About this issue
Neuroscience offers historians ideas, methods, and questions that can help us understand the past in new and deeper ways than the traditional methods of history alone provide. This issue of RCC Perspectives collects a number of contributions to the growing field of neurohistory. They ask questions about the role of biology and the brain in the development of human culture, a problem which is of relevance for environmental history as a whole because it can help shed light on how people interact with their surroundings.
How to cite: Russell, Edmund (ed.), “Environment, Culture, and the Brain: New Explorations in Neurohistory,” RCC Perspectives 2012, no 6. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/5596.
Content
Introduction
- How Can Neurohistory Help Us Understand the Past? by Edmund Russell
Thought Patterns and Structures
- A Mind Divided Against Itself: Thinking Holistically with a Split Brain by Frank Zelko
- Causality and the Brain by Benedikt Berninger
- Placebo Effects in History by Karin Meissner and Carlos Collado Seidel
- From Representations to Perceptions: A New “Horizon of Expectation” in Historical Theory? by Alejandro E. Gómez
Emotions
- Psychotropy and the Patterns of Power in Human History by Daniel Lord Smail
- Neurohistorical and Evolutionary Aspects of a History of Shame and Shaming by Jörg Wettlaufer
- Erythroxylum Coca and Its Discontents: A Neurohistorical Case Study of Cocaine, Pleasure, and Empires by David Matuskey
- Cognitive Demands on Brains Fall as Healing Properties of Environments Rise: Evidence from fMRI by Evgeny Gutyrchik et al.
Philosophy and the Future of Neurohistory
- Neuroscience and History by Chris Smith
- History and the Neurocentric Age by Peter Becker
- Neurohistory: Being in Time by Kirsten Brukamp
- The Brain in the West: A Course of Study by Steve Fuller
