a new breed of investigators: scientists interested in the biological foundations of religion and the links among its biological, behavioral, and cultural aspects. These scientists include cognitive psychologists, evolutionary anthropologists, cognitive neuroscientists, behavioral economists, and many others. Their aim is more or less the same as the religious studies scholars: to understand religion as a human phenomenon in a theologically neutral way. But these scientific approaches deploy techniques unfamiliar in older forms of the academic study of religion.²

Dr. McNamara has done much to advance neuroscientific investigations into religion over the past two decades.³ He is agnostic about what his research will, in the end, discover but remains open to the possibility that religion can be explained. We have the potential to figure religion out, he told me, just like REM sleep. Not yet but perhaps soon given a patient, experimental, neurological approach to religion and cognition.⁴

In general, the goal of neuroscience has been to show how multiple levels of organization in the brain operate, interact, and correspond with one another. In doing so, neuroscientists are increasingly hopeful that some of the major mysteries of mind-brain function will finally be explained. Such desire, they insist, has become less pie-in-the-sky-romanticism and more a palpable project that can be actively and experimentally pursued.⁵ Since its self-conscious inception in the 1980s, computational neuroscience has considered itself to be this cutting edge. Neuroscientists now imagine the end of psychology as a human, and therefore imprecise, science. As they condescendingly suggest, once the mathematical correspondence between brain and mind has been figured out, once the relationship between neurons and consciousness has been explained with a degree of replicable precision, psychology will have fulfilled its duty. According to neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (who founded the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience), a proper and persuasive understanding of human behavior will require neuroscience to think about how the rules and algorithms that govern all of the separate and distributed modules work together to yield the human condition.⁶

Neuroscience arrives, in other words, accompanied by a deep commitment to a thesis of progressive secularization. As the story goes, precise knowledge of the brain promises to liberate us from the shackles of superstition and the concept of the soul.⁷ The theological tendencies and/or religious biases of earlier inquiries into the brain will surely dissipate in the face of an overwhelming mathematics. With the increased rigor of experimental design and the refinement of techniques of measurement, the module of religion will be identified and subjected to sustained scrutiny. For as it turns out, there is no ghost in the machine after all. As one neuroscientist declares, There is no scientific evidence for the existence of an immortal soul, in either our own species or any other species. There is, on the other hand, a growing body of scientific data which indicates that all animals, including ourselves, can for most, and perhaps even all, purposes be regarded as organic machines, devoid of anything mystical. Severe is the certainty, here, that computational neuroscience is a secularizing trend. For as long as there is a systematic way (a nonmagical way) that a network like the brain performs its tasks, then in principle that way can be captured by an algorithm that formally specifies the relations between input and output.⁸

Over the last few centuries, despite encomia to secularity, insights from the brain sciences have been revelatory. They have also been generative, aided and abetted by increasingly authoritative neuroimaging technologies—from the draftsman’s hand to calipers and the silver staining of nervous tissue to electroencephalography and oscillators to MRI and neuro implants. Recent fanfare over such technologies has gilded the encroachments of neuroscience into existing scientific and humanistic conversations with the invention of new disciplinary spaces.⁹ These include neuropsychiatry,¹⁰ neurolaw,¹¹ neuroethics, neurogenetics, neuroeconomics,¹² neuromarketing, neuroaesthetics,¹³ neuroergonomics,¹⁴ neuroanthropology,¹⁵ neurosociology,¹⁶ neurodesign,¹⁷ neurocriminology,¹⁸ and neurotheology.¹⁹ These disciplinary formations, moreover, arrive under the sign of cognitive capitalism in which the latest discoveries by neuroscientists are mediated by what critical theorist Tony D. Sampson densely describes as an economic regime that strives to situate an increasingly docile consumer-subject managed according to channeled attention, primed emotional engagement, and visceral affective stirrings.²⁰ In light of trends in consumer neuroscience, not to mention the more ominous applications of neuroscience by Facebook, Google, and Amazon for purposes of monitoring and predicting user behavior, the brain has become not only a money-making proposition of unprecedented potential but a synecdoche of one’s human being.²¹

---

As a control subject in Dr. McNamara’s experiment on cognition and religious coping strategies in Parkinson’s Disease—funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Department of Veterans Affairs—I became anonymized patient #41672 or, less precisely, an object of measurement and subject to new scientific techniques that have promised to transform the study of religion into a proper science.

On the first of two days in Dr. McNamara’s laboratory I completed the required consent forms. I then began to fill out survey after survey that sought to establish a baseline of religious and/or secular proclivity. First up, the Magical-Ideation Scale and its list of statements and instruction to circle either true or false as they apply to your beliefs:

Can some people make you aware of them by thinking about you?

Do things sometimes seem to be in different places when you get home, even though no one has been there?

Have you had the momentary feeling that you might not be human?

Does the government refuse to tell us the truth about flying saucers?

refuse>

Do you sometimes have a feeling of gaining or losing energy when certain people look at you or touch you?

Have you noticed sounds on your records that are not there at other times?

When I turned my attention to the Post-Critical Belief Scale—in which I registered the intensity of my agreement and disagreement, on a 1-to-7 scale, to a series of statements—I was struck by its thick historicity. These statements were not only precedented but very much part of a history whose measurable presence in this laboratory was not of primary concern. The first two statements from the Post-Critical Belief Scale, for example, weighed heavily on the historian of religion in me—but perhaps more heavily on those who have long struggled to define themselves as religious vis-à-vis the public potency of science and on those who sought to distinguish themselves from secular observers who measured their faith in terms they did not recognize.

The Bible holds a deeper truth that can only be revealed by personal reflection.

If you want to understand the meaning of the miracle stories from the Bible, you should always place them in their historical context.

The majority of statements in the Post-Critical Belief Scale referred to Jesus, to the Bible and attitudes toward it, as well as to a monotheistic God and degrees of belief in him. Other statements were clearly directed at assessing my secularity:

The scientific understanding of human life and the world makes a religious understanding obsolete.

Despite the working assumption of Dr. McNamara and his team that there existed a positive relationship between religiosity and self-control,²² I began to suspect that a discipline was being enacted in this laboratory. For as I was probed at ever-deeper levels, religion, conceived of as an internal affair revolving around cognition and choice, was being extracted from me.

During the next session I sat behind a computer and answered a series of questions that measured my impulsivity and capacity for self-control. Before each question appeared, I was primed with either religious or secular cues. I picked up on them only about halfway through the exercise. Civic or mundane primes flashed almost imperceptibly across the computer screen—Hospital, Axe, Civil, Jolt, Jungle, Blink, Chisel, Hut, Lodge, Block, Pepper. Religious primes flitted by at the edges of my vision—words like Bible, Nun, Prayer, Monk, Temple, Saint, Angel, Heaven, Sin, Hell, Demon, Devil. After each prime, I was immediately asked whether I would like to have, say, $28 today or $30 in 110 days, or $67 today or $85 in 35 days. Over and over again, the primes and the wagers changed and sometimes repeated, catalyzing anxiety over what I had just seen and whether I was being consistent in my own assessment of my desire for financial reward.²³

I then filled out the Religion/Spirituality Questionnaire—the slash marking, perhaps, the most common sense groove of American religious history in which private is demarcated from public, self from institutions, agency from discourse. And as I would come to learn, the natural distinction between religion and spirituality was a working hypothesis of the entire project—specifically, that neural network connectivity between different parts of the brain corresponded to different capacities for experiential and doctrinal religious knowledge.²⁴

As someone who has spent more than a little time in the nineteenth-century archive, this 1-to-7 continuum between experiential and doctrinal knowledge and the questions that stemmed from it were familiar—questions about the vagueness of divinity, inner peace, and the beauty of creation as well as questions about feelings of unity and personal actions outside an institutional frame (How often do you pray privately other than at a church or synagogue?). The last two questions of the survey put an exclamation point on this pixelated formation of American religious history:

To what extent do you consider yourself a religious person?

To what extent do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

My spiritual life history was then taken as a graduate student (whom I will call Steve) interviewed me over the course of two hours. Over and over again I was asked about my personal takes on ultimate reality, ultimate meaning, and fundamental beliefs. I was encouraged to imagine my spiritual life as a book with as many chapters as I wanted (although it was recommended that my book have between two and seven). I talked about my baptism at age eight, the presence of an absent father in my life, and about my use of recreational drugs as a form of psychic and analytical training. I talked about family trauma and the time that the devil followed me home after a Halloween party in Santa Barbara and pulled up to my driveway in a black pickup truck at 2 a.m. blasting the Eagles’ Already Gone. I related, in sentimental detail, my grandmother’s warning before I set off to college in 1989 that I never, ever take a class in religious studies because those professors, she said, well, those professors don’t believe in God.

Steve’s questions elicited honesty, confession, truth, a hyperawareness of my individualism, or rather, my desire to at least be interesting to others because of some difference within me. In narrating my spiritual biography, I became a little paranoid—self-conscious, suspicious of my own motives as much as what might lie behind the questions. Was I filtering my responses, saying what some part of me wanted to hear, what I imagined Steve would want to hear, and at some level, uttering, in a vaguely strategic way, key words and phrases that might become data in the program, scanned for by the search algorithm?

The transcript of my spiritual life history—full of self-codings, confessional details, and verbal tics—was then scanned into NVivo. NVivo, whose original name was NUD*IST—for Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing—is a qualitative data analysis program developed by QSR International in Melbourne, Australia. NVivo is a machine that goes where the human analyst cannot—into the organization and analysis of nonnumerical or unstructured data. The algorithm separates, sorts, arranges, classifies, and categorizes significant data points. It examines the relationships between patterns. And so on and so forth, linking, searching, modeling, linking. NVivo enables the scientist to test theories and gut feelings with the push of a search button. Observation after observation, NVivo helps gather evidence and build an argument through the analysis of pattern. Meaning is necessarily abstracted from the very beginning.

Figure 2. NVivo banner, from http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx. Connecting the dots in your data is faster, easier and more efficient with NVivo. More than just a tool for organizing and managing data, NVivo helps you think differently about your research, uncover more and back it all up with rigorous evidence.

NVivo searched for patterns in my speech that hinted at religious proclivities or, inversely, secular leanings. This was its bread and butter. For as its makers proclaim,

An understanding of human language can be especially powerful when applied to extract information and reveal meaning or sentiment in large amounts of text-based content (or unstructured information), especially the types of content that has typically been manually examined by people. Analysis that accurately understands the subtleties of language, for example, the choice of words, or the tone used, can provide useful knowledge and insight. NLP will play an important part in the continued development of tools that assist with the classification and analysis of data, with accuracy only improving as technology evolves.²⁵

All of these tests and surveys—the extraction of information—were innocent enough but my anxiety increased as I went through the MRI prescreening for the third time in two days. First the graduate student, then the neuroscientist, and finally the clinician in the MRI suite. Clipboard out, pen in hand, she asked me once again:

Are you now or have you ever worked with metal or the cutting, grinding, or welding of metal? Have you ever been shot? Do you have any shrapnel in your body?

Yes, maybe, I said sheepishly. When I was little my grandma used to break open thermometers and let me play with the mercury in a bowl.

"Will that still have an effect?" I asked.

No, not on the MRI but mercury will erode the brain/blood barrier over time, which is not a good thing.

I then went off on a tangent. It was 1983. Early MTV. A few years before the MRI was approved by the FDA for clinical use. A broken-off thermometer atop a TV Guide on the coffee table. Mercury pulsating in a green glass bowl, eroding my brain/blood barrier over time. My grandmother, her intense evangelicalism, her struggles with mental illness, and her words of premillennial wisdom. John Howard, she would say—Howard being my middle name and the name of her late husband who had died when my own mother was only two years old—John Howard, she would say, we are privileged to be living in the end times.

The nurse went on with her questions, unphased.

Do you have any implants, clips, valves, stimulating devices, or dermal patches?

No, I said.

Do you have a cardiac pacemaker, a neural stimulator, an implanted cardiac defibrillator, a cochlear implant, a dental implant, pacing wires, a hearing aid, an implanted insulin pump? Do you have a Swanz-Ganz catheter, any type of intravascular coil, filter, or stent, a heart valve, a penile prosthesis, a surgical clip or staple, dentures, a wire mesh, body piercings or a tattoo?

These questions and this routine were for my own benefit, of course. For anything metal in me that was not embedded resolutely in bone could fly out of my skin at a very high speed once the magnets were turned on.

The MRI, then, is an oddly menacing device in that it can only, safely, measure flesh uncorrupted by the materiality of metal. For in the MRI there is a mortal threat for those who have taken even the most modest steps toward mechanical security and inscription—death simmering in a simple stent or heating up the metal bits in particular types of tattoo ink.

I got up on the exam table and laid down. My head was fitted into position and my left hand placed near a rubber ball that I could squeeze to signal that I was not doing fine for whatever reason, communicating with the technicians outside of the exam room, safe behind protective leaded glass.²⁶ Everything, it seemed, was in working order. I stared up at the white ceiling. Someone pushed a button and my table glided into the bore. More adjustments were made and the technician informed me that she was now going to leave the room.

Figure 3. Magnetom 3T Trio, from https://www.siemens-healthineers.com/de-ch/magnetic-resonance-imaging/for-installed-base-business-only-do-not-publish/magnetom-trio-tim. Courtesy of Siemens Healthineers.

The magnetic susceptibilities of my hydrogen nuclei were about to be manipulated in a massive way. Each was about to assume a slightly different charge, in unison, so that scientists outside could then measure the difference between the oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood running through my brain. Once my hydrogen protons were uniformly magnetized and their axes aligned, scientists could distinguish between these two blood states given their different magnetic properties. And once the computer had tracked the systemic flow of oxygen-rich blood in my brain, the scientists could chart real-time changes in neural activity due to the strange phenomenon that such activity causes the blood around it to become more oxygenated (known as BOLD, the blood oxygenation level dependent effect).²⁷

According to Robert Turner, physicist, MRI pioneer, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and son of anthropologists Edith and Victor Turner, such technological advances are leading this secular age. The improved data quality now available, writes Turner, allows the more unrealistic assumptions to be discarded, opening a way forward to far more realistic methods for brain functional analysis.²⁸ The improvement of data quality is dependent on a higher signal-to-noise ratio and image contrast generated by more powerful magnetic fields. The magnetic fields generated by the MRI are, under proper conditions, safe. In addition to issues of health and safety, it is a working assumption that there are no statistically significant cognitive effects precipitated by an MRI scan.²⁹ The possibility that magnetic fields could fuel a blip of spontaneous neuronal activity³⁰ or induce vertigo³¹ or nausea or cause a DNA lesion³² is consistently acknowledged but, lacking evidence, remains a peripheral concern.

In study after study, the patient’s experience of the MRI is also assumed to have little effect on what is being measured. As Turner and others surmise, experiences may be intense but rarely interfere with data capture or confound the brain’s work-a-day processing of information.³³ While lacking a credentialed foundation for dissent I find this claim hard to believe.³⁴ For in this Magnetom 3T Trio there is utter abjection. There is the impulse to run screaming from the shaking table and clanking gears. There are the high-pitched, otherworldly blips cascading—sounds whose acoustic sheen is precision incarnate. There is the sense that the plane is really, truly going down this time. There is the terror and there is the management of terror.³⁵ There is the pounding of your flesh with sound and energy but nothing quite tangible. There is more terror.³⁶ And there is panic but there is the yogic ease of breathing deeply, not swallowing, not moving, focusing on the most minimal tasks of breathing deeply, not swallowing, not moving.

To make a long story very short—one might say that in the MRI I encountered, on a visceral level, the abstractions of information, feedback, self-organization that fuel our contemporary moment. I was enveloped, albeit incompletely, by systems—technological³⁷ as well as social, political, economic, and historical.³⁸

This particular MRI at the Boston VA is what anthropologist Talal Asad might call a formation of the secular.³⁹ In this MRI, religion had become something in need of measured explanation. For in order to figure out religion, it must be located and pinned down as a matter of information processing in the brain related to one’s beliefs about supernatural agents, god-concepts, and the relative interaction between these perceived metaphysical entities and one’s self.⁴⁰ Indeed, one of the key epistemic and institutional logics of the secular is its commitment to religion as a matter of privately held and internally processed belief. Belief, in this convenient formulation, is a matter of choice, for better or for worse. The prospect of choice and the agency that it entails, then, is bolstered in the MRI by enthusiastic calculations of what lies behind the eyes and within the skull. Moreover, within this secular shell, there is a distinct difference between religious cognition and scientific cognition, the latter being called on to explain, publicly and with certainty, the former as part of an exercise in public reason and liberal governance. Indeed, the distinction between the religious and the secular, as a matter of common sense, is what makes legible my scan but also the brain scans of meditative monks, Franciscan nuns in the slow throes of mystical encounter, atheists and lay persons praying or under the influence of LSD, deep in trance, practicing extrasensory perception (ESP), speaking in tongues, and cultivating their spirituality.⁴¹

The data points generated in the MRI are real, in the ordinary sense. Yet the effects of measurement assume an extraordinary force in creating a culture that depends on particular readings of those data points. The representation of the brain on the screen, and according to the numbers, has its truth. There are patterns, repeated and repeatable, that reveal structure, flow, chemistry, mechanics. The measurements of those patterns, however, are made possible by desire, by history, by how existing measurements have been put to use and why. This is to say that the measurements of religion lack neither substance nor precision. But they do not account for the conditions of their own possibility and therefore call into question the coherence of their powerful certainties.⁴²

For in the MRI I sensed the presence of an agency, or, rather, I became hyperaware of my imagination of agency, a pattern generated by my fantasy impulse, or, better yet, through my desire to name that or who or what had gained full access to something so intimate that I did not even know of its existence. I was dependent on this machine for this truth. In the MRI I felt contingent practices of calculation achieve their mechanism within. Actions fueling concepts. Concepts fueling investigations. Investigations fueling imagination. Imaginings fueling actions.

In the MRI I experienced the invisible tendrils of discourse, which is to say that in the MRI I appreciated anew all those works of cultural and visual studies and critical ethnographies that had considered the MRI to be a particularly powerful construction of the social.⁴³ For in the MRI I became aware of my paranoia, mindful of how theories of information, feedback, and self-organization at midcentury continue to frame the social as comprised of discrete individuals in a giant communication machine.⁴⁴ And this, I must say, was a revelation. For in the MRI I began to consider what had brought me to it, lying on this particular examination table, thinking particular thoughts about all kinds of things that would eventually become the substance of this particular history of the brain. I began to consider all those things that remain, at present, active yet epiphenomenal to the modifications of magnetic charge in oxygen-saturated blood as it is conscripted by active neurons.

Here, then, finally, is a picture of my brain on that cold and rainy afternoon.

Figure 4. Author’s MRI scan.

This picture captures my brain in the process of considering the history of the brain, in general. In addition to capturing the neural substrate of my brain, this picture offers a glimpse of what is at stake, analytically speaking, in the book now before you. For in this picture you can see the imprint of my mind upon the machine. But if you look closely, you can also see something else: namely, the imprint of some other kind of machine upon my mind and, perhaps, yours, too.

Introduction

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and you—beside—

Emily Dickinson (ca. 1862)

The best model of the behavior of the brain is the behavior of the brain.

Warren McCulloch, Transactions from the Ninth Conference on Cybernetics (1952)

1. Saturation

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The brain beckons, inviting us to become a better, stronger, and faster version of ourselves—more productive, more empathetic, more successful, healthier, happier, wealthier, more sexy and serene.¹ For individuals, the optimization of and care for the brain have become moral obligations—things that we should and must do.² I imagine myself as a brain therefore I am. I can change myself and the world around me by changing my brain. Present³ manifestations of brain plasticity assume a range of pedagogical impulses, from the geriatric⁴ to the explicitly pious⁵ to the popular and pedestrian.⁶ In every example, the potential to affect the neural fundament of cognition makes possible whatever freedoms may be achieved by the brain and the human that is attached to it. Such freedoms, in other words, are effects of brain activity; or, more precisely, they are effects of the brain in proper communication with itself and with the environment.⁷ Neurons firing. Signals passed along through axons. Signals received by the dendrites of other neurons. Over 100 trillion synapses forming the basic functional structure for information processing between neurons in the central nervous system, required for understanding . . . the functional properties of neural circuits and brain functions, and even the consciousness that emerges from them.⁸ A precise mapping of the brain’s neural architecture and patterned routes of processing. A faith in general trends, in how movement toward more realistic models of biological neurons might advance AI as we currently know it.⁹

The brain, in addition to the promises made on its behalf, is an idea whose materializations have been severe—not least for those white-collar workers whose brains have been fried by the allure of neuroenhancers; not least for those at-risk children being managed according to cognitive pedagogies or else prescribed Adderall regardless of whether they are symptomatic or not.¹⁰ The biological turns in psychology¹¹ and psychiatry,¹² for example, have been taken up by the military, industry, and biomedical entrepreneurs. Projects now proliferate on neurogenetic engineering, transcranial magnetic stimulation, neuroprosthetics, and deep brain stimulation.¹³ The brain has fueled all manner of institutional investments that promise a transformation of mind, soul, politics, higher education,¹⁴ scholarly working conditions, and, if you were to grant figures like Silicon Valley’s Ray Kurzweil even a hint of legitimacy, immortality.¹⁵ In addition to institutions, industries, and structures of feeling, materializations of the brain include strategies of, and new machines for, measuring brain activity. Such materializations, not surprisingly, occur alongside incredible feats of number crunching that have imparted a felt sense that the brain—mine and yours, too, dear reader—is an information processing device.¹⁶

Look around. Close your eyes. Listen. Cognitive models of neural processing have become abundantly present—in politics, business, and the academy, in pharmaceutical research and electroconvulsive treatment centers, in medical imaging suites, on children’s television, in the percolating chatter of talk therapy and smartphone notifications. The brain has been taken up by preachers and magicians, by scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs, by engineers, athletes, and computer programmers, by psychologists and the CIA, by politicians, presidents, and policy makers, by criminologists, drug makers, and charter school administrators. The grammar of neuroscience is present in the TED talks of celebrity scientists and wannabe tech moguls, in brain-training apps such as www.lumosity.com, in the mundane tasks of swipe-laden socializing, in the kind of self that beams in and out of countless coordinated screens and digital devices distributed across the globe. These screens and these devices operate according to paradigmatic theories of neural networks and information processing that remain fundamental to contemporary models of cognition. These screens and these devices, in other words, assume the human to be a complex, self-organizing system. This human processes information. This human is, at the end of the day, primarily and paradigmatically, a neuromolecular phenomenon. Society, in turn, is nothing more, and nothing less, than an aggregate of interactive brains.¹⁷

The brain, they say, is who we are, who we have always been, and who we will soon become. For we are about to assume our proper place in a cosmos saturated with self-organizing systems understood to operate according to the same transcendental logic as the brain.¹⁸ Consequently, they say, the brain contains within it truths that are universal.¹⁹ For when each minute brain component has been located, its function identified and its interactions with each other component made clear—the resulting description will contain all there is to know about human nature and experience.²⁰

2. Approaching the Neuromatic (with a short engineering aside)

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When the historian Michel Foucault flippantly writes that Modernity begins when the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head, he is not to be taken literally.²¹ He is suggesting, on the contrary, that the mind and its neural architecture have long served as the basis for a massive biopolitical project.²² Ideas, according to Foucault, assume material force in the world—ideas fueling actions fueling concepts fueling investigations fueling imaginings fueling ideas fueling actions. And so on and so forth.²³ No beginning and no end. Which is to say that human beings do not, strictly speaking, exist solely inside their skulls. But the fact that they increasingly believe, act, and dream that they do adds no small bit of ballast to Foucauldian analyses of power and to this book which is, among other things, a particular history of the brain as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power within this so-called secular modernity.²⁴

For it is my hunch, shared by others, that to think about modernity is to think about the brain in terms of ideological density, epistemic reach, and the phenomenological swath that it cuts. Building on recent works that have noted the deep and abiding cognitive frame of modernity, an ever-encroaching neuro-ontology, and deployments of the brain in promiscuous projects of description, I want to think through how and why the brain has become so widely and intensely orientational. What to make of this model of a new kind of human who does not simply have a brain but whose very condition of existence is the brain? What to make of breathless copy that insists on a synaptic self and looping narratives of how our brains become who we are?²⁵ What lies behind this making of a brain-centered self that is subject to ethereal flows, a self so porous to the universe as to bleed into and, eventually, encompass it?²⁶

A neuromatic brain has been integral to what one might call the metaphysics of this modernity.²⁷ Different parts and particles of the brain are identified and traced as part of a system, different locations are considered in their collective action, as leverage for cultivating the self and explaining the wide wide world.²⁸ The neuromatic, then, signals a particular physiology—how we imagine the brain to be in essence and how that particularity authorizes who we are seeking to become.

The neuromatic brain is currently evidenced in such commonsense talk of neural network connectivity and synaptic selves. The grammar, itself, is grounded in the aggressive framing of brain function in terms of the information-processing properties of its structural makeup. That framing, moreover, has the winning quality of being able to address heretofore underappreciated emergent feedback circuits and control loops, that is, "network effects of system effects."²⁹ Consequently, the neuromatic brain is something more than mere flesh. It is a matter of neural networks processing information on a microscopic level, the brain interacting with its environment through the transfer of information, ever corresponding with itself and the world around—information [being] the name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustments felt upon it.³⁰

The neuromatic brain was officially codified in the integration of information theory and theories of neural connectivity at midcentury. The basic paradigm for thinking about the brain soon became utterly persuasive—a vast neural network, processing information and communicating with itself in order to sustain itself and move the body forward in the world. There was an eloquence to the integration of the logical calculus of neural nets and information theory. Both of these intellectual streams were driven by the desire to control some aspect of the material world.

Claude E. Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) was published in the Bell Labs Technical Journal and presented to other engineers as an aid in understanding the relationship between inputs and outputs in a general communication system. Every communication system was comprised of six elements: 1) an information source, 2) a transmitter that transforms the source pattern into a signal, 3) a channel, 4) a receiver that decodes the signal back into pattern, 5) a destination, and 6) noise, or the inevitable degradation of signal. As part of the group of mathematicians who contributed to quality control at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Shannon’s demarcation was to address uncertainty of transmission head on—accounting for it in order to measure it, measuring it in order to predict and control it. Shannon’s research agenda, moreover, was motivated by AT&T’s drive to maximize profit by using its existing infrastructure more efficiently.³¹ The mathematics were both pristine and practical.

Shannon’s mathematical modeling of communication, first and foremost, was read for its potential commercial applications. As a general and groundbreaking proposition, Shannon proved that perfect communication between the source and destination could be achieved when communication channels were imperfect. In addition to using binary digits, or bits, to define any and all messages, Shannon’s introduction of redundancy was revolutionary in that it suggested how a system could achieve error-free communication through channels riddled with noise. By way of repeating the transmission of any message enough times through a channel whose error rate was known, a communication system was able to not only guarantee accurate transmission of the message but also detect errors within the system as a whole and correct for them in future transmissions.³²

Figure 5. A mathematical theory of communication, as conceived by Claude E. Shannon in 1948. An approximation by Libby Modern.

In the decade following the publication of his groundbreaking article, Shannon witnessed the rapid uptake of information theory across numerous disciplines. As Shannon’s friend at Bell Labs, J. R. Pierce, later commented, information theory came as a bomb, and something of a delayed-action bomb.³³ Indeed, as it was read alongside emerging theories of automata and neural nets, information theory achieved much of its explosive charge.

In the development of digital computers, for example, information theory was essential in securing all but perfect communication between organs within a computer and between that organ network and its environment. Pioneering mathematicians such as John von Neumann relied on Shannon’s theory to make real in the world the axiomatic propositions of Alan Turing. At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, von Neumann began building what was essentially a Turing machine: a central processing organ where numbers were crunched and logical operations were carried out; a memory organ where the program and data that were generated were stored, a mass storage organ, and input and output channels.³⁴ As he theorized how to arrange those organs within a computer, von Neumann realized that Shannon’s theory had made it possible to secure communication between these organs by way of parallel processing of information.

In addition to information theory, von Neumann’s attempt to reverse engineer a human brain borrowed from the formal mathematics of neural processing worked out in A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. In this 1943 article, the psychologist Warren McCulloch and mathematical prodigy Walter Pitts had provided a theory and framework for calculating the pathways through which neurons received, transmitted, and coordinated electrical signals. A Logical Calculus had been received with little fanfare among biologists and psychologists.³⁵ But it soon gained significant traction as it was read in dialogue with Shannon and featured prominently in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) and in von Neumann’s The General and Logical Theory of Automata.³⁶

For McCulloch and Pitts, the neuron was an ideal type, the truth of which was a matter of form rather than substance. According to McCulloch and Pitts, a neuron either fired or it did not and therefore could be represented as a proposition—on or off, a 1 or a 0. Each proposition related to other propositions. And so on and so forth. Just as Shannon had begun thinking about Boolean algebra in relation to the electromechanical relays of the Differential Analyzer at MIT in the late 1930s, McCulloch and Pitts had applied Boolean logic to the neural network. In figuring each neuron as an on/off valve for transmitting an electrical pulse,³⁷ McCulloch and Pitts were approaching the brain in terms of computational processing. For them, the network of neurons was an elegant problem of logic—the brain is made up of a network of neurons, each one firing or not depending on the number and (perhaps even patterns) of incoming signals across the axons that were connected to it. Each neuron communicated with the other and, in tandem, communicated with the outside world.³⁸

Figure 6. Neural nets schematic, from McCulloch and Pitts, Logical Calculus, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5:4 (1943). An approximation by Libby Modern.

As an initial foray into mapping the relationality of these propositions in the form of complex mathematical equations, McCulloch and