[What follows is a work in progress. More to come.] Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has a rather amazing article in November’s The Atlantic magazine discussing how recent research suggests that we may not be alone in our brains. Instead, he suggests that “each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of …
Patterns: tools
Trepanation and technologies of the self
Neurophilosophy has posted a tremendously ghoulish and thoroughly fascinating interview with Heather Perry, the Gloucester woman who in 2000 decided to trepan herself in order to attain “more mental energy and clarity.” She denies a suggestion made by the BBC that the bathroom surgery, performed with local anaesthetic and an electric drill, was nearly fatal. …
Technologies of self, pharmaceutical interventions
Pharmaceutical interventions, prescribed or illicit, do much more than reorganize our somatic selves. Yes, they shuffle the sensorium and re-engineer the molecular body. But these effects are only part of the profound, and even violent, transformation of the somatic self made visible by the emergence of what Nikolas Rose has called the “neurochemical self.” Drugs …
