Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain

Contents
List of Figures
Prologue: Already Gone
Introduction
	1. Saturation
	2. Approaching the Neuromatic (with a short engineering aside)
	3. Blurred Lines
	4. Cybernetics and the Question of Religion
	5. Cybernetic Theses of Secularization
	6. Poetics
Synaptic Gap: Measuring Religion
1. Thinking about Cognitive Scientists Thinking about Religion
	1. False Positives
	2. The Cognitive Science of Religion
	3. The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device
	4. Distinguishing Marks on a Screen
	5. Breaking the Spell
	6. Northampton
	7. Jonathan Edwards, Hyperactive Agency Detector
	8. Detecting the Life of the Brain
	9. Agents Like Us
	10. Cheap Tricks
Synaptic Gap: The Information of History
2. Neither Matter nor Spirit: Toward a Genealogy of Information
	1. Hard Problems
	2. Neuromatic Piety: An Overview
	3. Ether and the Permeation of the Interspaces
	4. Emanuel Swedenborg, Neuroscientist
	5. Ghosts of Swedenborg
	6. Mental Slavery and the Invention of Spirituality
	7. The Diakka and Their Earthly Victims
	8. The Mediomaniacal Origins of American Neurology
	9. Prehistories of Electroencephalography
	10. Brain Waves and Tremulating Information
	11. Biofeedback and the Experience of Correspondence
	12. The Ontology of Information
	13. Concluding Thoughts on Perceptronium
Synaptic Gap: Too Much Too Soon
3. Imagining the Neuromatic
	1. Crash and Burn
	2. Opening Scene from a Cybernetic Demimonde
	3. Elective AffinitieS
	4. The Mechanics of Mediumship
	5. Images of an Oracle
	6. Thought Dictated in the Absence of All ControL
	7. The Cut-Up Experiments
	8. From Voodoo Death to Virology
	9. Engrams, Auditing, and the Appeal of Scientology
	10. Past Lives of the Neuromatic Brain
	11. Exteriorization, or the Ritual of Being Three Feet Back of Your Head
	12. Break Through in Grey Room
Synaptic Gap: White Machinery
4. Histories of Electric Shock Therapy circa 1978
	1. Of Systems, Sex, and Secular Conversion
	2. Moral Treatment and Heads That Differ in Shape
	3. Gendered Electricity in the Neuromatic Groove
	4. The Operationalization of Napa State Hospital
	5. Patients’ Rights
	6. The Shaving of Leonard Frank’s Beard
	7. Electric Love Therapy
	8. The Business of Marriage
	9. The Union of All Contradictory Ideas
	10. I Watch TV, I Watch TV
	11. Live from Napa State
Synaptic Gap: belief Molecules
Conclusion: The Elementary Forms of Neuromatic Life
	1. Totemic Systems
	2. Big Science
	3. Artificial Intelligence
Acknowledgments
Index