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Rethinking Peer-Review Processes: Expertise Across the Neuroscience/Humanities Gap

In her article “The Arts and Sciences of Reading: Humanities in the Laboratory,” Lindsey Grubbs (2016) agues that seemingly low-stakes neuroscientific research can have high-stakes implications. She focuses specifically on two studies from neuroscience and cognitive psychology that examine how reading literary fiction might affect the brain. Importantly, Grubbs notes that neither article is extraordinary; indeed, her point is that these two studies are illustrative of broader trends in neuroscientific research and its uptake in the media. As a countermeasure to the overly hyped but potentially undertheorized studies, Grubbs recommends bringing more humanist and social scientists into the experimental process, not simply as token members of the team, but as equals who could “provide context for and challenge the assumptions of biomedical models” (86). In the case of neuroscientific experiments on reading, Grubbs argues that humanists could educate scientific researchers about the “complex dynamics of reading literature” and provide more specific knowledge about some of the literary theory that was (somewhat) haphazardly applied within the experimental models. In short, humanists could help balance the “half-hearted interdisciplinarity” (86) on display in the studies Grubbs has selected. Overall, I support Grubbs’s call for more conscientious, well-rounded, and multidirectional interdisciplinarity, and see it as in line with and echoing much of the work by established scholars working on the “neuro-” (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013) and transdisciplinary neuroscience (Fitzgerald and Callard 2015; Littlefield and Johnson 2012), and those working in the field of critical neuroscience (Choudhury and Slaby 2012). And yet I am not convinced that involving more humanists and social scientists in the process of experimental design and contextualization is the best—or only—point of intervention. In this brief commentary, I expand on Grubbs’s proposed solution to suggest that humanists and social scientists could also be effectively involved in the peer-review process of scientific journals. This is not to say that Grubbs’s specific arguments for inclusion are misplaced, but to suggest something more radical: akin to a “nothing about us without us” campaign. Yes, there are powerful arguments to be made for the inclusion of humanists as collaborators in the experimental design and execution processes. Yes, there is a case to be made for more cautious—and as Grubbs would have it, more “ethical”— media uptake of experimental conclusions. And, yes, scientists should be equal partners in interdisciplinarity, coming across the quad (as it were) and learning about the longer histories and current theoretical trends in the humanities and social sciences. But perhaps what we need most is to recognize the value that each branch of knowledge has accrued; thus, I propose an additional solution to the gap between the humanities and the sciences: interdisciplinary peer review—a phenomenon that is already in place in select subfields of the humanities.