Exploring Poetry with Cognitive Neuroscience: T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Research that involves both neuroscience and art often attempts to explain the aesthetic experience of ‘beauty’ in visual art, and to define the function of art in neural terms; less has been written concerning the neural correlates of poetry reading. It is suggested that there are existing areas of study in neuroscience that may help elucidate how we enjoy literature beyond pure neuroaesthetics, such as research in creative problem-solving, knowledge-based pleasure, and music. This essay endeavours to bring together insights from both neuroscience and literature to shed light on how and why we take pleasure in interpreting T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It is proposed that the pleasures of reading ‘Prufrock’ are ultimately associated with the ways in which the reader's expectations are confirmed or challenged. While the conclusions of this paper are intentionally constrained to a single poem, they are potentially generalisable.     

Classic Studies on the Potential of Stem Cell Neuroregeneration

The 1990s and 2000s were the beginning of an exciting time period for developmental neuroscience and neural stem cell research. By better understanding brain plasticity and the birth of new neurons in the adult brain, contrary to established dogma, hope for therapy from devastating neurological diseases was generated. The potential for stem cells to provide functional recovery in humans remains to be further tested and to further move into the clinical trial realm. The future certainly has great promise on stem cells to assist in alleviation of difficult-to-treat neurologic disorders. This article reviews classic studies of the 1990s and 2000s that paved the way for the advances of today, which can in turn lead to tomorrow’s therapies.     

The Construction of Gender in Modern Chinese Law: Discrepant Gender Meanings in the Republican Civil Code

This article examines the intersection of law, gender, and modernity during the transitional Republican era (1912–49). It approaches the topic through a critical reading of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–30, and related commentary on the code by Chinese legal experts. By analyzing the gender assumptions embodied in several newly emergent categories of legal regulation, including legal personhood, minimum marriage age, consent, domicile, surnames, marital property, and child custody, the article’s line of questioning reveals how gender meanings helped to shape modern concepts like universality, equality, and freedom. The findings illustrate the ways in which Republican civil law broke with late imperial legal and gender norms tied to Confucian patrilineal ideology and in addition established new legal and gender meanings that helped to consolidate Chinese politics on a republican basis and to reconfigure modern gender difference on a conjugal basis.     

Verbs,Voyeurism, and the Stalker Narrative in Cortázar's "Continuidad de los parques"

Julio Cortázar's "Continuidad de los parques" can be described as a stalker narrative in two different senses. Not only is it a story about a stalker with murderous intentions, it is also a story in which the reader is turned into a stalker.

Modalization in verbs, or the use of the subjunctive and qualifiers, has been discussed by critics such as Tzvetan Todorov as a characteristic of the fantastic in literature. What has not been studied is the alternating use of aspect in the past, here between the verb tenses the preterite and the imperfect, as a technique that aids in the subtle creation of the reader as a stalker. Cortázar uses these two verb tenses to form and shape the narrative, moving it in the desired direction and, in the process, aiding in his creation of the image of the stalker. Both the careful manipulation of the preterite and the imperfect and the careful interplay between the two are the vehicle of invasion, an invasion perpetrated by the stalker, in which the reader is made complicit.     

Cajal's Brief Experimentation with Hypnotic Suggestion

Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the most notable figures in Neuroscience, and winner, along with Camillo Golgi, of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries on the structure of the nervous system, did not escape experimenting with some of the psychiatric techniques available at the time, mainly hypnotic suggestion, albeit briefly. While a physician in his thirties, Cajal published a short article under the title, “Pains of labour considerably attenuated by hypnotic suggestion” in Gaceta Médica Catalana. That study may be Cajal's only documented case in the field of experimental psychology. We here provide an English translation of the original Spanish text, placing it historically within Cajal's involvement with some of the key scientific and philosophical issues at the time.     

The Myth of Reserpine-Induced Depression: Role in the Historical Development of the Monoamine Hypothesis

For five decades it has been generally accepted that reserpine, an antihypertensive and antipsychotic drug, causes depression. The discovery that reserpine depletes brain monoamines was an important factor in the development of the monoamine hypothesis of depression, and it continues to be widely cited in support of this hypothesis. The present paper argues that, contrary to prevailing belief, reserpine is not depressogenic. The reason for perpetuation of this myth is reluctance to discard the monoamine hypothesis. This hypothesis ushered the modern biochemical paradigm into psychiatry and is still of great importance. It serves as a heuristic to guide research, it enhances psychiatry’s prestige, and it helps to validate and promote drug therapy for depression and other mental disorders.     

Revisiting transnational actors from a spatial perspective

Actor-centred approaches feature prominently in transnational history. Studying transnational actors has helped to better grasp the extent, dynamics and mechanisms of particular cross-border connections, and has highlighted the entanglement and mutual constitution of cultures and societies in a more general sense. While empirical research continues to reveal more forms of their interaction, the general notion of ‘transnational actors’ has been gradually flattened out: the transnational sphere is now often studied in isolation and conceived of as a rather homogeneous space, while transnational actors are largely viewed solely in their border-crossing capacities and activities. The authors argue that while such a focus successfully captures their mobility, it overlooks another important dimension, namely their embeddedness in local, national, imperial or regional contexts. To reconnect these aspects, the authors situate transnational actors in their diverse socio-spatial relations. Investigating them in this way brings out their important role not only as connectors, but also as producers of various kinds of spaces. The contributions to this dossier highlight that transnational fields of activity are heterogeneous and deeply entangled with other spaces of action and belonging.     

THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM REDDY,BARBARA ROSENWEIN,AND PETER STEARNS

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual‐biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of “emotive,”“emotional regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein's “emotional community” and on Stearns's “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women's history” in the 1970s.     

On the life and work of Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918)

This study describes the life and work of early-twentieth-century German scientist Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918). His medical training at universities in Munich, Würzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg and his further education are illustrated. His early Leipzig career and cooperation with brain researchers Oskar and Cécile Vogt in Berlin are portrayed, as are his contributions to a localization theory of the cerebral cortex—namely, Brodmann’s cytoarchitectonic approach—and the invention of a cortex area nomenclature, further developed until the beginning of World War I. His Tübingen professorship and being nominated to manage a major department of Emil Kraepelin’s Munich research unit represent further aspects of this study, a promising career ahead, harshly interrupted by an early and unexpected death.     

“You've Got to Work on This Axon”: J. Z. Young and Squid Giant Axon Preparations in 20th-Century Neurobiology**

Employing and extending Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's analytical concept of epistemic things, this essay proposes one reason why squid giant axons, unusually large invertebrate nerve fibers, had such great impacts on twentieth-century neurobiology. The 1930s characterizations of these axons by John Zachary Young reshaped prevailing assumptions about nerve cells as epistemic things, I argue. Specifically, Young's preparations of these axons, which consisted of fibers attached to laboratory technologies, highlighted similarities between giant axons and more familiar ones via lines of comparative study common to aquatic biology. Young's work convinced other biologists that the squid giant fibers were, in fact, axons, despite their unusual fused (syncytial) structures, thereby promoting further studies, such as intracellular measurements, made possible by the fiber's size. Tracing direct relations between preparations of squid axons and broader interpretations of neurons as epistemic things, this paper renders an actors’ category, “preparations,” into an analytical one. In turn, it offers glimpses into how aquatic organisms shaped twentieth-century neurobiology and how local experiments can drive broader, disciplinary changes.