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Brain Trees: Neuroscientific Metaphor and Botanical Thought

  • Baylee Brits (author)
Chapter of: Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World(pp. 81–98)

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Metadata
TitleBrain Trees
SubtitleNeuroscientific Metaphor and Botanical Thought
ContributorBaylee Brits (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0207.1.09
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/covert-plants/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightBrits, Baylee
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2018-09-11
Long abstractOur understanding of the brain is bound up with our images of plants. One of the dominant metaphors for the way the brain works is the tree. If we reduce a tree to its most basic carica-ture — the sphere on the top of the trunk — we have an echo not only of the brain and the brain stem, but of the neuron and its branching dendrites and extensive axon as well. In addition to this broad structure of stem and efflorescence, this visual meta-phor capitalises on the bloom of synaptic connections, redolent of the thinning and multiplying of twigs from branches. These metaphors of the brain become all the more significant given re-cent developments in the inverse field, as new work in plant sci-ence is changing the way we think about vegetation and thought. Studies of plant behaviour now suggest that plants engage in processes of what we might call thinking and learning, even if this thought does not exactly resemble the sort of conscious ra-tionality that vastly overdetermines our ideas about what the hu-man brain primarily does. While the brain is often envisaged as a tree, this metaphoric exchange has only ever gone one way: it re-mains anathema to associate plants with brains in anything more than an illustrative sense. Although the neurological armoury of images seems to be phytological — and phytology is now deploy-ing the concepts once unique to brain science — any exchange between the two is often rendered trivial, as if images and names existed in the realm of conceptual small change. Here I consider the way that current key popular texts in neurology deploy the metaphor of the plant, in particular the tree, and explore the ways that this metaphor works to both stabilise and ‘extinguish’ its object. I consider the way that the ‘tree’ is simultaneously a material and immaterial metaphor, an embodiment of both neu-ral object and function. This curious mode of metaphor, which I will associate with Paul de Man’s definition of ‘formal allegory,’ actually models the cognitive processes that it seeks to describe.
Page rangepp. 81–98
Print length18 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Baylee Brits

(author)