Vital Models: The Making and Use of Models in the Brain Sciences

The use of models has been important to the historical and contemporary study of the human brain, yet very little study by social scientists has been dedicated to how the brain sciences develop and use models to better understand what brains are and how they work, including the complex entanglements between brains, bodies and their environments. Vital Models: The Making and Use of Models in the Brain Sciences explores the history and use of brain models from clinical psychiatry to psychopharmacology and cybernetics, as well as developments in digital brain modeling, simulation, imaging and connectomics.

This timely volume helps both scientists and students better understand the variety, strengths, weaknesses and applicability of models in neuroscience.

Preface Tara Mahfoud, Sam McLean and Nikolas Rose 1. Vital brains: On the entanglement of media, minds, and models Cornelius Borck 2. Slicing the cortex to study mental illness: Alois Alzheimer’s pictures of equivalence Lara Keuck 3. Opaque models: Using drugs and dreams to explore the neurobiological basis of mental phenomena Nicolas Langlitz 4. Man not a machine: models, minds, and mental labor, c.1980 Max Stadler 5. Infrastructural intelligence: Contemporary entanglements of neuroscience and AI Johannes Bruder 6. Learning from large-scale neural simulations Maria Serban 7. Connectomes as constitutively epistemic objects: critical perspectives on modeling in current neuroanatomy Philipp Haueis, Jan Slaby 8. Bridging the gap between system and cell: The role of ultra-high field MRI in human neuroscience Robert Turner, Daniel De Haan