here's a conversation with Ruth Leys that people in #emotions research across the board might find interesting: https://jhiblog.org/2020/04/20/the-ascent-of-affect-emotions-research-and-the-history-of-emotions-interview-with-ruth-leys-part-ii/ I for one have responses to it...

Leys, I think, gets both Smail and me wrong in certain key respects, but I can't really speak for Smail so I'll focus on what's up with what she says about me (apart from misnaming me)

she says: "even if Smail and Boddice are correct in characterizing the human brain as so plastic as to undergo constant alterations, it’s not clear how we can ever learn anything about those alterations in the brains of historical actors because they are dead and gone..."

"... So we seem to be left with a proposal to the effect that historians need to pay attention to what people have said and done in the past, which is what they’ve [historians] always tried to do. In short, it doesn’t seem to me that the “neuro” in “neurohistory” adds anything."

Well, the problem is that in paying attention to what people have said and done in the past, historians have nonetheless imposed a timeless and biologically reductive understanding of what the human is

they have paid attention, but with unchecked assumptions about certain key categories - reason, emotion, sense, etc - such that the reading of past sources has seemed easier than it is in fact

some, people like Roger Cooter, have excoriated historians for their biological reductions, abandoning research into what a human is to the neurobiologists of a universalising stamp, and it's hard to disagree with him

what knowledge of neuroplasticty does, in conjunction with social neuroscientific insights into the formative role of concepts in the construction of meaningful experience, is to force us to check those assumptions...

it forces us to abandon an implicit understanding that 'we' know what it means or feels like to be human and therefore understand the past. We cannot recover the brain, true, but we can extrapolate because of what we know about the brain that past experiences were different

and this absolutely focuses our attention on what was said and done, and what was expressed and what material evidence was left behind, but in a quite radically different way to historical research in the past

it puzzles me that Leys can't/won't see this. Still, there's always another chance to lay this out again. I'm just finishing the ms for "Emotion, Sense, Experience" with Mark M. Smith, and will be beating people over the head with it pretty soon. Ends.