Modelling the Vital Brain: Interdisciplinary Engagements between Social Science and Neuroscience

Neuroscience is said to be changing how human behaviour is understood, how society is organized, how public policy is justified, and how lawmakers administer justice (Gazzaniga 2009). For some, neuroscientists are fast becoming the new experts in the management of human nature and behaviour (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). This growing influence has helped to grow collaboration between social scientists, humanities scholars, and neuroscientists (Callard and Margulies, 2011; Roepstorff and Frith, 2012), which have proven capable of deepening our understanding of human life and behaviour (Malabou 2012). However, as the recent European Science Foundation (ESF) report, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (2013) shows, demand and interest in integrating social scientists into domains traditionally occupied by the life sciences is strong, but the infrastructure to foster it is weak.