brainist

English

Etymology

brain +‎ -ist

Noun

brainist (plural brainists)

1. Someone who values the brain and its power.
   • 1991, Maximum Rocknroll - Issue 101:

     We could all make jokes about "brainists": people who see you just for the grey matter.

   • 1999 October 21, ONEstar, “PROVE THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST !!!!”, in alt.religion.christian (Usenet):

     That makes God brainist! Non-brainists have rights too you know!

   • 2014, Suzann Dodd, Planet Smudge, →ISBN:

     I can see the difference now between me and my wife having our offspring 'perfected' and a bowl of genetic soup being inserted into a neutralised egg and put into some fem's body to be raised by a gang of brainists.

2. One who believes cognition and sentience are purely a matter of physical brain functions.
   • 2007, Henry L. Roediger III, Yadin Dudai, Susan M. Fitzpatrick, Science of Memory: Concepts, →ISBN, page 145:

     Hence for the cognitivist, working memory is linked to encoding and the formation of a new memory, whereas for the brainist it is linked to retrieval and the use of memory.

   • 2015, Lucian Krukowski, This Place of Prose and Poetry, →ISBN, page 49:

     By placing the mind solely within the physical realm—as the brainists would have it— is not any more a solution to the mysteries of human consciousness than is talking—in-tongues.

   • 2016, Sal Restivo, Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism, →ISBN:

     Some brainists might suppose that a postmortem study of Einstein's brain would provide clues as to the cerebral processes underlying genius.

3. One who creates music by re-experiencing emotions while attached to an EEG cap.
   • 2011, Sidney D ́Mello, Arthur Graesser, Bjoern Schuller, Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, →ISBN:

     The brainist sat in a comfortable chair at stage center wearing a high-density EEG cap. Right and left of the stage, elevated speakers presented a recorded audience introduction and subject instructions. These included a brief (few word) description of the feeling the brainist had used to described the feeling he associated with each drone sound following training sessions.

   • 2011, Tim Mullen, Richard Warp, Adam Jansch, “Minding the (Transatlantic) Gap: An Internet-Enabled Acoustic Brain-Computer Music Interface.”, in NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression):

     The installation was also comprised of four participating parties, distributed around the world but connected via the Internet: the brainist, the composer/conductor, the physical audience (Phipps Hall), and the virtual (Internet) audience.

   • 2015, Anton Nijholt, “Competing and collaborating brains: multi-brain computer interfacing”, in Brain-Computer Interfaces:

     In [21] we have four musicians (a violinist, a flautist, a cellist, and a 'brainist'), where during the performance the brainist delivers drone sounds by re-experiencing emotions (classified by EEG) that has been associated with the sounds during a training session...

Adjective

brainist (comparative more brainist, superlative most brainist)

1. Holding the belief that cognition and sentience are the result of brain functions.
   • 1995 September 5, dannie hawkins, “life duty death”, in sci.anthropology (Usenet):

     And, their specieist survival instinct (another totally Natural instinct that *brainist deny) finally wins them over

   • 1997 July 2, Anders N Weinstein, “Brute Force, or Bitmap, Rationality (was: Re: Rationality)”, in comp.ai (Usenet):

     So AI has been anything but brainist in that sense. On the other hand, it is also appreciated that different sort of hardware can run different algorithms, ...

   • 2017, Sal Restivo, Sociology, Science, and the End of Philosophy, →ISBN:

     This entails jettisoning, as I urge in this book, brainist and neuroist assumptions and perspectives.

   • 2017, Igor M. Arievitch, Beyond the Brain: An Agentive Activity Perspective on Mind, →ISBN, page 7:

     The second reason to start with such a review is my belief that the current pushback by psychologists and educators who are skeptical about the surge of “brainist” neuro-explanations is inadequate and needs to be more conceptually deep and far-reaching.

2. Prejudiced based on intelligence and cognitive ability.
   • 1976, Encounter - Volume 46, page 395:

     But even if we are only amateurs, we can all make sure that the subject of discrimination — whether racist, sexist, heightist, weightist, ageist, brainist, beautyist, or tokenist — is never absent from our waking thoughts.

   • 1995 July 7, Rachel McKay, “Gazza Boardman”, in rec.bicycles.racing (Usenet):

     I hate to be "brainist" but Boardman's IQ is about 10 times Gascoigne's; he's not 50lbs overweight; and he's not overpaid.

   • 1999 October 21, ONEstar, “PROVE THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST !!!!”, in alt.religion.christian (Usenet):

     That makes God brainist! Non-brainists have rights too you know!

   • 2015, Linda Madden, “Knowledge spaces and the urban jungle: Animal agency in the geographical understandings of public space”, in MFCO Working Paper Series:

     Upon reviewing the types of geographic knowledge spaces in which animals are situated, it seems that perhaps as academics we remain subject to what Laland & Hoppitt (2003) refer to as a 'brainist bias' – a bias that maintains a view of an evolutionary hierarchy that culminates in human reason and language.

   • 2015, Martin Hughes-Games, A Wild Life: My Adventures Around the World Filming Wildlife, →ISBN:

     We humans are so brainist. Once nature hits on a really effective design it tends to stick with it: the basic crocodile layout is fantastically effective, and has not changed significantly for some 80 million years

Anagrams

• Britains, binarist