Cart
Free US shipping over $10
Proud to be B-Corp

Neuromatic John Lardas Modern

Neuromatic By John Lardas Modern

Neuromatic by John Lardas Modern


$22.38
Condition - Very Good
Only 1 left

Summary

John Modern offers a powerful and original critique of neurology's pivotal role in religious history.

Faster Shipping

Get this product faster from our US warehouse

Neuromatic Summary

Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain by John Lardas Modern

In Neuromatic, religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling and critical examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth-century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth-century, to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concern that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.

Neuromatic Reviews

Neuromatic is a fascinating exploration of the intertwined histories of religion and the brain. More than anything, it raises the question of the nature of belief - whether we can know the unknowable through these shadows that we chase around the cave of the skull. * Psychology Today *
A powerful intervention into how notions of the secular are proliferated and internalized. . . . An innovative and imaginative work that shows the inner workings of our commonsense understandings of ourselves and our world. * Reading Religion *
This is a wild ride, engaging and rewarding. * Choice *
A full immersion in that complex world of neuroscience with its many-and at times bizarre-applications, and the occasionally surreal world of cognitive science of religion . . . converging in the supreme attempt to reduce religion to that same pattern. This is an insightful book . . . impiously critical. * Reviews in Science, Religion, and Theology *
[A] fascinating and wide-ranging survey. * International Society for Science and Religion *
Modern balances the academic and the bizarre with a colorful cast of characters from history, from religious scholars to scientists to psychics. There's something for anyone with a curious mind. * LNP *
This book is magisterial in scope-masterfully researched, carefully considered, subtly theorized, and energetically executed. Wrangling published, archival, and media sources into a deliberately nonlinear genealogy, Neuromatic will be essential for scholars of religion, history, philosophy, and science studies. * Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan University *
Neuromatic is equal parts brilliant critical analysis and affectionate polemic. I strongly recommend it to my colleagues in the cognitive sciences who should know about the metaphysical skeletons in our closets. I recommend it to everyone else because reading it is so much fun. * Anthony Chemero, University of Cincinnati *
Neuromatic, though masquerading as both a poke at the smugness of supposedly secular science and a plea against reductionism, is up to something more interesting: anamnesis. It wants us to stop forgetting everything that went into making the brain the font of all order-pills, electro-shock therapy, EEGs, TV screens, cognitive anthropology and other findings from the twilight zone of cybernetics. With flashes of insight going off in an antic zigzag logic, Neuromatic fires on as many synapses as the enchanted loom of the brain itself. Modern, a library cormorant of the first order, provides a history of oddballs and kooks, including some heroes of postwar science, and I ended up not being able to tell them apart. I found my brain happily scrambled after reading this book. Neuromatic gleefully demonstrates how the effort to create binaries of pure-dirty, science-kookiness, truth-fabrication, sobriety-credulity, secular-religious fails again and again. An ultimately sane plea to linger in the midworld. * John Durham Peters, Yale University *

About John Lardas Modern

John Lardas Modern is professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author of The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs and Secularism in Antebellum America, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Already Gone Introduction Saturation Approaching the Neuromatic (with a Short Engineering Aside) Blurred Lines Cybernetics and the Question of Religion Cybernetic Theses of Secularization Poetics Synaptic Gap: Measuring Religion I. Thinking about Cognitive Scientists Thinking about Religion False Positives The Cognitive Science of Religion The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device Distinguishing Marks on a Screen Breaking the Spell Northampton Jonathan Edwards, Hyperactive Agency Detector Detecting the Life of the Brain Agents like Us Cheap Tricks Synaptic Gap: The Information of History II. Neither Matter nor Spirit: Toward a Genealogy of Information Hard Problems Neuromatic Piety: An Overview Ether and the Permeation of the Interspaces Emanuel Swedenborg, Neuroscientist Ghosts of Swedenborg Mental Slavery and the Invention of Spirituality The Diakka and Their Earthly Victims The Mediomaniacal Origins of American Neurology Prehistories of Electroencephalography Brain Waves and Tremulating Information Biofeedback and the Experience of Correspondence The Ontology of Information Concluding Thoughts on Perceptronium Synaptic Gap: Too Much Too Soon III. Imagining the Neuromatic Crash and Burn Opening Scene from a Cybernetic Demimonde Elective Affinities The Mechanics of Mediumship Images of an Oracle Thought Dictated in the Absence of All Control Cut-Ups From Voodoo Death to Virology Engrams and Auditing Past Lives of the Neuromatic Brain Exteriorization Break Through in Grey Room Synaptic Gap: White Machinery IV. Histories of Electric Shock Therapy circa 1978 Of Systems, Sex, and Secular Conversion Moral Treatment and Heads That Differ in Shape Gendered Electricity in the Neuromatic Groove The Operationalization of Napa State Insane Asylum Patients' Rights The Shaving of Leonard Frank's Beard Electric Love Therapy The Business of Marriage The Union of All Contradictory Ideas I Watch TV, I Watch TV Live from Napa State Synaptic Gap: Belief Molecules Conclusion: The Elementary Forms of Neuromatic Life Totemic Systems Big Science Artificial Intelligence Index

Additional information

CIN022679962XVG
9780226799629
022679962X
Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain by John Lardas Modern
Used - Very Good
Paperback
The University of Chicago Press
2021-09-29
392
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Neuromatic