For “those of you who wish to exercise your brain systematically as an athlete would exercise various muscle groups,” manuals provide well-ordered cerebral training programs and recommend hiring a cerebral “marathon trainer” and keeping “brain workout diaries” (213–214). The vocabulary of bodily fitness is thus extrapolated to the brain itself. Causally and rhetorically, bodily and cerebral fitness go hand in hand.
Inspired by the homonymous book by Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, this timespace presents the authors' genealogy of the cerebral subject and the influence of the neurological discourse in human sciences, mental health and culture.