Neuroscience-based representations and practices of the brain aimed at lay populations present the brain in ways that both affirm biological determinism and also celebrate plasticity, or the brain's ability to change structure and function. Popular uses of neuroscientific theories of brain plasticity are saturated with a neoliberal vision of the subject. Against more optimistic readings of plasticity, I view the popular deployment of plasticity through the framework of governmentality. I describe how popular brain discourse on plasticity opens up the brain to personal techniques of enhancement and risk avoidance, and how it promotes a neuronal self. I situate brain plasticity in a context of biomedical neoliberalism, where the engineering and modification of biological life is positioned as essential to selfhood and citizenship.

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The approach sociologists should take toward the biological sciences, particularly in light of the neurocognitive turn that is taking place in many other disciplines, is not as straightforward as some have suggested. Advocates of bridging neurocognitive and sociological frameworks have argued that we should learn and utilize neurocognitive science in order to refresh sociological concepts, as well as to contribute positively to the development of bio/psycho/social knowledge. However, I argue that the onto-epistemological question of how we should approach neuroscientific knowledge, which has yet to be resolved, should be foregrounded rather than forgotten in these efforts. Without a willingness to criticize as well as learn from neurocognitive science, and wade into its internal debates, sociologists risk reifying neurocognitive knowledge and diminishing awareness and appreciation of its complexities and contradictions.

The rise of neuroplasticity has led to new fields of study about the relation between social inequalities and neurobiology, including investigations into the “neuroscience of poverty.” The neural phenotype of poverty proposed in recent neuroscientific research emerges out of classed, gendered, and racialized inequalities that not only affect bodies in material ways but also shape scientific understandings of difference. An intersectional, sociomaterial approach is needed to grasp the implications of neuroscientific research that aims to both produce and repair neurobiological difference. Following Benjamin’s critique of the “carceral imagination” of technoscience, this article considers how such research may fix in terms of helping, or in contrast, fix by classifying and reifying, vulnerable subjects. I address the potential for biosocial determinism in linking neural phenotypes and social problems. I use an intersectional approach to consider the presence and absence of race in this body of research and explore how some methodological and conceptual framings of the “brain on poverty” mark poor and minority children for intervention in concert with neoliberal approaches to poverty.

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