Critical Neuroscience

This essay uses gender as a category of historical and sociological analysis to situate two populations-boxers and victims of domestic violence-in context and explain the temporal and ontological discrepancies between them as potential brain injury patients. In boxing, the question of brain injury and its sequelae were analyzed from 1928 on, often on profoundly somatic grounds. With domestic violence, in contrast, the question of brain injury and its sequelae appear to have been first examined only after 1990. Symptoms prior to that period were often cast as functional in specific psychiatric and psychological nomenclatures. We examine this chronological and epistemological disconnection between forms of violence that appear otherwise highly similar even if existing in profoundly different spaces.

BACKGROUND:
In spite of its indusrial usefulness and varied daily uses, lead (Pb) pollution is a widespread ecological problem that faces the humans in the 21th century. Pb was found to produces a wide range of toxic effects including neurotoxicity especially to the developing and young offspring. Recently, the utilization of herbal plants has received a significant attention where there has been rising awareness in their therapeutic use; among these is the garlic.
AIM OF THE WORK:
In light of the above, the current study is designed experimentally in female pregnant rats in order to investigate the beneficial role of garlic extract in the protection from the maternal and fetal cerebellar damage that produced by administration of different doses of Pb during pregnancy.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
Positively pregnant female rats were divided into five groups; one control group, two Pb-treated groups (exposed to 160 and 320 mg/kg b.wt. of Pb, respectively) and two groups treated with both Pb and garlic (exposed to Pb as previous groups together with 250 mg/ kg b.wt. /day of garlic extract). Treatments started from day 1 till day 20 of pregnancy, where the mother rats of different experimental groups were sacrified to obtain the fetuses. Pb level in the maternal nd fetal blood and cerebellum was estimated by spectrophotometry. Specimens of the cerebellum of different mother and fetal groups were processed to histological and immunohistochemical staining for microscopic examination.
RESULTS:
The results showed that administration of Pb to pregnant rats resulted in a dose-dependent toxicity for both mothers and fetuses in the form of decrease of maternal weight gain, placental and fetal weights, brain weight and diminished fetal growth parameters, which were prominent in rat's group treated with larger dose of Pb. In Pb-treated rats, Pb level in blood and cerebellum was high when compared to the control. The histopathological examination of the cerebellum of treated dams and fetuses showed marked alterations mainly in the form of Purkinje cell degeneration and lack of deveopmet of fetal cerebellum. Co-treatment of garlic extract along with Pb resulted in a significant decrease in Pb levels as compared with those treated with Pb alone with improvement of the histopathological changes.
CONCLUSIONS:
This study was useful in evaluating the hazardous effects of uncontrolled use of Pb in general and in assessing the developmental and neurotoxicity of fetuses due to exposure during pregnancy in particular. Co-administration of garlic has beneficial effects in amelioration of Pb-induced neurotoxicity and reversing the histopathological changes of the cerebellum of mother rats and fetuses.
KEYWORDS:
garlic; glial fibrillary acidic protein; lead; purkinje cells

Special issue of "Culture Unbound". Through an introduction and six original articles, the issue investigates a variety of cultural and scientific discourses and practices that in different ways are related to neuroscience and the brain.

The special issue was edited by guest editors Peter Bengtsen and Kristofer Hansson.

«BRAINSTORM»: THE NEUROSCIENCE OUTSIDE OF NEUROSCIENCE The paper analyzes the intervention of neuroscience into various areas of human practice and cognition which results in the formation of the so-called «brain culture». The author draws attention to a number of phenomena showing an active disciplinary expansion which may be observed in recent decades. Three main directions of critical reflection of the problem are marked out. Firstly, the paper shows theoretical and methodological disadvantages of neuroscience itself and raises the question of criteria allowing distinguishing be

Visualizing the capitalist economic system has been a problematic question many artists and writers have been concerned with in the recent decade. It is as if the inability of recognizing the body and borders of the capitalist structure we are ingrained in had led to a naturalization of this invisible and inarticulate system. What would happen, however, if we were to move away from trying to see the economy, and were given the tools to sense and feel the fluctuations of the economic system?
Neuroscientist David Eagleman has created an object named “Sensory Substitution Vest”, a piece of clothing that allows the hearing impaired to feel words instead of hearing them. This project has also experimented with sensory addition, creating a new sensorial experience based on the fluctuations of the stock market. By feeding the vest real-time stock data, and challenging the subject to take decisions connected with the impulses received (thus unconsciously trading with these stocks), David Eagleman believes the subject wearing the vest could learn to have a sensorial experience built on the economic movements of the market. To explore this object further and illustrate some of the effects it might have on our patterns of embodiment, I propose analysing it from the perspective of (critical) disability studies. In doing so I recognize how Eagleman’s Vest not only becomes a perfect product of its ‘Silicon Valley’ setting, but also how it blurs and shifts classic perceptions of what constitutes able and disabled bodies, thus rendering all human bodies as if in need of enhancement. This paper ends by questioning the differences between usual, visual trading, and this new form of embodied trading; interpreting how the body can experience the invisible realm of the economy, and hopefully stimulating further discussion points and questions that can be explored in the future.

FREE to download until October 2, 2020. Co-authored with Mark M Smith: Emotion, Sense, Experience is a short, pointed, engaging book calling on historians of emotions and historians of the senses to partake in serious and sustained dialogue. The book outlines the deep, if largely unacknowledged, genealogy of historical writing, insisting on a braided history of emotions and the senses; explains why recent historical treatments have sometimes profitably but nonetheless unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses; and makes a compelling case for the heuristic and interpretive dividends of bringing emotions and sensory history into conversation. We claim that histories of emotions and the senses should be written in tandem, not only in an effort to dilute some of the shortcomings of the respective fields as they are currently conceived and written but, more importantly, to grant historians access to a new way of understanding historical experience generally. Such a project necessarily opens up the question of the object of historical enquiry – the human being – and points us towards new interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration. As the neurosciences turn toward the social and the cultural, so historians might usefully turn towards the neurosciences. Unpicking some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience, we radically re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and placing it squarely under the purview of the humanities.

Neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga has wondered whether 'scientists, embarked upon their personal quests – their quixotic endeavours – spend their time just thinking'. This adjectival invocation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote pitches science as an epic quest that equates scientific rationality with the Don’s delusions. Does science quest after truth in a quixotic, literary way that philosopher Nicholas Maxwell terms 'rationalistically neurotic'?

Over the past several years, a growing number of social scientists studying addiction have begun paying attention to materiality, embodiment, and biology in potentially novel ways.  In this this chapter, I ask what it means, concretely, for social scientists to think seriously about materiality and biology while remaining ambivalent toward prevailing notions of addiction as brain disease. In the first part of this chapter, I examine the brain–disease model of addiction as an epistemic object, tracing its emergence from a particular scientific style of reasoning and examining some of its key social effects. In the remainder of the chapter, I briefly review the social science of addiction literature associated with four conceptual frameworks, which I suggest highlight domains and mechanisms of biosocial entanglement – and are thus particularly fruitful as potential sites of conversation between social scientists and bioscientists. These frameworks are: (1) embodied sensations; (2) will and habit; (3) social and material milieu; and (4) trajectories.

The early years of the 21st century were marked by the increasing prominence of neuroscientific ideas in wider society. The proliferation of neuroscience has been accompanied by lively debate, alternately excited and apprehensive, about its societal significance. However, consideration of neuroscience’s cultural implications has largely remained speculative due to a paucity of research that directly examines how publics engage with neuroscientific ideas. Drawing on Social Representations Theory and the principles of embodied phenomenology, this thesis aims to map the contours of the neuroscientific knowledge that surfaces in ordinary, everyday life in contemporary Britain. Its investigation focuses upon two empirical contexts, cataloguing the representations of brain research that materialise in (i) the mainstream print media, and (ii) the common-sense understanding revealed by a series of semi-structured interviews with London residents. A content analysis of 3,630 newspaper articles confirms that the period 2000-2012 saw a steady expansion of neuroscience’s prominence in public dialogue, primarily within appeals to readers to optimise their brain function by moderating their mental activity, nutritional intake and lifestyle choices. Thematic analysis of 48 interviews, however, suggests that laypeople have remained largely unaware of the media attention afforded to neuroscience, with the brain occupying a negligible space in people’s day-to-day thought and conversation. Interview respondents situated brain research within the socially distant ‘other worlds’ of science and medicine, characterising direct experience of brain-related pathology as the only context that would motivate them to engage with neuroscientific knowledge. However, more latent meanings attached to the brain surfaced as the interviews progressed: the brain was also constituted as a tool over which individuals can exert control, and as a source of human variation, invoked to articulate and explain social differences. Through rigorous analysis of original empirical data, this thesis traces the paths by which neuroscientific ideas travel through the public sphere, distinguishes how they are elaborated and re-constituted en route, and explores the implications this may have for social life.

This paper uses the findings of two art-science research projects to reveal insights into how brains work and how we think about how brains work. It uses these insights to suggest ways that art can engage more critically with neuroscience. During the One Thousand Mindreaders art-science research project, one thousand people were taught a little-known skill developed by Victorian stage mindreaders. By holding someone’s hand and feeling their subconscious muscle movements, participants could find objects hidden in a room and duplicate unseen drawings that person had made earlier. The research suggests that such physical experiences of the embodied nature of thought can challenge the dominant neurocentrism of neuroscience discourse. An art-science research study of a direct-to- consumer EEG Brainwear device is then used to explore the history of scientific attempts
to capture images of thoughts from early thoughtography to current neurotechnology. This history reveals the dangerously seductive allure of brain imaging technologies and the thought images they produce. Critical Neuroscience is a recent interdisciplinary initiative that encourages social, historical, and philosophical studies of neuroscience and the implications of recent advances in the field. There has been a call for a ‘Critical NeuroArt’ that responds to the concerns of ‘Critical Neuroscience’. This paper suggests that such a Critical NeuroArt can benefit from art practices that have a quintessentially performative and embodied nature. It argues for utilising previously institutionally excluded art practices with a rich and relevant history of engagement with neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

An Open Access anthology edited by Matteo Pasquinelli forthcoming (Fall 2015) for Meson Press, Leuphana University Lüneburg. With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe and Ben Woodard. Dutch edition forthcoming for Leesmagaziijn, Amsterdam.

Neurofeedback draws on multiple techniques that propel
both healthy and patient populations to self-regulate neural activity. Since the 1970s, numerous accounts have promoted electroencephalography-neurofeedback as a viable
treatment for a host of mental disorders. Today, while the
number of health care providers referring patients to neurofeedback practitioners increases steadily, substantial methodological and conceptual caveats continue to pervade empirical reports. And yet, nascent imaging technologies (e.g., real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging) and increasingly rigorous protocols are paving the road towards
more effective applications and a better scientific understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Here, we outline common neurofeedback methods, illuminate the tenuous state of the evidence, and sketch out future directions to further unravel the potential merits of this contentious therapeutic prospect.

This glossary consisting of over 300 definitions is meant to accompany the previously published three-volume set,The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 1, 2 and 3. It reflects the concerns contained in those
volumes. It marks the beginning of a long-term process
of creating a dictionary of terms with which to understand
and eventually destabilize the co plex ways through
which a future Neural Capitalism will work in creating
contemporary forms of neural subsumption.
Neural subsumption is a future condition brought
about by an assemblage of networked neural technologies
that wil l link our brainwaves to the Internet of
Everything (IoE) and then encode them to use in advanced
data analysis. No thought conscious or unconscious will
be left unrecorded, encoded or surveyed . Furthermore
this data will be used for a future form of data inscription
upon the connectome: the data set describing the connection
matrix of the nervous system and which represents
the network of anatomical connections linking neural
elements together. This in the end constitutes what I have
called the Statisticon.

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.

The neuroscience of morality presents novel approaches in exploring the cognitive and affective underpinnings of moral conduct, and is steadily accumulating influence within discursive frames of biocitizenship. Many claims are infused with varieties of neuroactuarialism in governing morally risky subjects, with implications that other fields should observe closely. Sociologists and other social scientists, however, have typically been reluctant to interject their expertise. However, a resurgent sociology of morality offers the means by which closer engagement may be realized. In encouraging this interdisciplinarity, a brief outline of recent developments in the neuroscience of morality is provided. Some interdisciplinary collaborations are then explored, which weave together novel methodological affordances from the neurosciences with conceptual models from sociological inquiry. A brief overview of ‘neuroliberalism’ follows, to concretize the growing appeal and practical application of the psy- and neurosciences in governing moral conduct. Finally, some tentative ‘provocations’ are offered, towards fostering moralities that, ultimately, we can live with.

Chapter 1 of Brain Culture

This book offers a timely analysis of the impact of rapidly advancing knowledge about the brain, mind and behaviour on contemporary public policy and practice. Examining developments in behaviour change policies, neuro-architecture and urban design, neuro-education, and workplace training programmes, the book examines the global spread of research agendas, policy experiments and everyday practice informed by ‘brain culture’. It offers an alternative, geographically-informed set of explanations for what matters in explaining how people behave and how citizens’ behaviour should be governed. It will be of interest to students and academics across the social and behavioural sciences.

This thesis seeks to trace the escalating shift from mind to brain and resulting changes in understandings of care for the self, emergent in part through growing influence of neuroethics and related calls for ‘neuro-enhancement’ of the ethical subject.  This study – propelled largely through a critical discourse analysis of recent disciplinary output and public engagement – is particularly interested in observing the increasing confidence of neuroscience-informed perspectives on humanity, with announcements that we are witnessing a so-called ‘Second Enlightenment’.  Such calls for a new ontology of ethics, I argue, amounts to overly ‘expansive’ claims funnelled through increasingly ‘intensive’ gazes.  Within the rise of neuroscience more broadly, empirical neuroethics proclaims its epistemic privilege with respect to tracing our moral selfhood, in part through its location of measures of the ethical subject within functionally ascribed activity traced at the neurological level.  Once elusive properties of conduct and wellbeing are now sought to be registered in the common currency of this synaptic ledger, exclusively overseen by specialists in this new field of expertise.

The thesis then explores the subsequent adoption of this new empirical currency by those practicing a ‘hard’ transhumanism.  Advocates of this position urge us to embrace methods of cognitive and moral ‘enhancement,’ lest we find ourselves unfit for the future in a world of ever-escalating risk.  However, I argue that dominant framings of care of the self within neuroethics tend to be narrowly construed.  I suggest that by failing to recognise the socio-historical contingencies of their claims, neuroethicists risk producing rigid, stultifying, and perhaps even self-defeating constructs of the ideal citizen.  The personal ethos advanced by these new technologies of the self creates new forms of personal responsibility, which, consistent with neoliberal ideals of progress, involves a perpetual labour upon one's brain as a mode of accumulation strategy.  This threatens to become a cruel labour that ultimately jars with our eventual and inevitable neurodegeneration.

In response to this emerging ethos, I attempt to go beyond the constraints of a merely critical discourse to enable a more productive, if cautious, engagement with the claims of the new, applied neuro-disciplines.  I consider what kind of differently expansive framing of subjectivity might be better suited to the present, compared with the ‘hyper-cognitive’ subject of certain ‘hard’ neuroscientific and neuroethical discourses.  Contributing to the growing interest in the social sciences in the broad movement of ‘neurodiversity’, I turn to fictional accounts of dementia to see what might be learned from these literary sources.  I argue that these literary explorations of subjectivity open up novel ways of reconceiving our relation to our neurology, and thus may play an important role in reimagining the self in a manner adequate to the complexity, urgency, and promise of our times.  Though grounded primarily within the field of the sociology of science and technology, this thesis also draws extensively on related thought in poststructuralist critical and literary theory, while also maintaining an accessibility acutely attuned to the growing importance of interdisciplinary exchange.

The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation

The thesis puts forward an exploration of the relationship between two perspectives on the mind: the scientific perspective, through which the mind is described and explained by the disciplines of cognitive science, and the lived perspective, through which the mind is experienced and understood in the context of everyday life. In articulating this apparent duality of views I draw upon two influential philosophical accounts: Edmund Husserl’s (1970) investigation of the life-world and the world of science and Wilfrid Sellars’ (1963) analysis of the manifest and the scientific image of the human being in relation to the world. The presentation and juxtaposition of the two analyses opens a way to an exploration of the interdependence of science and the life-world. It also sets the stage for a critique of naturalism in mind sciences. Following Husserl, I show that the naturalistic attitude stems from forgetting that the idea of the objective scientific reality is but an abstraction from the concrete life-world of experience, value, and meaning. Surveying the conceptual space of philosophy of mind, I further challenge the naturalistic attitude by demonstrating the untenability of its metaphysical and epistemological assumptions. As I argue, naturalism amounts to a particularly inconsistent stance in studying human epistemic processes, where it must paradoxically presuppose the very aspects of the world that it set out to disclose. Concluding that cognitive science lacks absolute metaphysical or epistemological foundations, I suggest that studying the mind needs to recognize the importance of the lived perspective of being a mind. I explore the multifaceted ways in which the scientific perspective on the mind is both rooted in the life-world and shapes it in turn. I conceptualize two dimensions of this interrelatedness through the presentation of Varela et al.’s (1991) enactive approach to cognitive science and Ian Hacking’s (1995) theory of the looping of human kinds. I conclude by proposing that consistent study of mind which acknowledges the impossibility of separating the cognizing subject from her cognized world is bound to remain open to revision of its own foundations. Cognitive science is thus imbued with a demand for reflexivity towards its own theory and practice which would recognize the historical, experiential and socio-political embeddedness of its concepts as well as the role which cognitive science itself plays in shaping societal conceptions of the mind and the way in which the mind is concretely understood, experienced, lived, and acted upon in the context of everyday life.

Dieser Artikel aus dem Jahr 2013 ist ein einführendes Positionspapier zur Kritischen Neurowissenschaft. Es geht um historische, soziologische, anthropologische und philosophische Interpretationen und Kontextualisierungen der neurowissenschaftlichen Forschungspraxis und zugleich um das Bemühen, diese Reflexionen in die Praxis und die Selbstverständnisse der Hirnforscher zurückwirken zu lassen.

The brain in its plasticity and inherent ‘sociality’ can be proclaimed and projected as a revolutionary organ – a kind of ‘wonder tissue’ writ in revolutionary, transformative text. Far from the old reactions which opposed the authenticity of political theory and praxis to the dangerous naturalism of ‘cognitive science’, with images of men in white coats, the RAND Corporation or military LSD experiments, recent decades have shown us some of the creative potentiality of the ‘social brain’ (Vygotsky, Negri, Virno – each of whom is deliberately renewing with a Spinozist tradition in which old forms of conservatism, including hermeneutics, Heideggerianism and other perpetuations of a nature-culture, Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften divide are discarded). Of course, the gleefulness with which the brain is proclaimed as revolutionary – including in its immateriality, a paradox for a doctrine which invokes a material organ – masks some underlying problems. For one, who says the brain – “the book which reads itself,” in Diderot’s words – is necessarily revolutionary? Plasticity doesn’t have to mean plasticity ‘for good’; it could mean an openness to conformism or being shaped – including being swallowed into a ‘group mind’? While I don’t propose to definitively answer all these objections, I seek here to connect reflection on the social brain with what one might call the project of a politics of affect(s), partly inspired by Guattari’s idea of a “production of subjectivity.”

In an intellectual atmosphere still marked by the ideological failures of the twentieth century, the expectations for neuroscience are extremely high, even in fields traditionally sheltered from the seductions of neurobiological explanations, such as political theory, sociology and philosophy. In an attempt to problematize the reception that this neuroscientific vocabulary has received, I provide in this article a cartography of three major lines of philosophical criticism of neuroscience – ‘conceptual’, ‘societal’ and ‘embodied-enactive’ – put forward recently by philosophers of different intellectual traditions. Although these criticisms are important in shedding light on some epistemological inconsistencies of the neuroscientific programme, the need remains to supplement this philosophical work with a different kind of critique, one that could address more directly the social and political relevance of neuroscience as well understand our epoch's urge to ‘turn neurobiological’ previously cultural or sociological phenomena.

This book criticizes the claims of Freud's psychoanalysis and Solms and Turnbull's neuropsychoanalysis using a medley of biology, neurobiology, ethology, primatology, critical theory, and philosophy. We develop a materialist theory of neuroscience which leaves room open for anthropology and sociology, while at the same time attempting a synthesis between positivism and post-Kantian anti-realism. (Author's note: this is an early work of mine; all of it does not always hang together, but I think that some ideas expressed herein are of some worth).

Brain imaging is a persuasive visual rhetoric by which neuroscience is articulated as relevant to the construction and maintenance of desirable selves. In this essay, I describe how " brain-based self-help " literature disseminates neuroscientific vocabularies to public audiences. In this genre, brain images are an authoritative visual resource for translating neuroscience into a comprehensive program for living. I use Foucault's discussion of biopower to describe the ways in which brain-based self-help literature enables self-constitution in a biosocial age where health is a central means of communicating personal worth, social value and political order. The implications of this continuous self-fashioning are not limited to the personal realm but have important political consequences.

We outline the perspective of ‘critical neuroscience’: a stance of informed critique pertaining to neuroscientific methods, practices, concepts, discursive effects, formative backstories, and societal impacts. Critical neuroscience brings together work from various vantage points with the aim to engage neuroscience practitioners as well as decision makers, stakeholders and the public to convince them of the feasibility of a vigilant critical stance towards the entirety of the ‘Neuro complex’, including its impacts on scholarship, academia and wider society. The text is a programmatic outline which traces major lines of influence and theoretical backgrounds and sketches working examples. It is an invitation to neuroscientists and critical scholars from different fields to engage in collaborative reflection on the present and future of human neuroscience in its varied and dynamic socio-cultural surroundings. The chapter is a revised and updated version of chapter 1 of our volume Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Wiley-Blackwell 2012).

Advances in brain imaging techniques have opened new fields of investigation and often challenged conventional assumptions concerning human behaviour. This 'neuromolecular gaze' (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013) also heralds new ways of intervening in the regulation of social phenomena, based on the objectification of the cerebral processes that underlie individual conducts. Neuroeconomics applies this brain-centric perspective to the study of economic decision making. This paper engages with the two dominant approaches in neuroeconomics. The first section concentrates on the work of Paul Glimcher, who considers economic models and their correlative notion of 'utility maximization' as providing the neurosciences with a theoretical framework as to how the brain solves decision problems. The second section discusses the findings of behavioural neuroeconomics, which attempts to model departures from the rationality axiom by measuring the cognitive and emotional biases that have their sources in the brain's complex architecture. Whereas both strands of neuroeconomics rely on a benchmark of economic rationality, this paper argues that they reformulate in allegedly neutral neuroscientific terms a behavioural norm that is basically moral in nature. If rational decision-making conditions economic and indeed evolutionary survival, and yet if most people regularly fail as utility optimi-zers, then understanding the neural causes of such failures should help people better themselves and behave as good homines oeconomici.