Geography and neuroscience: Critical engagements with geography's “neural turn”

Abstract

Geographers are increasingly interested in understanding the significance of developments in neuroscience, psychology and the behavioural sciences. Indeed, consideration of these disciplines has arguably shaped the trajectories of human geography since at least the 1960s, but its “neural turn” has only recently been acknowledged. This paper provides an original analysis of the intersections of research on neuroscience and geography. With reference to qualitative interviews with cognitive scientists and neuroscientists based in the UK, it identifies how geographical concepts have been approached within contemporary neuroscience while also identifying the broad trajectories of geographers’ engagements with neuroscience. The discussion demonstrates the political implications of these disciplinary trends for a geographical account of brain culture and brain‐based explanations in policy and practice. Specifically it proposes the development of a “critical neuro‐geography” capable of providing an overarching analysis of these phenomena. The paper's novel synthesis of hitherto disconnected engagements between geography, cognitive science and neuroscience establishes the rationale for a more sustained and critical engagement between neuroscience and geography sensitive to issues of situated subjectivity, power, inequality and difference.

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

“…Geographers, in other words, have an important contribution to make in situating and politicizing surprise by: (a) problematizing the positivistic and universalist research paradigms of surprise in the cognitive sciences (e.g. Pykett, 2018; Simandan, 2019b), (b) exploring the relationship between surprise and social difference (how do differently raced, gendered, and classed subjects experience different kinds of surprises, and what can we learn about the spatialities of intersectionality if we take the trope of surprise as an analytical entry point; cf. Hopkins, 2017, 2018), and (c) attending to how the phenomenon of surprise is being used for political manipulation and economic gain.…”

“…Geographers are well positioned to critique these practices, given their thriving research programs on ‘nudging’ and the libertarian paternalism of applied cognitive science (e.g. Pykett, 2018; Reid and Ellsworth-Krebs, 2018; Whitehead et al, 2018).…”

Political will and human geography: Non-representational, post-political, and Gramscian geographies

“…‘For it is in the gap between the onset of action and the organization of action that not yet determined or to be determined tendencies emerge and may take form’ (2014: 87). This is a linear language of affect preceding intention and representation, one that stands in contrast to a more recursive understanding of affect and intention – and thus meaning and representation – that has been observed in recent geographical engagements with neuroscience (Korf, 2012; Pykett, 2018), phenomenology (Simonsen, 2012), and social cognitive neuroscience itself (Lieberman, 2009). As Linda Zerilli (2015: 262) reminds us, to see affect and cognition, body and mind, as distinct – as occupying different ontological layers – is ‘to remain entangled in the Cartesian conception of the subject as a disembodied intellect that affect theory and phenomenology would have us refuse’.…”

Inside the behavioural state

“…2 Table 9.1 outlines the interdisciplinary forms of engagements that characterize BI, and the complementary, but largely unintegrated, disciplines from which additional perspectives could be gleaned. It shows how BI is interdisciplinary in certain ways, but simultaneously points to the scientific territory in relation to which it appears to lack substantive interdisciplinary engagement (also see Lepenies & Malecka 2018;Pykett 2018;Jones et al 2013). Notwithstanding BI's valuable contributions in refining cognitive and behavioural accounts of human decision-making, its interdisciplinarity thus seems to be of a relatively comfortable kind.…”

“…1 We ultimately claim that the interdisciplinary zone associated with BI is characterized by a pronounced lack of engagement with a broader range of social sciences, which share similar concerns, but employ very different analytical and methodological perspectives (e.g. Jones et al 2013;Shove 2010;Mols et al 2015;Pykett 2018;Lepenies & Malecka 2018). There are many ways of demonstrating the critical contribution that the broader social sciences could make to behavioural policymaking.…”