Metacognition, Metahumanities, and Medical Education by Bleakley, Alan; Eichbaum, Quentin; Ellaway, Rachel;

Short description:

This persuasive volume develops a novel approach to medical education and the medical humanities, making a case for the integration of the two to explore the ways in which ‘warm’ humanism and ‘cold’ technologies can come together to design humane posthumanist futures in medicine.

Long description:

This persuasive volume develops a novel approach to medical education and the medical humanities, making a case for the integration of the two to explore the ways in which ‘warm’ humanism and ‘cold’ technologies can come together to design humane posthumanist futures in medicine.

There are many problems with conventional medical education. It can be overly technocratic, dehumanizing, and empathy-eroding, introducing artefacts that lead to harm and reproduce inequality and injustice. Use of the arts, humanities, and qualitative social sciences have been pursued as an antidote or balance to these problems. Arguing against the purely instrumentalist use of medical humanities in this way, this book addresses the importance of a genuine and open-ended engagement with humanities approaches in medicine. It discusses the impact of artificial intelligence and emerging theoretical frameworks and posthumanist perspectives, such as object-oriented ontology, on meaning making in medicine. It demonstrates how the key to such a transition is the recovery of the intrinsic art and humanity of metaphor-heavy biomedical science, in turn framed by models of dynamic complexity rather than static linearity.

This book is an important contribution to debates around the medical humanities and its role in medical education. It is an essential read for scholars with an interest in these areas, as well as those working in science and technology studies and the sociology of health and illness.

Table of Contents:

Preface 

Introduction:

PART 1

1: Forms of metahumanism

2: Meta-cognition and the making of meaning

3: Metacognition, meta-affect, and the clinical encounter: language matters

4: Knowing more than we can say: the tacit dimension and the unconscious ego

5: Thinking outside the brain: the extended mind and metahumanities

6: Heuristics and metaheuristics

PART 2

7: Forms of attention: the ground for meta-cognition

8: Perception: immaculate or illusory? Whither then metacognition and metahumanities?

9: Capability, augmentation, metacognition

10: Realising the extended mind

11: Metacognition and pattern thinking

12: From empathy to compathy in medical education

PART 3 

13: Metahumanities in medical education: a manifesto

References

Index