As a career sociologist I ? rst became interested in neurosociology around 1987 when a graduate student lent me Michael Gazzaniga s The Social Brain. Ifthe biological human brain was really social, I thought sociologists and their students should be the ? rst, not the last, to know. As I read on I found little of the clumsy reductionism of the earlier biosociologists whom I had learned to see as the arch- emy of our ? eld. Clearly, reductionism does exist among many neuroscientists. But I also found some things that were very social and quite relevant for sociology. After reading Descarte s Error by Antonio Damasio, I learned how some types of emotion were necessary for rational thought a very radical innovation for the long-honored objective rationalist. I started inserting some things about split-brain research into my classes, mispronouncing terms like amygdala and being corrected by my s- dents. That instruction helped me realize how much we professors needed to catch up with our students. I also wrote a review of Leslie Brothers Fridays Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind. I thought if she could write so well about social processes maybe I could attempt to do something similar in connection with my ? eld. For several years I found her an e-mail partner with a wonderful sense of humor. She even retrieved copies of her book for the use of my graduate students when I had assigned it for a seminar.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
The Evolution of the Human Brain. - What Is Social About the Human Brain? . - The New Unconscious: Agency and Awareness. - Mirror Neurons: A Return to Pragmatism and Implications for an Embodied Intersubjectivity. - The Neuroscience of Emotion and Its Relation to Cognition. - The Self in Neuroscience and Social Psychology. - Consciousness, Quale, and Subjective Experience. - The Place of Imitation in Social Life and Its Anatomical Brain Supports. - Determinism and Free Will. - Conclusion.
