Funders:
Stockholm University
Language:
English
Reviewers:2
Nicklas Berild Lundblad
A kind of ‘translation’ of scientific knowledge is therefore required when it is made available to lay people and members of the public
Nicklas Berild Lundblad: I think this idea of translation is potentially important and worth expanding on -- see George Steiner's book After Babel.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad: I wonder if this tendency - neuro-realism etc - is unique to neuro science, or if it is a variation on a theme. I would also be interested in understanding if there are unique ways in which lay-people translate scientific findings when it comes to neuro-science.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad: There is an argument for thinking through analogy and metaphor here. Metaphors are fleshed out analogies, so the mechanism here is probably layered from analogies to metaphors to mental models. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/mental-models#:~:text=Originally%20proposed%20by%20Craik%20(1943,%2C%20hypothetical%2C%20or%20imaginary%20situations.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad: I like the methodology - robust, interesting. I do wonder about the translation step - does something happen when you translate "hjärna" to "brain"? Vad är "mind" på svenska? Här finns något att problematisera.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad: The tendency to consider science as settled in the popularized version is a good, and really important observation. Most researchers would be happy to admit that we know less than 10% of what we need to know about the brain to make confident predictions in any more complex case of causation or even correlation. The public is not flustered by that.
conduct one’s life. As we have seen, the representations of the brain as an object included
Nicklas Berild Lundblad: The observation that representations of the brain have direct implications for behavioural adaptations is really interesting and spot on -- this is perhaps something that makes neuro-science uniquely interesting from a representational perspective, compared to, say cosmology. Although you could argue that popular understanding of entropy and heat death could inspire life style changes, but they rarely do.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad: I am not enturely sure that metaphor and metonymy as forms enable or promoto objectifying or reductionist thinking. I think the particular use they are put to does so. In poetry they do quite the opposite. So there is something about the use here. These may well be special classes of metaphors - compressive metaphors - and that would be interesting to explore.
Peter Holmqvist
From a historical perspective
Peter Holmqvist: This paragraph is formatted as a quotation, but I know that it is not from the previous version.
Peter Holmqvist: I am still curious about the choice of - and importance of - 2019 as the year to focus on, but I am happy that more details regarding the newspaper and analytical focus have been added.
Peter Holmqvist: The article's significance is now somewhat more explicitly addressed in this section.
Peter Holmqvist
Brain knowledge in society
Peter Holmqvist: While the section situates the paper in the research field(s) I find that there is a too heavy emphasis on how neuro-knowledge is authoritative and determining of lay persons’ understandings and views. I am not disputing that this is, often, the case, but there are several studies that complicate and problematize this notion, and that instead highlight the translation of and negotiation with neuro-knowledge that people do. See for instance Singh, Ilina. “Brain Talk: Power and Negotiation in Children’s Discourse about Self, Brain and Behaviour.” Sociology of Health and Illness 35, no. 6 (2013): 813–27. Such a reframing of the introduction would better clarify that the media offers various, and at times conflicting, discursive resources for understanding and conceptualizing ourselves and society. (The author does touch on this in the first paragraph under Theoretical Approach but it is in passing and deserves to be discussed in more detail in the Introduction.) I am furthermore missing something about what this paper contributes with to the existing research. What does it add? How does it expand our knowledge of this phenomena? Is it an empirical contribution? A theoretical one?
Purpose
Peter Holmqvist: Here I have two main questions. My first questions concerns how the author views the relation between media and the neurosciences. It is stated that “journalists draw on culturally shared knowledge to both interpret science and communicate this to an audience” but this should be clarified and discussed further, particularly in relation to the material and analysis. What role does the journalists play in the communicating and sharing neuroscientific findings? How do the ways that journalists communicate relate to the specific media type, to the textual genre, and so on? (I will return to these questions in my comments on the paper’s method.) The analysis is written in a way that fully conflate any distinction between actors. It is, in other words, impossibly to discern who is actually speaking/writing in each article. Is it the journalist? An interviewed expert? Is it a quotation from a book? If the journalist actively draws on particular shared knowledges and interpretive repertoires, shouldn’t that be discussed in relation to what the author then analyzes? If the author wants to further develop these aspects perhaps books such as these can be of interest: Briggs, Charles L., and Daniel C. Hallin. Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life. London: Routledge, 2016; Ekström, Anders, ed. Den Mediala Vetenskapen. Nora: Nya Doxa, 2004. Secondly, the choice of material could be discussed more in-depth. Why choose Svenska Dagbladet and not, say, Dagens Nyheter? And are there aspects of it being a morning paper, and not an evening paper such as Expressen or Aftonbladet, that could be important for contextualizing what and how it communicates scientific findings? If the paper is meant for an international audience then it could be relevant to also position the paper in the Swedish media landscape as a whole. We also know that the textual genre matters and that knowledge and information can be presented differently depending on if it is a letter to the editor, an interview, an advice column, etcetera. I am also not clear about why the author chose 2019 as the year to focus on. Did something particular happen that year? Was it just a year chosen at random? Would something change if it was 2020 or 2018 instead? My general comment on the Method section is therefore that I would like to see a developed discussion of the material and the process leading to this particular paper and year.
Theme 1: The brain as object
Peter Holmqvist: The Results section is generally interesting to read and easy to follow. But there are some things that I believe could be improved upon. One is, as already mentioned, to consider the choice to omit any details concerning who is ‘speaking’. A second thing that I kept coming back to while reading was that it is difficult to grasp the relation between the different main and sub-themes, particularly when it comes to their significance or ‘weight’. Was any of the main and/or sub-themes more prevalent? Was the view of the brain as an object and the view of the brain as a subject equally widespread in the articles? Was it more common to present the brain as vulnerable compared to as it being malleable?
The relationship between mind and brain
Peter Holmqvist: I am thinking about if it is possible to somehow integrate The relationship between mind and brain and Metaphorical representations with the rest of the analysis. Especially as Theme 1 and Theme 2 are quite dense and packed with quotations, whereas the former two sections appear more analytical and theoretical.
Conclusions
Peter Holmqvist: A recurring thought while reading was – and this ties back to my comment on the paper’s Introduction – that I had a hard time clearly grasping what the paper’s contributions were. It is never spelled out what, exactly, does the paper show and find that previous studies haven’t. It is instead quite easy to believe that it actually doesn’t represent anything especially new since the author consistently refers to other studies with similar findings (this mainly concerns the Discussion section), both concerning how the brain is discussed and represented and the uses of metaphors and metonymy and the consequences of such uses for our understanding of ourselves and various scientific objects. I am quite certain that this paper does have novel contributions and findings – maybe it is the empirical material combined with the national context, or with the theoretical concepts, or all three, or something completely different – but I would be greatly helped as a reader if the author explicitly and very plainly told me what they were.
