Neuromatic arrives as the designs of neuroscience are sweeping across the arts and humanities, inspiring business leaders and dreams of artificial intelligence, informing public policy and tactics of political mobilization, defining the cutting edge of pharmaceutical research and psychological advance, lacing new age proclamations and the chatter of TED Talk celebrities, and saturating our daily routines of swipe-laden socializing. Such designs have, by the time you are reading this, intensified as humans become more inclined and incentivized to imagine themselves and everything else for that ... More

Neuromatic arrives as the designs of neuroscience are sweeping across the arts and humanities, inspiring business leaders and dreams of artificial intelligence, informing public policy and tactics of political mobilization, defining the cutting edge of pharmaceutical research and psychological advance, lacing new age proclamations and the chatter of TED Talk celebrities, and saturating our daily routines of swipe-laden socializing. Such designs have, by the time you are reading this, intensified as humans become more inclined and incentivized to imagine themselves and everything else for that matter in terms of neural networks processing information. How has this neuromatic brain come to frame so many aspects of life? What lies behind its limitless promise of control? Neuromatic addresses the entangled histories of science and religion that lay behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century to cybernetics, Scientologists, parapsychologists, and Bell Laboratory engineers in the twentieth to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion and spirituality. In reprogramming the codes of secular critique, Neuromatic casts the history of neuroscience as a religious revival that is vast in scope and long in the making. At once lyrical and disturbing, Neuromatic reveals the mythic imaginings, ritual schemes, and cosmic concern that have accompanied idealizations of the brain and inquiries into its structure and substance.