ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces thinking based on interpersonal neurobiology that I expand upon throughout the book. Since the so-called ‘decade of the brain’ in the 1990s there has been a huge proliferation of neuroscience studies, particularly using new scanning techniques. I will outline some of the new knowledge, albeit cautiously, as neuroscience remains in its infancy, and some scepticism is in order (Weisberg et al., 2008; Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013; Farah, 2014). I focus not just on the brain or what goes on in people’s ‘heads’, but on whole body processes. In recent years many scientists have come to see the brain as embodied (Thompson and Cosmelli, 2011) as well as enactive (Ward and Stapleton, 2012), or in other words a brain does what it does and is what it is in part due to its owner’s embodied actions in the world.
