Affiliated research projects

Center for Neuroscience and Society

The University of Pennsylvania has launched the Penn Center for Neuroscience and Society, a cross-disciplinary endeavor to increase understanding of the impact of neuroscience on society through research and teaching and to encourage the responsible use of neuroscience for the benefit of humanity. The Center will confront the social, legal and ethical implications of increasingly rapid advances in neuroscience. Penn cognitive neuroscientist Martha J. Farah will lead the Center as director. “Neuroscience is giving us increasingly powerful methods for understanding, predicting and manipulating behavior,” Farah said. “Every sphere of life in which the human mind plays a central role will be touched by these advance”. The reach of the CNS will extend beyond academia and engage policy makers, advocacy groups, industry and professionals in the full range of fields affected by progress in neuroscience such as business, the military, law and education.

Constituting Neurologic Subjects: Neuroscience, Identity and Society after the ‘Decade of the Brain’’

‘Constituting Neurologic Subjects’ is an ESRC-funded project seeking to add a valuable empirical dimension to recent debates within the social sciences regarding the articulations between neuroscience and society. The study is concerned with how a variety of publics (including scientists and their research participants) assert different subject positions in relation to neuroscience, and how, in the process, ethical and social concerns come to be ascribed to this culturally-resonant branch of technoscience. The project is a collaboration between Sarah Cunningham-Burley and Martyn Pickersgill at the University of Edinburgh, and Paul Martin, University of Nottingham.

For further information, please contact: martyn.pickersgill@ed.ac.uk.

Brain, Self and Society

BSS is a three-year project located within the BIOS Centre at LSE and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Its goal is to map the social and political impacts the ‘new brain sciences’ are having on our understanding of selfhood, personhood, and identity and with what consequences and implications. As primary investigator Professor Nikolas Rose put it, ‘The aim of the research project is to evaluate the hypothesis that the emerging field of 'the new brain sciences' is having as significant a social, political and personal impact in the 21st century as did the birth of psychological conceptions of personhood and their associated ways of thinking and acting in the 20th century.

Contact: Joelle Abi-Rached
Email: J.M.Abi-Rached@lse.ac.uk

Neuroculture

Coming soon at www.neuroculture.org...

Nature coverage: New York city will be criss-crossed this spring by a net of brainy ideas. More than a hundred public events will link neuroscience with art, music and meditation in the city’s Brainwave festival, which runs until June. The metropolitan mix gives the festival its peculiar flavour. Musician Lou Reed introduces and discusses his latest compositions about meditation. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux examines sources of fear, and asks how Buddhist practitioners seek to master... Frazzetto,G. (2008). Neural networking in Manhattan, Nature, 451, p772 (pdf)

Contact: Giovanni Frazzetto
Email: g.frazzetto@lse.ac.uk

VOICES: on identity, childhood, ethics and stimulants

VOICES is a Wellcome Trust funded research project based within the LSE BIOS Centre. The research project brings the perspectives and experiences of children into international debates around rising child psychiatric diagnoses and the increasing use of drugs in child psychiatry.

Contact: Ilina Singh (Wellcome Trust University Lecturer in Bioethics and Society)
Email: i.a.singh@lse.ac.uk

The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL

The aims of the Centre shall be to research and disseminate the history of medicine, both as an academic discipline and as a subject of broader public interest. Its close relationship and connections with the Trust, notably the Trust's Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, will facilitate its commitment to promoting a vision of medical history which is comprehensive in chronological, geographic and thematic range, and which draws upon a wide field of scholarly expertise. While primarily devoted to research, the Centre will also play a prime role in outreach and in fostering public understanding of the subject, through teaching and training, through programmes of seminars, lectures and symposia, through publishing, broadcasting and other appropriate activities. It will have an international profile, attracting high calibre scholars and students from abroad, and participating in exchanges with history of medicine institutions around the world.

Supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to Dr Tilli Tansey and Professor Leslie Iversen, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL presents a series of podcasts on the history of neuroscience featuring eminent people in the field: Today's Neuroscience, Tomorrow's History.