Abstract
Although quantification has marked psychiatric practice since the rise of experimental psychology, the past two decades have seen an intensified use of data, implemented in tandem with a general move toward big data and “scored societies” across the biosciences. Today, a new, hyper-quantified psychiatry is aiming to map the neurological substrates of affective disorder through extracting neural data from brain implants. The classic story that is often rendered by many critical scholarly accounts about this new form of hyper-quantified psychiatry is that in their drive to render psychiatry profitable to new forms of data capitalism, such technologies evaporate language and the subjective into a cascade of numbers. This paper examines a case study of a subject enrolled in an experimentation in psychiatry for the first brain implant system coupled to an artificial intelligence in order to trouble such easy narratives about quantification. How would our account of quantification change if we saw language not as an extraneous surplus to the experimental production of numbers, but at the heart of how these new technologies of quantification are being developed?
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.