Abstract
With the rapid rise in neuroscience research in the last two decades, neuroscientific claims have travelled far beyond the laboratory and increasingly, ‘facts’ about the brain have entered the popular imagination. As cognitive neuroscience steps up its focus on neurological distinctions between different ‘kinds of people’, researchers in the social sciences and humanities have begun to investigate the role of neurological vocabulary in the constitution of identities. In this article, we explore the terrain of ‘neurological identities’ through a comparative analysis of identity issues among individuals diagnosed with autism, and among adolescents – two categories of people who constitute important objects of study in current work in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry. In particular, we explore the social conditions that render neuroscience a language palatable to autistic self-advocates and controversial to adolescents. Through these case studies, we demonstrate the heterogeneity of the role of the brain in projects of identity formation, and the many possible meanings conferred by the notion of ‘being wired up differently’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The use of the term ‘anthropological figure’ when related to the ‘cerebral subject’ does not intend to rehabilitate some form of anthropological philosophy and draw on a notion of essence, or universal and ahistorical human nature. Rather, it designates the processes of individuation and subjectivation in certain socio-historical contexts, and does not exclude the cohabitation of different anthropological figures: cerebral selves, psychological selves, chemical selves and others. In this sense, the cerebral subject as an anthropological figure of our contemporary biomedicalized societies constitutes a radicalization of modern western forms of constitution of naturalized and singularized individuals, as have been analysed among others by Louis Dumont (1986), Foucault (1978, 1985, 1986), Charles Taylor (1989), Norbert Elias (1978, 1982), Alan McFarlane (1992).
The metaphor of ‘being wired up differently’ has been extensively used by science journalists, health services and is commonly heard among people to whom such versions of neuroscientific theories pertain. The term has travelled widely from research publications about ‘atypical connectivity’ in autistic brains and adolescent brains (two, among many, exemplary groups) and can be found in print newspapers and magazines, media websites, and increasingly in the blogosphere.
To what extent the proliferation of new research programmes about brain bases of kinds of people is a result of, or a response to, the increasing presence of neuroscientific claims in popular culture remains to be explored.
Findings from brain imaging studies about both teenagers and autistic individuals have frequently led to media reports about both groups having ‘different brains’. Neuroscientist Laurence Steinberg in an interview about thrill-seeking adolescents in the New York Times in December 2009 for example discusses the legal implications of teenagers being ‘different’ from adults in terms of the brain (www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01conv.html?_r=3&em;). Similarly the BBC reported on neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's research, discussing how adolescents use their brains differently from adults in thinking about intentions (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5327550.stm). Autistic people, too, are reported to have ‘different brains’, for example, in a BBC article that conveyed findings of ‘flawed’ connectivity in the certain regions (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6037836.stm) and in a health information website interview with autism researcher Nancy Minshew, which discusses the ‘atypical’ and ‘unique’ organization of cells in autistic brains (http://autism.about.com/od/causesofautism/a/AutismBrain.htm).
This story was widely reported, for example, in a BBC Science story entitled ‘ “People-person” brain area found’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8055296.stm).
Research from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience has come together in the last two decades to form social neuroscience, which typically uses fMRI to demonstrate areas of the brain that function together to enable humans to predict other people's actions on the basis of their beliefs and desires (‘theory of mind’), and understand other people's goals, intentions and emotions (Frith and Frith, 2010).
Several popular science books and parenting manuals have been published recently providing biological explanations of parents’ observations about their children, and neuroscientifically evidenced ways to effectively teach the developing teenage brain, such as Barbara Strauch's manual Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids (2003), Usha Goswami's book Cognitive Development and the Learning Brain (2008), and Evelyn Crone's Dutch bestseller Het puberende brein (The Pubertal Brain) (2008). We have been tracing public portrayals and debates around these themes in the United Kingdom, United States and Brazil, which range from popular books to television documentaries and short films to chat show discussions and museum exhibitions.
Research on the adolescent brain, and the developing adolescent brain itself, are often referred to as a ‘work in progress’. See for example the Frontline (PBS) article on the adolescent brain (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/onereason.html), Sheryl Feinstein's parenting manual, Parenting the Teen Brain: Understanding a Work in Progress (2009), and a recent Royal Society science exhibition (www.summerscience.org.uk/09/exhibit/the-teenage-brain-a-work-in-progress). The slogan of ‘work in progress’ refers at once to the ongoing maturation of the brain as well as the promise of new answers in ongoing investigations.
The literature about patient groups and health movements is enormous and increasing. For a recent overview see Epstein (2008).
Paul Rabinow coined the term ‘biosociality’ to analyse the socio-cultural and political implications of genetics and particularly of the Human Genome Project (Rabinow, 1996). The term has been widely used in recent years to describe different forms of identity constitution and social practices that have genetics as a reference (Gibbon and Novas, 2008). We use the term to stress different process of biological and somatic subjectivation and forms of sociality that are present in our contemporary biomedical societies, including neurological identities and socialities.
In his recent work on human kinds and autism, and autism activism and autobiography (2006, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b), Hacking refers to autism as a ‘kind of people’, which has historically been medicalized, normalized and administered in an anti-essentialist way, and as a way to experience oneself and interact with others. The label of autism or Asperger Syndrome affects the persons so labelled and their families and caretakers, and can potentially modify their behaviour. The label has undergone transformations because of changing biomedical theories. The looping effect includes not only scientific and diagnostic methods, but also advocacy groups and generic notions of autism in movies, TV programmes, novels and blogs. Thus Hacking insists that recent autism activism and the publication of personal testimonies in the internet and of autistic autobiographies can produce the looping effect of deconstructing the trope of the alien common in popular culture to refer to the reciprocal relation between autistic people and the neurotypical universe. Autobiographies, blogs and other resources help both autistic people to infer from neurotypical behaviour and ‘neurotypical’ people to infer from autistic behaviour.
Data pertaining to autistic people were gathered from published qualitative research dealing with autism in cyberspace, writings by autistic people, as well as personal blogs of people diagnosed and several discussion lists on the internet drawing directly on the topics of autistic identity and neurodiversity, mainly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
There is, however, not a straightforward story about cerebralization of autism among self-advocates. On the one hand, parent and professional associations such as Cure Autism Now involved in funding biomedical research into causes, prevention and treatment for autism also draw on neurological and genetic explanations and reject psychodynamic explanations of the condition (Nadesan, 2005; Silverman, 2008a, 2008b). On the other hand not all autistic adults favour neurodiversity and its anti-cure rhetoric (Ortega, 2009).
‘Snippet’ from Jane Meyerding's website, http://mjane.zolaweb.com/snipframe.html.
Thus autistic identity politics constitute the opposite trend to Hacking's reflections on autism. While the former draws on neurology to justify and naturalize differences among autistics and between autistics and neurotypicals, Hacking's ‘narrative’ approach draws on self-testimonies and autobiographies to establish a bridge between autistic and neurotypical population (and to dismantle the ‘alien’ trope used by both autistics and neurotypicals to refer to each other) and stress the radical heterogeneity within the autistic population.
Data pertaining to adolescents were gathered from a mixed-method study involving questionnaires and a focus group discussion from participants at a secondary grammar school for girls in London, UK. The questionnaire, consisting of 18 items, comprised of both multiple-choice and open-ended questions, and was administered to 85 female pupils aged between 13 and 14 . Eight pupils aged 14 took part in the focus group. To stimulate discussion about the portrait of adolescence in society, and the neuroscience of adolescence, we showed three short video clips, which in three different ways portrayed adolescent behaviour deemed to be ‘typical’ (Choudhury et al, under review).
References
American Psychiatric Association (APA). (2000) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A.M. and Frith, U. (1985) Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’? Cognition 21 (1): 37–46.
Beddington, J. et al (2008) The mental wealth of nations. Nature 455 (7216): 1057–1060.
Blume, H. (1997) ‘Autism & The Internet’ or ‘It's the Wiring, Stupid’, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/blume.html, accessed January 2010.
Brownlow, C. and O'Dell, L. (2006) Constructing an autistic identity: AS voices online. Mental Retardation: A Journal of Practices, Policy and Perspectives 44 (5): 315–321.
Burnett, S., Bird, G., Moll, J., Frith, C. and Blakemore, S. (2008) Development during adolescence of the neural processing of social emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21 (9): 1–15.
Casey, B. et al (1997) A developmental functional MRI study of prefrontal activation during performance of a Go-No-Go task. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9 (6): 835.
Charman, T. (2006) Autism at the crossroads: Determining the phenotype matters for neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience 9 (10): 1197.
Choudhury, S., Merten, M. and McKinney, K.A. (under review) Rebelling against the brain: Public engagement with the neurological adolescent. Social Science and Medicine.
Clarke, J. and van Amerom, G. (2007) ‘Surplus suffering’: Differences between organizational understandings of Asperger's syndrome and those people who claim the ‘disorder’. Disability & Society 22 (7): 761–776.
Crone, E.A.M. (2008) Het puberende brein: Over de ontwikkeling van de hersenen in de unieke periode van de adolescentie. Amsterdam: Bakker.
Dahl, R.E. (2004) Adolescent brain development: A period of vulnerabilities and opportunities. Keynote address. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1021, (Adolescent Brain Development: Vulnerabilities and Opportunities), doi: 10.1196/annals.1308.001.
Davis, L.J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London/New York: Verso.
Davis, L.J. (2002) Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions. New York: NYU Press.
Dumit, J. (2003) Is it me or my brain? Depression and neuroscientific facts. Journal of Medical Humanities 24: 35–48.
Dumit, J. (2004) Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
Dumit, J. (2006) Illnesses you have to fight to get: Facts as forces in uncertain, emergent illnesses. Social Science & Medicine 62 (3): 577–590.
Dumont, L. (1986) Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Ehrenberg, A. (2004) Le Sujet cerebral. Esprit 309: 130–155.
Elias, N. (1978) The history of manners. In: E. Dunning, J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell (eds.) The Civilizing Process, Vol. I. Oxford: Blackwell.
Elias, N. (1982) State formation and civilization. In: E. Dunning, J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell (eds.) The Civilizing Process, Vol. II. Oxford: Blackwell.
Epstein, R. (2007) The Case against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books.
Epstein, S. (2008) Patient groups and health movements. In: E.J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch and J. Wajcman (eds.) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 499–539.
Eshel, N., Nelson, E.E., Blair, R.J., Pine, D.S. and Ernst, M. (2007) Neural substrates of choice selection in adults and adolescents: Development of the ventrolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. Neuropsychologia 45 (6): 1270–1279.
Feinstein, S. (2009) Inside the Teenage Brain: Parenting a Work in Progress. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.
Fombonne, E. (2003) Modern views of autism. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Revue Canadienne De Psychiatrie 48 (8): 503–505.
Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1985) The Use of Pleasure. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1986) The Care of the Self. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Freeman, B.J. and Cronin, P. (2002) Diagnosing autism spectrum disorder in young children: An update. Infants and Young Children 14 (3): 1–10.
Frith, U. (1989) Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Oxford: Blackwell.
Frith, U. and Frith, C. (2010) The social brain: Allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 1537 (365): 165–176.
Frith, U. and Happé, F. (1994) Autism: Beyond ‘theory of mind’. Cognition 50 (1–3): 115–132.
Gibbon, S. and Novas, C. (eds.) (2008) Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge.
Gogtay, N. et al (2004) Dynamic mapping of human cortical development during childhood through early adulthood. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101 (21): 8174–8179.
Goswami, U. (2008) Cognitive Development and the Learning Brain. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Hacking, I. (ed.) (2002) Making up people. In: Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, pp. 99–114.
Hacking, I. (2006) What is Tom saying to Maureen? London Review of Books 28 (9), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n09/hack01_.html, accessed May 2007.
Hacking, I. (2007) Kinds of people: Moving targets. Proceedings of the British Academy 151: 285–318.
Hacking, I. (2009a) Autistic autobiography. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364: 1467–1473.
Hacking, I. (2009b) Humans, aliens & autism. Daedalus 138 (3): 44–59.
Hacking, I. (2010a) Autism fiction: A mirror of an internet decade? University of Toronto Quarterly 79 (2): 632–655.
Hacking, I. (2010b) How we have been learning to talk about autism. In: E.F. Kittay and L. Carson (eds.) Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy. Chichester, West Sussex: Willey-Blackwell, pp. 261–278.
Hall, G.S. (1904) Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
Hare, T.A., Tottenham, N., Galvan, A., Voss, H.U., Glover, G.H. and Casey, B.J. (2008) Biological substrates of emotional reactivity and regulation in adolescence during an emotional go-nogo task. Biological Psychiatry 63 (10): 927–934.
Hirsch, M. (1993) Resisting images: Rereading adolescence. In: M. de Ras and M. Lunenberg (eds.) Girls, Girlhood and Girls’ Studies in Transition. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, rpt. In: J.K. Gardiner (ed.) Provoking Agents: Theorizing Gender and Agency, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press (1994).
Hyman, S.E. (2007) Can neuroscience be integrated into the DSM-V? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8 (9): 725–732.
Illes, J. (ed.) (2005) Neuroethics: Defining the Issues in Theory, Practice, and Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Illes, J. et al (2010) Neurotalk: Improving the communication of neuroscience research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience (11): 61–69.
Kirmayer, L. (1988) Mind and body as metaphors: Hidden values in biomedicine. In: M. Lock and D. Gordon (eds.) Biomedicine Examined. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 57–93.
Lebreton, M. et al (2009) The brain structural disposition to social interaction. European Journal of Neuroscience 29 (11): 2247–2252.
Lesko, N. (2002) Making adolescence at the turn of the century. Discourse and the exclusion of girls. Current Issues in Comparative Education 2 (2): 182–191.
Loveland, K.A., Bachevalier, J., Pearson, D.A. and Lane, D.M. (2008) Fronto-limbic functioning in children and adolescents with and without autism. Neuropsychologia 46 (1): 49–62.
Luhrmann, T. (2000) Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry. New York: Knopf.
Luna, B. and Sweeney, J.A. (2004) The emergence of collaborative brain function: FMRI studies of the development of response inhibition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1021: 296–309.
Mackinlay, R., Charman, T. and Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2003) Remembering to remember: A developmental study of prospective memory in a multitasking paradigm. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Biennial Meeting, 24–27April, Poster, Tampa, Florida.
Martin, E. (2000) Mind–body problems. American Ethnologist 27: 569–590.
Martin, E. (2007) Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
Martin, E. (2010) Self-making and the brain. Subjectivity 3 (4): 366–381.
McCabe, D.P. and Castel, A.D. (2008) Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition 107 (1): 343–352.
McFarlane, A. (1992) On individualism. Proceedings of the British Academy 82: 171–199.
Mitchell, S.R. et al (2009) Neuroanatomic alterations and social and communication deficits in monozygotic twins discordant for autism disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 166 (8): 917–925.
Morein-Zamir, S. and Sahakian, B.J. (2010) Neuroethics and public engagement training needed for neuroscientists. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (2): 49–51.
Moreira, T. and Palladino, P. (2005) Between truth and hope: On Parkinson's disease, neurotransplantation and the production of the ‘self’. History of the Human Sciences 18 (3): 55–82.
Moss, P. and Teghtsoonian, K. (eds.) (2008) Contesting Illness: Processes and Practices. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.
Nadesan, M. (2005) Constructing Autism: Unravelling the ‘Truth’ and Understanding the Social. London/New York: Routledge.
Ortega, F. (2009) The cerebral subject and the challenge of neurodiversity. BioSocieties 4 (04): 425–445.
Ortega, F. and Vidal, F. (2007) Mapping the cerebral subject in contemporary culture. RECIIS – Electronic Journal of Communication Information & Innovation in Health 2 (1): 255–259.
Ortega, F. and Vidal, F. (eds.) (2011) Neurocultures. Glimpses into and Expanding Universe. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Peter Lang.
Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B.F. and Rogers, S.J. (1991) Executive function deficits in high-functioning autistic individuals: Relationship to theory of mind. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 32 (7): 1081–1105.
Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1996) Artificiality and enlightenment: From sociobiology to biosociality. In: Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 91–111.
Racine, E., Bar-Ilan, O. and Illes, J. (2005) FMRI in the public eye. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2): 159–164.
Rees, D. and Rose, S. (eds.) (2004) The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Rose, N. (2007) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Rosenberg, C.E. (2002) The tyranny of diagnosis: Specific entities and individual experience. The Milbank Quarterly 80 (2): 237–260.
Rosenberg, C.E. (2006) Contested boundaries: Psychiatry, disease, and diagnosis. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49 (3): 407–424.
Scott, W.R., Ruef, M., Mendel, P.J. and Caronna, C.A. (2000) Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations: From Professional Dominance to Managed Care. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Shapiro, J. (2006) Autism movement seeks acceptance, not cures, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5488463, accessed January 2010.
Silverman, C. (2008a) Brains, pedigrees and promises: Lessons from the politics of autism genetics. In: S. Gibbon and C. Novas (eds.) Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities. London: Routledge, pp. 38–55.
Silverman, C. (2008b) Fieldwork on another planet: Social science perspectives on the autism spectrum. BioSocieties 3 (03): 325–341.
Singer, J. (1999) Why can’t you be normal for once in your life? From a ‘problem with no name’ to the emergence of a new category of difference. In: M. Corker and S. French (eds.) Disability Discourse. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, pp. 59–67.
Singer, J. (2007) Light and dark: Correcting the balance, http://www.neurodiversity.com.au/, accessed January 2010.
Sowell, E.R., Thompson, P.M., Holmes, C.J., Batth, R., Jernigan, T.L. and Toga, A.W. (1999) Localizing age-related changes in brain structure between childhood and adolescence using statistical parametric mapping. NeuroImage 9 (6 Pt 1): 587–597.
Strauch, B. (2003) The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids. New York: Doubleday.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vidal, F. (2009) Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity. History of the Human Sciences 22 (1): 5–36.
Volkmar, F.R., Lord, C., Bailey, A., Schultz, R.T. and Klin, A. (2004) Autism and pervasive developmental disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45 (1): 135–170.
Vrecko, S. (2006) Folk neurology and the remaking of identity. Molecular Interventions 6 (6): 300–303.
Weisberg, D.S., Keil, F.C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E. and Gray, J.R. (2008) The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20 (3): 470–477.
Wickelgren, I. (2005) NEUROLOGY: Autistic brains out of synch? Science 308 (5730): 1856–1858.
Williams, J.H.G., Whiten, A., Suddendorf, T. and Perrett, D.I. (2001) Imitation, mirror neurons and autism. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 25 (4): 287–295.
Wing, L. (1997) The history of ideas on autism: Legends, myths and reality. Autism 1 (1): 13–23.
Wing, L. and Gould, J. (1979) Severe impairments of social interaction and associated abnormalities in children: Epidemiology and classification. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 9 (1): 11–29.
World Health Organization (WHO). (1992) International Classification of Diseases and Related Disorders (ICD-10). Geneva: World Health Organization.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ortega, F., Choudhury, S. ‘Wired up differently’: Autism, adolescence and the politics of neurological identities. Subjectivity 4, 323–345 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.9