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Petty Cash and the Neuroscientific Mapping of Pleasure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2008

Simon Cohn
Simon Cohn
Affiliation:
General Practice and Primary Care Research Unit, Institute of Public Health, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 0SRUK E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic research conducted at a number of brain imaging sites to examine investigations into emotion, and specifically the experience of pleasure. Using a small set of healthy volunteers, the experiments are designed to observe reactions in the brain when people are subjected to carefully chosen stimuli. But as these studies shift from structural to functional aspects, the imperative to establish a material basis for complex abstract experiences is compelling the scientists to revise previous descriptions of the brain. In order to generate a single model that can satisfactorily associate the experimental stimuli with observed responses, intricate interactions relating to both time and space have to be disentangled and reorganized into a singular linear narrative. As a result, only those elements that can be localized and delimited emerge as components of the pathways and maps used to represent the experience. Wider issues, such as the social context of the experiment, the meaning of the experience for the volunteer, or acknowledgement that different things might be happening at the same time, cannot be reconciled with this process. Consequently, the final neuroscientific accounts inevitably ignore or circumvent aspects that cannot be described in a very particular way.

Keywords

Brain ImagingEmotionExperimentMaterialityNeurosciencePleasure
Type
Articles
Information
BioSocieties , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 151 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

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