What is it about?
The article examines the fiction that transplanting the brain from an old or aging body into a younger one may insure the person's immortality. Since brains are depicted as not deteriorating, this fiction highlights the extent to which the brain has come to replace the soul as the seat and core of personhood and personal identity.
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Why is it important?
The brain transplantation fiction highlights the role the brain has come to have in understanding the human since the late 17th century. In that context, films and literary fictions are especially important because, by dramatizing psychological and interrelational challenges that result from the transplantation, they problematize and even question the modern and contemporary focus on the brain.
Perspectives
The brain transplantation fiction is part of the cultural history of the human as "cerebral subject" – a view that emerged in the late 17th century. in the contemporary period, fiction in literature and film, as well as in other arts, have become major sites for critically exploring, and sometimes questioning, the primacy of the brain as locus of personhood and personal identity.
Dr. Fernando Vidal
ICREA
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Desire, indefinite lifespan, and transgenerational brains in literature and film, Theory & Psychology, September 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0959354316665713.
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