The shift toward neurobiological imaginary in lay perspectives is the most general finding of the study, the pattern behind the other patterns of meaning. An "imaginary" is not a professional discourse or system of theoretical understandings, but largely tacit and socially shared meanings that animate and legitimate common practices and understandings. This chapter explores the most prominent indicators of the shift from a more psychological to a more medicalized viewpoint. The clearest indicator comes from participant prioritizing of brain states—for example, "chemical imbalance," "misfiring brain circuitry"—as the effective cause of suffering. Even many people who did not refer to the brain directly spoke in terms that pointed toward a mechanistic, nonpersonal way of imagining the cause of their struggles. Another indicator, suggested by dismissive views of psychotherapy and presumptions of medication effectiveness, was a way of imagining suffering without temporality, social context, or meaning. The common thread was an approach to predicament resolution that comported with a strong view of self as self-defining. Other survey and time-trend studies of public and patient views toward questions of problem cause, medication, and psychotherapy have shown similar medicalizing views, and the chapter concludes with a brief review of these.

Abstract The neurobiological, as revealed in participant stories, is a way to imagine ourselves, with the aid of techniques and technologies, as truly disengaged, to think of and enact ourselves or crucial aspects of ourselves independently of our situatedness, and to author our own story, free of constraints. A self-mastery is the promise and the appeal. This self-mastery, rooted in a mechanistic view of ourselves, comes at a high cost. It subserves the aspiration of liberal selfhood, yet in a way that diminishes the person. We can see this propensity articulated in the mechanistic and disengaged perspective of the person eminating from various academic fields, including popular neuroscience and the postmodern humanities. The alternative languages they speak in do not offer a more penetrating account of our situation and move toward the de facto authorization of a solitary and empty conception of the will. This is one affect of imagining ourselves through the prism of the neurobiological. Other affects involve our relationship to social norms and ideals, our recourse to other evaluative frameworks, our self-understanding and relation to others, and our attitude to suffering. In these ways, the imaginary closes off and inhibits.

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An implicit finite difference scheme based on the Newton-Kantorovich technique was developed for the numerical solution of the nonsteady, incompressible, two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations in conservation-law form. The algorithm was second-order-time accurate, noniterative with regard to the nonlinear terms in the vorticity transport equation except at the earliest few time steps, and spatially factored. Numerical results were obtained with the technique for a circular cylinder at Reynolds number 15. Results indicate that the technique is in excellent agreement with other numerical techniques for all geometries and Reynolds numbers investigated, and indicates a potential for significant reduction in computation time over current iterative techniques.