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Book Review |
Keeping media in mind
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Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise (1984), has a character called Doctor Winnie Richards who, being a cognitive neuroscientist, is likened to ‘some phenomenal subhuman like a yeti or sasquatch’. Her role is to discover the chemical components of a mysterious new designer-pill which the main character's wife is taking in a secret psychopharmacology trial. Winnie eventually discovers that the drug, known as Dylar, is designed to inhibit a neurotransmitter that generates fear of death; whereby DeLillo gives his readers a flavour of what neuroscientists get up to.
A sign of the development and rapid expansion of a scientific discipline is its impact on popular culture. White Noise depicts neuroscience, albeit through a fantastically distorted lens, from the vantage point of the mid-1980s as a coming discipline, which of course it was. Just as the invention of the telescope and the discovery of mathematical physics had provided new ways of understanding
Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project
Jesus College
Cambridge CB5 8BL
United Kingdom