Configurations

Melissa Littlefield's Instrumental Intimacy carries the reader through a lively history of the movement of electroencephalography (EEG's)—an electrophysiological method of recording brain activity—out of the laboratory and into personal self-tracking devices, while also incisively undercutting both unhelpfully utopian and dystopian views that threaten to derail much needed interdisciplinary exchange. Rather, Littlefield's work persuasively suggests that the popular uptake of neurotechnologies could well be marked by creativity, invention, play, and therapeutic care. Such devices may reimagine agency in ways not necessarily corrosive, but endlessly diffusive and additive, reconfiguring sociality in unforeseen ways. Exploring the implications of such possibilities, without fear or favor, renders this text essential reading for scholars interested in the reach of the cognitive neurosciences into everyday life.

The irony that EEG is at the forefront of such novel neuro-sociality is acknowledged by Littlefield, for it has arguably lacked the popular appeal and laboratory potential of other neuroimaging technologies. Still, this relative lack is also the very quality that may render EEG most influential. Specifically, EEG is cheaper and far more portable than other brain imaging methods, enabling a "quiet metamorphosis" in "leaving the laboratory and infiltrating the popular wearables market" (p. 1). Such wearables, designed for self-tracking purposes, have emerged amid increasing responsibilization and gamification of health-enhancing practices. Exploring and theorizing the history, applications, and potentials of EEG in everyday life is the primary task of Instrumental Intimacy, achieved with verve and acuity, and so proving a foundational text as neurotechnologies further enter the popular imaginary.

Very briefly, for those unfamiliar, EEG refers to "measures [of] the aggregate electrical potential of neurons via electrodes placed at various points on the scalp" (p. 7). Preceding other techniques of witnessing the brain-in-action, EEG was optimistically imbued with the promise of "visualization and conquest, display and control" of our neurological dispositions (p. 2). Though largely (but not entirely) supplanted in laboratory utility, EEG became portable at the very same time self-tracking emerged as a valorized practice of biocitizenship. Consequently, EEG devices have suddenly entered "a consumer market defined by and obsessed with perpetual training, tracking, and competition, a market embedded with cultures of risk that demand even (and especially) the 'healthiest' among us to subject ourselves to the oversight of various (medical) experts" (p. 3).

Yet, in contrast to other forms of self-tracking, the unique quality of tracing the brain-in-action engenders a distinctly hyperreflexive quality, one where "the brain is defined (and consumed) as both problem and solution" (p. 15). Our brains are problematized as "troubled, out of control, untrained, and in need of technological [End Page 495] intervention" (p. 15), with such aspirations often leaning on popular understandings of neuroplasticity. The brain is thus tasked to work on itself.

As a result, this instrumentalizing of EEG devices entails they "are coming to define who we are, how we know ourselves, and how we relate to one another" (p. 4). Yet, as Littlefield notes, EEG's promissory influence is far from new. Though given little attention when developed in the 1920s, by the 1950s EEG was taken up with revelatory zeal. EEG fostered hopes for a genuine "brain mirror," inscribing in legible forms the "psychical energy" of life itself (p. 5). Furthermore, while Hans Berger—a key figure in EEG's development—sought to reveal latent capacities for telepathy, the more recent instrumental turn is less concerned with proving telepathy, but rather producing it for everyday use. As Littlefield notes, many EEG devices insistently sell themselves on better signaling not only "attention," but also affective states. Though the tools are currently crude, and the logic sometimes suspect, the ambition remains telling.

Yet, one persistent problem is that, given the limitations of EEG, this machine-mediated mirror or "exoself" lacks depth befitting of the aspirational ends to which it is sometimes tethered. That is, EEG-harvested data can currently only be refashioned into a rather flat reflection of well-being and functional...