Description
Book SynopsisJohn Modern offers a powerful and original critique of neurology's pivotal role in religious history.
Trade Review"
Neuromatic is a fascinating exploration of the intertwined histories of religion and the brain. More than anything, it raises the question of the nature of belief — whether we can know the unknowable through these shadows that we chase around the cave of the skull." * Psychology Today *
"A powerful intervention into how notions of the secular are proliferated and internalized. . . . An innovative and imaginative work that shows the inner workings of our commonsense understandings of ourselves and our world." * Reading Religion *
"Among the great virtues of
Neuromatic is to show how dark indeed have been systematizers’ assaults on the spirit in the cause of making legible the interior life, of making the brain the organ of reason and order. That project demanded strange machines, cruel experiments, and an extravagant credulity in scientific progress." -- Tracy Fessenden * Religious Studies Review Forum *
"
Neuromatic had my synapses firing like disco lights at Studio 54—its own kind of Dream Machine." -- William Robert * Religious Studies Review Forum *
"What I see John doing here, a high and lovely and estimable thing, is a play with scholarly format via the CULTURE JAM. The book dismantles, sure, but it also creates a Gysin-like fog over the brain, so that Swedenborg’s angels can cavort with electric love therapists.
Neurmatic is an irruption in the long attempt to figure out human difference." -- Jason Bivins * Religious Studies Review Forum *
"While critical theorists of the John Modern variety might not be worried about violating religious taboos, they can be creeped out by scientific confidence in the ability to make everything measurable and intelligible . . . Throughout
Neuromatic, there is a looming sense of calamity lurking behind human attempts to master the brain." -- Finbarr Curtis * Religious Studies Review Forum *
"John has compiled the most beautiful and indeed meticulous genealogy of the conditions that allow the cognitive science of religion to constitute knowledge. He also shows the absurd humanity involved in that process. . . The scientists are Ahab, obsessively trying to chart the white whale, and John is Ishmael, somewhere in the ship, trying to tell a story about what is going on." -- Gabriel Levy * Religious Studies Review Forum *
"This is a wild ride, engaging and rewarding." * Choice *
"What do scholars of religion think about the methodologies and explanations rendered in the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR)? In
Neuromatic, Modern consults a wide range of empirical literature as well as humanist theory about the brain sciences to consider the relation between the concept of religion and the concept of the brain. His book. . . suggests it is not sufficient to study religion without also being aware of its position in broader historical and cultural contexts." * Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture *
“A full immersion in that complex world of neuroscience with its many—and at times bizarre—applications, and the occasionally surreal world of cognitive science of religion . . . converging in the supreme attempt to reduce religion to that same pattern. This is an insightful book . . . impiously critical." * Reviews in Science, Religion, and Theology *
"In equal turns frustrating, fascinating, and unique." * Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture *
"[A] fascinating and wide-ranging survey." * International Society for Science and Religion *
"Modern balances the academic and the bizarre with a colorful cast of characters from history, from religious scholars to scientists to psychics. There’s something for anyone with a curious mind." * LNP *
“This book is magisterial in scope—masterfully researched, carefully considered, subtly theorized, and energetically executed. Wrangling published, archival, and media sources into a deliberately nonlinear genealogy,
Neuromatic will be essential for scholars of religion, history, philosophy, and science studies.” * Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan University *
“
Neuromatic is equal parts brilliant critical analysis and affectionate polemic. I strongly recommend it to my colleagues in the cognitive sciences who should know about the metaphysical skeletons in our closets. I recommend it to everyone else because reading it is so much fun.” * Anthony Chemero, University of Cincinnati *
“Neuromatic, though masquerading as both a poke at the smugness of supposedly secular science and a plea against reductionism, is up to something more interesting:
anamnesis. It wants us to stop forgetting everything that went into making the brain the font of all order—pills, electro-shock therapy, EEGs, TV screens, cognitive anthropology and other findings from the twilight zone of cybernetics. With flashes of insight going off in an antic zigzag logic,
Neuromatic fires on as many synapses as the “enchanted loom” of the brain itself. Modern, a library cormorant of the first order, provides a history of oddballs and kooks, including some heroes of postwar science, and I ended up not being able to tell them apart. I found my brain happily scrambled after reading this book.
Neuromatic gleefully demonstrates how the effort to create binaries of pure-dirty, science-kookiness, truth-fabrication, sobriety-credulity, secular-religious fails again and again. An ultimately sane plea to linger in the midworld." * John Durham Peters, Yale University *
Table of ContentsPrologue: Already Gone Introduction Saturation Approaching the Neuromatic (with a Short Engineering Aside) Blurred Lines Cybernetics and the Question of Religion Cybernetic Theses of Secularization Poetics Synaptic Gap: Measuring Religion I. Thinking about Cognitive Scientists Thinking about Religion False Positives The Cognitive Science of Religion The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device Distinguishing Marks on a Screen Breaking the Spell Northampton Jonathan Edwards, Hyperactive Agency Detector Detecting the Life of the Brain Agents like Us Cheap Tricks Synaptic Gap: The Information of History II. Neither Matter nor Spirit: Toward a Genealogy of Information Hard Problems Neuromatic Piety: An Overview Ether and the Permeation of the Interspaces Emanuel Swedenborg, Neuroscientist Ghosts of Swedenborg Mental Slavery and the Invention of Spirituality The Diakka and Their Earthly Victims The Mediomaniacal Origins of American Neurology Prehistories of Electroencephalography Brain Waves and Tremulating Information Biofeedback and the Experience of Correspondence The Ontology of Information Concluding Thoughts on Perceptronium Synaptic Gap: Too Much Too Soon III. Imagining the Neuromatic Crash and Burn Opening Scene from a Cybernetic Demimonde Elective Affinities The Mechanics of Mediumship Images of an Oracle Thought Dictated in the Absence of All Control Cut-Ups From Voodoo Death to Virology Engrams and Auditing Past Lives of the Neuromatic Brain Exteriorization Break Through in Grey Room Synaptic Gap: White Machinery IV. Histories of Electric Shock Therapy circa 1978 Of Systems, Sex, and Secular Conversion Moral Treatment and Heads That Differ in Shape Gendered Electricity in the Neuromatic Groove The Operationalization of Napa State Insane Asylum Patients’ Rights The Shaving of Leonard Frank’s Beard Electric Love Therapy The Business of Marriage The Union of All Contradictory Ideas I Watch TV, I Watch TV Live from Napa State Synaptic Gap: Belief Molecules Conclusion: The Elementary Forms of Neuromatic Life Totemic Systems Big Science Artificial Intelligence Index
