Neurorhetoric, Race, and the Law: Toxic Neural Pathways and Healing Alternatives

Lucy Jewel

Persuasion happens in both the brain and the body. Departing from a Cartesian view of rationality, neuroscience explains that the mind and the body are highly integrated. It is a fallacy to believe that we engage with arguments in an abstract, analytical, and unemotional fashion. Instead, neuroscience explains that when rhetoric influences us, it does so in an embodied way, triggering electrochemical reactions that traverse our neural pathways, beyond the purview of our conscious thought. Although it sounds like a science fiction concept, the biological and embodied nature of rhetoric is in line with the beliefs of the ancient Sophists, who understood rhetoric to have the same kind of effect on the brain as a drug. This ancient understanding, that rhetoric can infiltrate the human body, is another instance where ancient knowledge aligns with modern scientific theory. Neurorhetoric is the study of how rhetoric shapes the human brain. At the forefront of science and communication studies, neurorhetoric challenges many preconceptions about how humans respond to persuasive stimuli. Neurorhetoric can be applied to a multiplicity of relevant legal issues, including the topic of this Symposium Issue: race and advocacy. After detail- ing the neuroscientific and cognitive theories that underlie neurorhetoric, this Essay theorizes ways in which neurorhetoric intersects with the law, advocacy, and race. This Essay explores how toxic racial stereotypes and categories become embedded in the human brain and what can be done about it.

This Essay, which examines the way that language creates thought patterns that can become collectively entrenched, is especially relevant in our extremely divisive political age.