Keeping media in mind

Abstract

Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise (1984), has a character called Doctor Winnie Richards who, being a cognitive neuroscientist, is likened to ‘some phenomenal subhuman like a yeti or sasquatch’. Her role is to discover the chemical components of a mysterious new designer-pill which the main character's wife is taking in a secret psychopharmacology trial. Winnie eventually discovers that the drug, known as Dylar, is designed to inhibit a neurotransmitter that generates fear of death; whereby DeLillo gives his readers a flavour of what neuroscientists get up to. A sign of the development and rapid expansion of a scientific discipline is its impact on popular culture. White Noise depicts neuroscience, albeit through a fantastically distorted lens, from the vantage point of the mid-1980s as a coming discipline, which of course it was. Just as the invention of the telescope and the discovery of mathematical physics had provided new ways of understanding the universe, so rapid advances in non-invasive brain imaging, together with ever-advancing molecular biology, developmental biology, Artificial Intelligence, pharmacology and genetics were revolutionizing the study of the brain and central nervous system. After a century in the doldrums, neuroscience was, in its own estimation, taking off; and the promise for medicine was as great as the promise for basic neurobiology, psychology and philosophy of mind. The drama of the discipline's bright future was summed up a trifle woodenly in the preface to Eric Kandel (of whom more later) and J. Schwarz's 1985 edition of Principles of Neural Science : ‘One of the last frontiers of science, perhaps its ultimate challenge, is to understand the biological basis of mentation.’ So fast-forward 20 years: and how is the discipline doing in the eyes of popular culture in the mid-first-decade of the 21st century? Take Tom Wolfe's best-selling 2004 offering, I Am …