Bloomsbury Academic Brainmedia: One Hundred Years of Performing Live Brains, 1920–2020 (Thinking Media)

Will we ever be able to see the brain at work? Could it be possible to observe thinking and feeling as if watching a live broadcast from within the human head? Brainmedia uncovers past and present examples of scientists and science educators who conceptualize and demonstrate the active human brain guided by new media technologies. Drawing on original archival material, Brainmedia outlines a new history of “live brains,” arguing that practices of - and ideas about - mediation impacted the imagination of seeing the brain at work. Through five carefully researched and illustrated historical case studies, Flora Lysen shows the conceptual but also practical assembling of brains and media: from exhibitions of giant illuminated brain models and staged projections of brainwave recordings; to live televised brain broadcasts, brains hooked up to computers and experiments with “brain-to-brain” synchronization. By combining accounts of scientists examining brains in laboratories with examples of public demonstrations and exhibitions of brain research, Brainmedia casts new light on popularization practices, placing them at the heart of scientific work. The book argues that a vital part of brain research is the performing of knowledge with and through media. This means that the significance attributed to neuroscientific research today also much depends on the changing forms of fascination that ultimately allow for the persistence of promises of seeing the live brain at work. Review With Brainmedia Flora Lysen offers fascinating insights on the interplay of technology and experience, mediation and presence, discourse and politics that go far beyond the history of neuroscience: In pursuit of a critical understanding of the phenomena, Flora Lysen engages with brain research as current predicament and provides her readers with an engaging media-philosophical perspective. --Cornelius Borck, Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies, University of Lübeck, Germany, and author of Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography Combining media and science studies, this brilliant book shows how the 20th century turned the brain into an epistemic spectacle. It reconstructs the curves, projectors and screen technologies that were used for publicly displaying the living brain at work. By the same token, it critically questions our drive to create and consume “time images” of the cerebral that highlight liveliness, transparency and immediacy. The result is a compelling account of the brain as a medium and message firmly tied to the power and time relations of modern culture. --Henning Schmidgen, Professor of Media Studies, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany About the Author Flora Lysen is a historian of science and media and a member of Maastricht University’s Science and Technology Studies research group, the Netherlands. Studying how scientific concepts develop and circulate between different disciplinary domains and social spaces, her work focuses on technological sensations and histories of imag(in)ing the body and the brain. Through her scholarly work and by bringing together artists and scientists in collaborative projects, she explores the (popular) mediation of science and imagined scientific futures.