The emergence of the brain in the public space: newspaper articles on neuroscience and brain in the print media (2000-2012)

This article aims to analyse the dissemination and social circulation of discourses about the brain in print media. Newspaper articles were collected from the website of La Nación newspaper (2000-2012) and analysed with quantitative and qualitative analysis technique. It was found that, while there is a thematic diversity in the articles related to neuroscience, articles tackling health-disease issues predominate. The content of these articles contributes to highlight the role of the brain, in the explanation of diseases as well as in the construction of narratives prone to health care practices and a healthy lifestyle. The novelty of neurosciences seems to be related not only to the variety of scientific research areas, but also to the contribution of vocabulary and new ways of describing and explaining health-disease processes that are offered to the lay audience. The combination of expert knowledge and medical recommendations, which appear in some of the articles that were analysed, is a powerful instrument of social legitimation of the ideas about the brain that circulate socially.

brain; neurosciences; print media; health