The Word and the Brain: Rhetoric and Persuasion in Soul and Body

The power of words is not a metaphor. The word-and-brain entwinement, part of the mind-and-body relationship, has long been the focus of religious, philosophical, and scientific debates, e.g., on the nature of prayer and meditation. Modern-day psychology and neuroscience are also fascinated by how verbal suggestion affects neuroplasticity and healing. NEUROWORD will present an interdisciplinary and comprehensive historical study of reflections on the impact of eloquent speech on the human body. In the early modern critical scientific context, when the seat of consciousness was transferred from the soul to the brain, I will examine the full spectrum of views on the relationship between the word and the brain across the disciplines concerned with experiences of soul, mind, and body: rhetoric, musicology, preaching, theological anthropology, philosophy, medical psychology, logopedics, and neurophysiology. I will examine not how rhetoric was used in scientific discourse but how it was deemed able to affect the brain. The psycho- and neurophysiology of persuasion can be best explored through the lens of rhetoric, as it was less prone to the mind-body dualism professed by much of the natural philosophy. These matters have not been studied, but by filling this gap, we can gain valuable insights into the entangled history of conceptualization of the mind-and-body relationship. This project is critical at a time when our mediated environments make rhetoric ambiguous with respect to truth and ethics, which demands a historical perspective on the neuroscience of eloquence for an educated approach to scientific communication. At the Warburg Institute, a leading centre for the history of rhetoric and part of the University of London with its range of prominent neuroscience programs, I will be a member of a stimulating interdisciplinary community and will do ground-breaking research in the history of scientific communication.