Vienna 2009

Social neuroscience and neuroimaging

Organized by Dr. Ilse Kryspin-Exner, Psychology Department, University of Vienna

Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna & The MR Centre of Excellence, Medical University of Vienna, Austria
1-3 April 2009

Aims and objectives

In a time of pronounced social change in light of developments in the brain sciences, increased awareness of practical scientists of the historical, social and political implications of their work is necessary. Training in the neurosciences is very often ahistorical and asocial, in the sense that neuroscience knowledge and experimentation are taught and learned with little attention to the epistemological changes that took place in earlier times, or to the factors (technological, social, cultural, economic) that shaped them or continue to influence them. Likewise, students trained in the social studies of neuroscience do not always have a chance to be directly exposed to how rationales and questions in neuroscience experimentation are formulated, or to the process of design and actualisation of the experiments themselves. Social scientists must be equipped with the basic theoretical and practical knowledge of the proceedings of the discipline they are interested in. We expect that this event will promote innovative, critical thinking about key issues in modern neuroscience. The school offers a symmetrically interdisciplinary environment for cross-tutoring and the sharing of ideas, to assess the rigour and precision of current methodologies and the limitations of experimentation in modern neuroimaging – and to discuss its contextualisation in contemporary society, the uses and practices to which it is put, and the way in which this science affects policy and everyday life.

Content and themes

Functional neuroimaging is a scientific area of enormous social relevance. Ongoing advances in this fields aims to explain in neuroanatomical and neurochemical terms mental dysfunctions with heavy societal burdens as well as behavioural patterns that are pertinent to a vast array of an individual’s social competences and strategies to respond to the environment as well as to social norms and procedures. Experimentation in these fields cannot afford, therefore, to move on unaware of its social context and without an assessment of its impact on many aspects of our lives, especially the understanding of disease, normality, subjectivity and equality.

 Notably, the conceptual shift in biological psychiatry inscribes behaviours and psychiatric conditions as reducible to the operations of the brain and has accentuated their abstraction from society. This has the consequence of lifting them from the cultural frameworks of motives, meaning and responsibility that are normally applied to social objects. However, psychiatric disorders are simply not independent from societal forces and mechanisms. The NeuroSchool will attempt to address and work through some of the following questions in this area: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the imaging process? What is assumed or left out of neuroimaging investigations, and what assumptions or interpretive leaps are required by the technology or experimental setup? How do we respond to this? How can complex behaviors be ‘isolated’ and ‘measured’ in the laboratory, especially given the constraints of the fMRI process? What factors (financial, technological, experimental, social, historical) decide what fMRI experiments are worth conducting?