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Culture, the Crack’d Mirror, and the Neuroethics of Disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2016

GRANT GILLETT
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Abstract:

Human beings are sensorimotor coupled to the actual world and also attuned to the symbolic world of culture and the techniques of adaptation that culture provides. The self-image and self-shaping mediated by that mirror directly affects the neurocognitive structures that integrate human neural activity and reshape its processing capacities through top-down or autopoietic effects. Thus a crack’d mirror, which disrupts the processes of enactive self-configuration, can be disabling for an individual. That is exactly what happens in postcolonial or immigration contexts in which individuals’ cultural adaptations are marginalized and disconnected in diverse and often painful and disorienting ways. The crack’d mirror is therefore a powerful trope for neuroethics and helps us understand the social and moral pathologies of many indigenous and immigrant communities.

Keywords

neurocognitive structuresneural activityneuroethicsautopoiesis
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 25 , Special Issue 4: Clinical Neuroethics , October 2016 , pp. 634 - 646
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

Notes

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