Animating Brains.

"The very dynamic of this research, however, as here observed as an example of Umbesetzungen, escapes such a narrative of rational progress. Instead, there are remnants of animism within the reductionism of social neuroscience, they are irreducible like Blumenberg’s absolute metaphors. The animistic qualities of brain research transgress the narrow limits of the acknowledged epistemological framework and hence they may go unnoticed though perhaps not unnoticeable. Occasionally they may hit like magic, as some kind of return of the irrational, as was the case when someone dared to label social neuroscience voodoo and the public picked up the story by storm. In ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’, Ed Vul and his co-authors used ‘voodoo’ as a stigmatising label, dramatising their accusations to fight against uncritical and non-scientific activities within the sciences. Although they lost the debate, they succeeded in gaining enormous attention and Vul won professional recognition. The scientists accused by Vul and his co-authors of publishing unsound data convinced the public and funding organisations that their science was sound, and, as a consequence, these allegedly voodoo correlations had to be taken seriously. So, Vul had a point and missed it in the way he styled his attack: voodoo, rejected by the scientific community as a qualification of problematic methods for statistical analysis, re-enters as a descriptive category of scientific practice in social neuroscience."