Upon waking one morning in the twenty-first century from the most unsettling of dreams, we somehow came to find ourselves transformed into a brain. How can we begin to understand this metamorphosis? How did we get to this point? Did it involve a pharmakon, like in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where the jealous Circe uses potions to deal with both the men who reject her love as well as her female rivals? Are we somehow being punished for our humanistic hubris, like Arachne who was turned into a spider after claiming to have superior weaving skills to Athena? Or are we simply taking on a different form as a means of defence as we flee from something, like Thetis morphing into different forms to escape Peleus who is attempting to make her his wife? As one can see, the dictum “You are your brain” raises several questions: not only pertaining to why we so readily accept it and, indeed, even embrace it so eagerly at times, but also concerning why this dictum must be stated so firmly, so coercively (make no mistake), as if we were being addressed by some final sovereignty or god, that amounted to the ultimate super-ego command.

These questions—among others, for example, how the transformation took place, what produced it exactly and for what ends—coupled with the equally difficult if not altogether more problematic and Kafkaesque ordeal of remembering what exactly we were before, might best be approached by probing further into the results of the transformation: what are we exactly, when we are said to be our brain? Henceforth, in this book I set out to provide a cartography of the manifold forms that we take when we become or are said to be brain-creatures.

The task of discerning the different metamorphoses of the brain and trying to understand them is an urgent one. This is because the momentous period in which we are living, what I am designating as the transition from having a brain to being a brain, might represent the last window of opportunity to say something about the shifting conditions of our existence. Having a brain meant that one could contemplate it as an object, look at it and attempt to grasp it in language. However, given that we are now increasingly enjoined to coincide with the brain itself, are we not in danger of losing our capacity to speak about that very thing which itself claims to define our conditions of possibility? Simply put, are we becoming mute? Indeed, today there appears little space left from which to respond to the hegemonic dictum you are your brain: we are, first and foremost, urged to recognise ourselves in and identify with what is a relatively minimalistic if not one-dimensional depiction of our existence. That is, the way in which the brain-human is conceptualised and imagined within this neuroscientific paradigm is anything but Romanesque or complex; in fact, one is tempted to say it is grey or dull inasmuch as it reduces human beings to cognitions, a limited range of affects and some unconscious processes, all of which are framed by hormonal driven instinctual impulses. One could see such a conceptualisation as the bitter, deconstructive and material truth, a truth that leaves us befuddled and bereft of any solid ground from which to formulate a strong riposte. You are your brain, in other words, represents a clear and definitive full stop, one which robs us of any humanistic hubris as well as tearing away the remaining vestiges of any illusions we still had of being conscious agents who possess free will—remember Arachne, in this regard. What remains is our complete and utter awe and fascination with the brain that, although highly complex in comparison to our one-dimensional and simplified make-up, nevertheless often serves to silence us. Resultantly, when the notion of having a brain is superseded by the idea of being our brain, we become deprived of a minimal distance and lose our voice in the process.

This is reminiscent of Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, of course, who, upon being turned into a “monstrous verminous bug”, finds out that he has become speechless: he attempts to speak to his sister as well as his parents but comes to realise that his voice has changed in such a way that no-one understands him any longer. Equally, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the hunter Actaeon, having seen Diana naked and turned into a stag, is rendered speechless:

In a stream he longed to say, “O miser-

Able me!” but had no words, nothing but

Animal cries while tears ran down his changed,

Bewildered face.

(Ovidius 1958, p. 69)

Perhaps, having been turned into a brain, we similarly now have no words. Consider the archetypal brain image of the isolated brain: the brain in profile, the brain without eyes, nose, mouth or tongue. This brain is, ultimately, blind and mute. We are blinded, but yet told to walk without fear or hesitation: follow your synapses, we are told, and if anything were to go wrong psychotropic interventions will reset our neural paths accordingly. We are mute inasmuch as the brain underneath the scanner only lights up at particular stimuli provided externally by the person in a lab coat. Just as Io who, as one will remember, was transformed into a cow because her lover Jupiter wanted to hide her from his wife, and was only able to trace letters in the dust, the mute brain can only trace signs onto the scanner—voxels either light up or they do not. In neural times, then, the letters in the dust have become digitalised; where once Io was—if one will allow me this this pun—I-0 has now taken her place. If we can be said to communicate with the brain, it is on the basis of this rudimentary digitalised sign language. But how can we absolutely be certain that we understand the digitised brain correctly? That is to say, how can we be positive that we are asking the brain the right questions in the first place, or that we are presenting it with the relevant stimuli whilst under the scanner?

One is tempted here to reject this digitalisation, to cling tightly onto the analogue, that is, to hold on to the idea that I, my Ego, my subject, or whatever other terms one chooses to posit it, still has something to say beyond or apart from the digital traces left behind by the electric or chemical activity in the organ of the brain. Within such a project, one could try to undo the metamorphosis and free the subject of the neurosciences from the reductionism of the scanner—where it must lie still and say nothing—and give it back its body and its voice. But in such an instance, where we would approach the subject through recourse to the usual phenomenological methods, get an understanding of the whole situation by taking into consideration the socio-anthropological context, and conduct in-depth interviews as part of a qualitative approach to research, do we not run the risk of falling back on retrograde illusions and even older myths from a bygone era? That is to say, would the voice and the body we are seeking to re-establish not equally be pre-formatted and, hence, equally non-emancipatory? That is, despite our good intentions, we might end up doing nothing more than putting the subject back in its old prison outfit and handing it old lines to read from past scripts. Moreover, the common argument that the neurosciences research an artificial subject in an artificial situation risks overlooking how the subject under the scanner, watching a screen, handling a joystick or a keyboard and responding to cues and clues, may, in actual fact, be an accurate description of the contemporary head-phoned, wired and connected subject who moves through highly digitalised and controlled environments where its personal and social lives increasingly takes place.

At the very least, then, we can say that harking back to previous epistèmes does not hold much promise of liberation. In the same way, one could even go as far as to argue that we have merely traded one highly scripted and controlled environment (analogue and embedded in socio-psychological discourses) for another one (digital and grounded in neuro-discourses). Should we thus adopt the stance that brain-discourse represents nothing new but is merely the latest in a long line of myths and, as such, is just yet another overarching and hegemonic cultural narrative with which subjects must engage and negotiate? Such a position would suggest that we are not, in fact, losing our voice but, rather, our voice is simply mutating and morphing as we transition into a different age. However, we should perhaps reject this idea that the subject will always be resilient enough to adapt to new epistèmes, on the grounds that it harbours a false and all too easy optimism; above all, such a view testifies to how much in this day and age we all too readily rely on the option of pressing the Ctrl + z key at any point. That is to say, within our digital environments we are free to continually experiment with chunks of text and image, altering them and subjecting them to numerous operations, safe in the knowledge that we can always go back to where we started from (only to find ourselves at a loss when in real, concrete life, for example, a vase falls and thinking Ctrl + z turns out to be of no help whatsoever). Hence, in this book I want to argue that we should seriously consider the possibility that the neuro-turn signals a fundamental and structural break qua subjectivity and sociality. Simply put, we might not be merely trading old myths for new ones as I suggested earlier. The saying nihil nove sub sole (there is nothing new under the sun) has a long-standing tradition of being used by those who wish to remain blind towards the new—or, for that matter, those who want others to remain blind towards the new. For, it might be the case that, when faced with the dictum you are your brain we, as aforesaid, lose our voice (as we ourselves are not considered to have any access to our own truth) and that this in an altogether unprecedented way curtails any subjective leeway, thus amounting to a structural and decisive break with subjective positions from former eras.

While in disciplinary, religious or psychological discourses, for example, the subject had to mobilise a desire, invest in a discourse and engage in some kind of activity—albeit we might call these forms of pseudo-activity or “interpassivity” whereby desire, discourse and activity are outsourced to the o(O)ther (Pfaller, 2000; Žižek, 1997)¹—we might need to consider the possibility that the new brain discourses, in contrast, condemn each of us to a kind of locked-in-syndrome where desire, discourse and activity lose all meaning as such. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are replete with irreversible transformations of humans and nymphs into trees, stones, mountains or rivers, into which their personages are irreversibly trapped, and through which they forever lose their access to the world. Do we not have to consider the possibility that brain-discourse prepares us for a similar metamorphosis, by virtue of the fact that the dictum you are your brain invalidates us as interlocutors, as answerable partners and hermetically seals us in our brains? For example, in education today the expert advice is no longer, talk with your teenagers but, rather, talk with your kids about their brains, as is literally stated at one point (Jensen & Nutt, 2014). One can imagine that it doesn’t take long before one also talks to youngsters about their brains’ shortcomings. This is where the only options open to teens is to listen, or at best ask questions for clarification. One could readily dismiss this, of course, as simply media neuro-junk, but I do think that this is symptomatic of a problem in regular and serious neuroscience itself. Or phrased otherwise, the aberrations which reveal themselves when neuroscience comes into the open, that is, into the popular realm might, in actual fact, represent a magnification of neuroscience’s hidden flaws. Moreover, one should not underestimate the ways in which this generalised neuro-turn might thoroughly affect our life-world, if not utterly reshape it altogether. At the very least we should ask the question, what will become of subjectivity and society once we have raised whole generations under the rubric of “we are our brain”?

Hence, as aforesaid, the guiding question of this book concerns what we have actually transformed into. What are we exactly, when we are said to be our brain? If, as argued, the metamorphosis of the brain entails the transfiguration of an analogue, psychological subject into a digital, neuronal subject, then the popular image of the brain-in-a-vat might be expedient as a preliminary means through which to grasp what this transformation actually entails. This well-known thought experiment features a stand-alone brain severed from its body, artificially kept alive and connected to a computer which induces a virtual reality to the brain. The standard debate then concerns how we ourselves can know for sure that we have a real body and a real life to live, and thus are not, in actual fact, in this brain-in-a-vat position (see, e.g., Putnam, 1981). Does this specific example not constitute the quintessential depiction of the fact that fully becoming our brain entails a particular kind of locked-in syndrome? However, as is always the case with thought-experiments, the most interesting aspect here is the non-thought (or should we say the un-thought), that is, the unspoken assumptions that can be said to structure the construction.² For instance, would the principal issue with this set-up not concern the choice of scenarios or scripts that were used by the computer in order to simulate the so-called real world? Would the traditional, pre-neurological human sciences, and particularly the psy-sciences, not play a major part in constructing a more or less plausible experience situated in time and space? In other words, I claim, the ways in which this staged brain-person relates to its virtual self, virtual others and the virtual world would ultimately be given form by algorithms based on pre-existing theories of (social) psychology.

To elaborate on this point a bit further, so as to demonstrate its importance, let us consider a similar thought experiment, one that is said to be more realistic by people like Ray Kurzweil, who argues that it will soon be possible to upload the brain to a supercomputer (Kurzweil, 2000, 2005). At the very least, one can discern a recurring tendency within neuroscience to not only adhere to a classical mind-body dualism, but also to conceptualise the physical brain as something that exceeds the body and thus something that can be immaterialised and hosted in a virtual reality: it can be regarded as software, as programmatic codes which can potentially surpass and survive their bodily container. Again, the non- and un-thought of this thought experiment are manifold: is it not evident, for instance, that if one were in fact able to successfully upload a person or a subject, then surely t...