The DOI matches its Crossref record; 41 of the 41 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The plastic brain: Neoliberalism and the neuronal self
Abstract
Neuroscience-based representations and practices of the brain aimed at lay populations present the brain in ways that both affirm biological determinism and also celebrate plasticity, or the brain’s ability to change structure and function. Popular uses of neuroscientific theories of brain plasticity are saturated with a neoliberal vision of the subject. Against more optimistic readings of plasticity, I view the popular deployment of plasticity through the framework of governmentality. I describe how popular brain discourse on plasticity opens up the brain to personal techniques of enhancement and risk avoidance, and how it promotes a neuronal self. I situate brain plasticity in a context of biomedical neoliberalism, where the engineering and modification of biological life is positioned as essential to selfhood and citizenship.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality
Delanty, G., & Ong, A. (2001) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2654361 · Cited by 4,328
The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century
Rose, N. (2007) · doi:10.1515/9781400827503 · Cited by 3,294
’Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France
Cote, M. (2004) · Canadian Journal of Communication · doi:10.22230/cjc.2004v29n3a1488 · Cited by 2,494
Lemke, T. (2001) · Economy and Society · doi:10.1080/03085140120042271 · Cited by 2,043
(2006) · Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · Cited by 2,029
Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76
Hearn, M., & Foucault, M. (2004) · Labour History · doi:10.2307/27515985 · Cited by 1,464
Life as surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era
(2008) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.45-6120 · Cited by 1,341
Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics
Brown, W. (2009) · Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · doi:10.1515/9781400826872 · Cited by 1,257
Stone, B. E. (2004) · Foucault Studies · doi:10.22439/fs.v0i1.567 · Cited by 1,126
Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life
Sunder Rajan, K. (2006) · Duke University Press eBooks · doi:10.1215/9780822388005 · Cited by 1,067
Cited by
Drugs as instruments: A new framework for non-addictive psychoactive drug use
Müller, C. P., & Schumann, G. (2011) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x11000057 · Cited by 286
Yergeau, M., & Huebner, B. (2017) · Journal of Social Philosophy · doi:10.1111/josp.12191 · Cited by 61
Habitual Reflexivity and Skilled Action
Toner, J. (2017) · Body & Society · doi:10.1177/1357034x17736371 · Cited by 19
Gendron, M., Mesquita, B., & Barrett, L. F. (2020) · Culture, Mind, and Brain · doi:10.1017/9781108695374.010 · Cited by 20
AFFECTIVE ETHOLOGIES: monk parakeets and non-human inflections in affect theory
Smailbegović, A. (2015) · Angelaki · doi:10.1080/0969725x.2015.1065118 · Cited by 5
Metadata
- Authors
- Pitts-Taylor, V.
- Venue
- Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2010-10-25
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 635-652
- ISSN
- 1363-4593 (ISSN-L)
- 1461-7196
- OpenAlex
- W2122172379
- Cited by
- 294
- References
- 41
- FWCI
- 5.43
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The plastic brain: Neoliberalism and the neuronal self. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/1363459309360796
- The paper
- Pitts-Taylor, V. (2010). The plastic brain: Neoliberalism and the neuronal self. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459309360796
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
