āWhat if you could boost productivity and focus just by understanding your own brain?ā The Neurable Enten headphone is a commercial device that promises āscientific insights into your brain that help optimize your productivity and block out distractions. (ā¦) to allow you to focus on what matters most and win back time in your day.ā How does this work? In their advertising videoĀ [see selow]Ā , the makers of the headphone state that āwhen you focus, you brain cells produce electrical signals.ā Their headphones measure these signals with Electroencephalography (EEG) and translate it into ādata that are practical and easy to understandā. Specifically, their application will tell you when and where you focus best. This allows you to ābuild better habits, to optimize your day and avoid burnoutā because you receive āreal-time advice based on your cognitive stateā, such as prompting you to takeĀ a break or go outside when your focus is low.
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The idea that we should use EEG-equipped headphones to gain scientific insight into our focus-levels that are informative for habit-building and optimizing our daily activities rests on the assumption that these headphones can reliably and objectively inform us about our level of focus. This raises the suspicion that EEG-equipped headphones might be more informative about our focus-levels than our own experiences ā one is scientific and objective, the other fallible and subjective. I call this suspicion the epistemic authority of neuroscientific instruments about self-knowledge, and we see this authority popping up in more situations (a mental illness is more real if we can visualize it on a brain-scan, meditation works because it changes pathways your pre-frontal cortex, EEG-waves can be used as objective evidence in court-cases, etc.). In this essay, I want to ask two related questions: where the epistemic authority of the neuroscientific instruments about self-knowledge comes from, and what the effects of this authority are in the ways in which we understand ourselves.
Foucault, Epistemic Defamiliarization, and Technologies of the Self
I will use the philosophy of Michel Foucault (1962-1984) to think through these questions. Foucault spent much of his (academic) life arguing that the scientific knowledge that was ātrueā in his time was in fact contingent on material and sociological historical processes. His main works Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and The History of Sexuality (1976) can be read as attempts to bring the historical contingency of contemporary systems of knowledge and thought into view (Foucault, 1961, 1973, 1986, 1989, 1990). According to Foucault, systems of knowledge (epistemes) are not rational systems that represent the most up-to-date version of the truth of matters, but are instead the result of historical material and sociological practices and processes.
"Foucault was not interested in walking the path to the truth, but in looking at the path itself and how it has led us to a certain contemporary idea of the truth."
Ā We can see Foucault as a philosopher that aimed to defamiliarize the taken-for-grantedness of our perception of established epistemic authorities, a questioner of automated perceptions of things that are so familiar that they seem natural and unquestionable (van Grunsven & Ijsselsteijn, 2022). Through these epistemic defamiliarizations, Foucault opened up spaces for marginalized voices and communities that were excluded and oppressed in hegemonic epistemes. The mad, the ill, the prisoners, the non-heterosexuals were excluded and oppressed in dominant epistemes of his time. By bringing the historical socio-material contingency of epistemes into view, Foucault also showed that these exclusions are not natural or objective but relative and subjective, and thereby opening Ā a broader plurality of epistemic authorities, voices, and ways of life. Ā
Towards the end of his life, Foucault moved away from thinking about how what we think and believe is determined by sociomaterial historical processes, and he moved instead to the role of freedom in human life. It was then that he introduced the concept of technologies of the self as āthe various operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being that people make either by themselves or with the help of others in order to transform themselves to reach a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortalityā (Foucault, 1997). Foucault refers here to all kinds of practices where we āengineerā ourselves to a more desirable state of being, like writing a diary, practicing meditation, reading self-help books, or, in our case, using EEG-headphones to acquire insight in focus-levels. Both the material and how a person relates to this material is important for Foucault. For instance, writing with a pen in a diary gives a different kind of insight into oneās own subjectivity (introspective, slow, contemplative) compared to writing a letter to a friend (intersubjective, slow, intimate), compared to writing a social media post (intersubjective, fast, public). All these technologies (both in the sense of artifacts and the sense of techniques) can be used to understand and transform our selves in new ways. The artifact itself, the practice around it, and the epistemes that they are used in all play a role in this interplay of self-understanding and self-shaping.
The Episteme of Personhood as Brainhood
Foucault thus urges us to look at the practical material and sociological processes that have led up to the episteme where neuroscientific instruments are the knowledge-authority of our self-knowledge. When we take his approach, we see for one that medical practices changed over the course of the 18th century from a praxis that was oriented towards miracles and wonder of the human soul towards a praxis that was oriented towards uniformity and control of the standardized biological human body (Foucault, 1973; Lock & Nguyen, 2018). This change was not merely ideological. The materiality of anatomic research practices and instruments also embodied and enforced the episteme of classification, objectification, quantification, and standardization of the standard human body in medicine. An extrapolation of this material trend was the invention of neuroscientific imaging instruments that made it possible to study the brain in living subjects, such as EEG, fMRI, ECoG, etc. These instruments neatly fit the idea of the human being as a standardized biological body ā visualizing metabolic processes in the brain made it possible to do experiments about subjectivity in an objective, scientific way. This has led to a wide range of theoretical and experimental paradigms about the brain and cognition in which the brain was theorized as the seat of cognition and the self. The picture of the human being that emerged from this episteme is the human as a disembodied, brained individual that is detached from embodied experience and the environment. In other words,
"personhood is in modernity often equated with brainhood" (Vidal, 2009)
This picture has spread par tout throughout Western collective consciousness: nowadays we have neurobiology, neuroeconomics, neuropsychology, neuroethics, neuromarketing, neurodiversity, neuropsychiatry, neuroyou-name-it.
What my minimalistic Foucauldian analysis of the epistemic authority of neuroscientific instruments shows is that the authority does not come from rationalistic, objective scientific processes. It is rather the outcome of a mishmash of material and sociological processes that have together formed a particular agreement on a contingent truth. It has not been evidently āprovenā that neuroscientific instruments have more epistemic authority over our inner worlds compared to subjective experience. On the contrary, often neuro-projects do not deliver on their promises of finding truths about the mind.Ā For instance, besides spending 20 billion euros of funding for understanding mental disorders from a neuroscientific perspective, former director of the National Institute for Mental Health Thomas Insel has admitted that it has not āmoved the needle in reducing suicides, reduced hospitalization, and improved recovery for millions of people with mental illnessā. (Henriques, 2017)
Neurotechnologies of the Self
What does the contingency of the epistemic authority of neuroscience as source for self-knowledge mean for the use of EEG headphones as a modern technology of the self? For one, if users do not see this contingency, they could be misled to assume that these headphones know them better than they know themselves through self-experience. This can lead to counterintuitive situations, where the headphone could be telling a user to go outside for a walk because they have lost their concentration whilst they feel like they are engaged in an experience of focus. If the epistemic authority of the headphone is unquestionably assumed, a user will follow the advice, ignore the epistemic authority of their own experience, and by doing so establish an epistemic hierarchy in their possible sources of self-knowledge. In this enactment, their possibilities for self-shaping are mediated by the headphones. The possibilities that they are left are infused with the picture of the human being as a controllable, calculatable, mechanistic machine that is governed by the brain and accessible through neuroscientific technologies. Taken to the extreme, the consequence might be somewhat tragic. By enacting the āself-as-brainā possibilities for self-shaping, users will in fact shape their selves in accordance with the self-as-brain picture of the human being and as such enter in a self-fulfilling prophecy where they confirm the idea of the self-as-brain through their actions and reaffirm the truth of the episteme. Some philosophers have recently observed that technology is becoming more human-like.
"From a Foucauldian perspective, we are led to the opposite conclusion: humans are becoming more machine-like."
However, there is some space for freedom in critical reflection if we combine Foucaultās idea of technologies of the self with the earlier analysis of the historical contingency of epistemic authority. That is, if we see the epistemic authority of neuroscientific instruments for what they are, a historically contingent epistemic authority, we become freer to choose how we want to relate to this authority and, importantly, other possible authorities. By critically reflecting on the assumptions and perhaps defamiliarizing us with the taken-for-grantedness of neuroscientific truths about the self we open up the space to perceive other epistemes of knowledge about self-shaping. We can, for instance, bring in the role of subjective experience, religion, spirituality, and the body as possible sources of self-knowledge with their own contingent histories and epistemic authority. Even though Foucault was always hesitant to be normative in his philosophy, we can call the defamiliarization of assumed objective sources of self-understanding an ethical act of self-formation through critical engagement with technologies of the self that stem from different epistemes. We cannot escape the structuring powers that these technologies and epistemes hold over our thinking and acting. The freedom that we can still enact must be found in the relationship between us and these technologies, and in opening up our perceptions to things that we may have learnt to unsee (Lewis, 2012).
Literature
Ā Foucault, M. (1961). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archeology of medical perception. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1986). The history of sexuality: The Care of the Self. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1989). The order of things: an archeology of the human sciences. Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: The use of pleasure. Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. In The essential works of Foucault (pp. 1954ā1984). The New Press.
Henriques, Gregg. (2017, May 23). Twenty Billion Fails to āMove the Needleā on Mental Illness. Psychology Today.
Lewis, T. (2012). The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques RanciĆØre and Paulo Freire. Continuum International Publishing Group.
Lock, M., & Nguyen, V. K. (2018). An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Wiley Blackwell.
Stein, S. 2021. An EEG-equipped set of headphones aims to monitor how well you focus. CNET: your guide to a better future. Retrieved from: https://www.cnet.com/health/an-eeg-equipped-set-of-headphones-aims-to-monitor-how-well-you-focus/
van Grunsven, J., & IJsselsteijn, W. (2022). Confronting Ableism in a Post-COVID World: Designing for World-Familiarity Through Acts of Defamiliarization. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, 40, 185ā200. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08424-9_10/COVER
Vidal, F. (2009). Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity. History of the Human Sciences, 22(2), 5ā36. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695108099133
Ā Author Bio
Bouke van Balen is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Ethics of technology at UMC Utrecht (Neurology & Neurosurgery), TU Delft (Ethics & Philosophy of Technology), and TU Eindhoven (Human-Computer Interaction). In this interdisciplinary project, he is embedded in a lab of neuroscientists at the UMCU that develop implantable communication Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) for independent home-use. His research is on the intersection of philosophy of technology, phenomenology, embodied cognition, neuroscience, and ethics. He is specifically interested in how BCIs can and should shape the perceptions and experiences of communication and subjectivity of people with severe communication problems due to paralysis. His project is part of the ESDiT (Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies) consortium, which is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Find him on LinkedIn.