Neuroscience in Psychology Textbooks 37(or others’) particular social conditions, just use your brain to enjoy your
poverty! Don’t raise your voice; use your voice to sing a song to take care
of your brain! This neuropsy discourse thus turns out to be conservative
and pushes you to accept social and economic inequalities:
The action of epinephrine and norepinephrine is a good illustration of
the long-lasting effects of hormones. If you’ve noticed that it takes a
while for you to calm down after a particularly upsetting or stressful
experience, it’s because of the lingering effects of epinephrine and
norepinephrine in your body. (Hockenbury et al., 2015, p. 59)The message is: it’s neurobiology, stupid! Don’t bother with or to try
to deal with what might affect your life in a political, social, economic
way: stay calm (the meme of our times?) and just sit out the lingering
effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine.
But here it is important to think the positionings through: at first sight
it appears as if the neuro-discourse deprives you of your potentially being
upset or of your stress, it deprives you of your “perceptions, feelings,
memories, and thoughts” as these are “given” to us, as we read with
Griggs, by the nervous system. 6 But can we not argue that this precisely
shows that the true human feature is not about having perceptions, feelings,
memories, and thoughts, but about taking one step back, to contemplate (to
think, theorize, marvel about) perceptions, feelings, memories, and
thoughts? Put simply: while the homo neuro-psychologicus depicted by the
neurosciences is the one who from time to time feels bad, the real or the
concrete human being is the one who thinks; gosh I feel so bad, the one
who sings about it or writes about, the one who urgently has to tell
someone about it (or not), the one who takes recourse to the
neuropsysciences to make sense of it. The problem, however, is that these
neuropsysciences, for structural reasons, can only deal with the homo
neuro-psychologicus, they are unable to account for the fact that the
human, as an encultured being of language, inevitably redoubles and for
(^6) “It is this chemical communication that allows the neurons to transmit and integrate information
within the nervous system, giving us our perceptions, feelings, memories, and thoughts, as
well as our ability to move” (Griggs, 2010, p. 50).