title: "How do you know unless you look?": brain imaging, biopower and practical neuroscience.
abstract: Brain imaging is a persuasive visual rhetoric by which neuroscience is articulated as relevant to the construction and maintenance of desirable selves. In this essay, I describe how "brain-based self-help" literature disseminates neuroscientific vocabularies to public audiences. In this genre, brain images are an authoritative visual resource for translating neuroscience into a comprehensive program for living. I use Foucault's discussion of biopower to describe the ways in which brain-based self-help literature enables self-constitution in a biosocial age where health is a central means of communicating personal worth, social value and political order. The implications of this continuous self-fashioning are not limited to the personal realm but have important political consequences.
authors.affiliation: Southwestern University, 1001 E. University, Georgetown, TX 78626, USA. djohnson@southwestern.edu
authors.forename: Davi
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D001931:Brain Mapping; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D008019:Life Style; D009488:Neurosciences; D011209:Power, Psychological; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014825:Vocabulary