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Re: [xmca] Plasticity and Physiotherapy

Thanks Elizabeth (PDF attached).
That gives us the Kuhnian story (with an ethical twist) of why neuroscience required a fixed machine for its discipline and how the paradigm shift occurred, but what is missing is how it was that outside of the discipline others knew that the brain changed. This is what intrigues me. How a discipline can maintain a fiction about its own object of study whilst outside the discipline people know it is a fiction. I am presuming it has a lot to do with the sociology of science and the status of the various sciences. But I will see if I can find something. 

Andy

Elizabeth Fein wrote:
Tobias Rees has a wonderful article in American Ethnologist ("Being Neurologically Human Today: Life and Science and Adult Cerebral Plasticity - An Ethical Analysis" Volume 37, Issue 1, pages 150–166) that talks about the "regime of fixity" in neuroscience, and the way this story of the brain has been maintained over the years and is now being challenged. 
Elizabeth Fein, Ph.D.
University of Chicago
Department of Comparative Human Development
Postdoctoral Fellow, SociAbility (847)559-3240 
efein@sociabilitychicago.org


---- Original message ----

Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:44:10 +1000
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu (on behalf of Andy Blunden 
<ablunden@mira.net>)
Subject: [xmca] Plasticity and Physiotherapy To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
On the theme of empirical evidence and the latest discoveries
of
neuroscience, this is one which has intrigued me, especially
since it
became personal. So far as I know, physiotherpists have known
for at
least two generations that brain damage can be repaired by
physical
exercise. But this scientific, empirical knowledge,
coexisted, at least
in some countries, with a dogma taught in school biology
classes, that
"no new brain cells are created after age X," making a total
mystery
(SFAICS) of all manner of learning processes which everyone
knows about >from daily experience. Then we hear from the tribunes of advanced
neuroscience, armed with all sorts of advanced brain imaging
equipment,
about "brain plasiticity" and what lowly physiotherpists know
about with
their own hands and patients knew about with their own
experience of
rehabilitation, became a new scientific discovery solely
because
(SAFAICS) it was expressed in the language of "the latest
discoveries of
neuroscience." On the plus side Norman Doigue's campaign has
had a
psychological impact on people undergoing rehabilitation, by
giving the
stamp of neuroscientific approval to the physiotherapists'
work and 
giving renewed hope.
Is there anyone who knows about the history of science in
this area that 
can explain how this fiction was maintained?

Andy
--
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*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts

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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts

Attachment: plasticity-ethics.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

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