Entre crânios analógicos e imagens digitais: alguns antecedentes históricos e culturais das tecnologias de neuro-imageamento

Abstract

Lately, we have seen the popularization and massive difusion of biological descriptions to aspects that we used to consider as social or mentaly based. Notable in scientific and lay environments, this tendency frequently chooses the brain as the privileged organ of its attention. Every week, a new cerebral locality, related to behavioral and personality traces, is publicized. Along with this movement, it is remarkable the intellectual and financial efforts undertaken in the last years in the domaine of mental health, to advance the researchs that aim to discover the neurobiological basis of the mental disorders. This tendency points to the fusion between psychiatry and neurology in only one discipline, phisicalistically based, sometimes called brainology . One of the most important events that served as a base to the legitimation and the popularization of this trend was the development, in the last decades, of the new medical imaging techniques and technologies, like the Positron Emission Tomography (PET scan) and the Functional Magnetical Ressonance Imaging (fMRI). These technologies allowed the image construction of almost every nosografic category made up in the psychiatric domaine, transmitting implicitly many assumptions and promises. Notwithstanding the cultural imaginary sustaned by these technologies and the efforts undertaken to localize the biological markers of psychiatric disorders, there isn t, until the present time, any conclusive result that entitle the imaging diagnostic of nosographies like schizophrenia, depression, and the pathogical gambling. In spite of the mediatic attention and the milionaires amounts destined to researchs in this field, the concret results obtained until now aren t free from tough controversies. However, even considering we are very far from the construction of accurate maps for the mental disfunctions, it s incredible the power of conviction that neuroimages have nowadays. The scans are exhibited as visuable truths, or facts concerning the people and the world, in a proportion much superior to the data they present. Some critics call such an aspect neurorealism, or rhetoric of auto-evidence. The aim of this work is to question the persuasive power acquired by the neuroimages nowadays, especially when addopted to diagnostic aims in the field of mental health. If these images pass the idea of neutrality, immediate transparence and auto-evidence, this work intends to include them in a social-historical context, through wich they have obtained meaning, familiarity, and the status of truth. The point of depart is their localization in the crossing of two different historical movements: that of the medical illustrations, in its relation to the production of objective knowledge; and that of the researches about the localization, in the brain cortex, of complex behaviours and personality traits. Besides the establishment of some historical conditions of possibylity to the emergence of a cerebral neo-localizationism, this work pretends to stress some diferences in relation to preceding localizationist projects, and to emphasize the influence of the contemporary cultural context to the success e persuasive power of this kind of technologie.