New Books in Neuroscience · New Books Network

Jeremy Stolow, "Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography" (MIT Press, 2025)

June 20, 2025·1 hr 16 min·35 clips

The episode begins with a practical reminder for listeners to take the New Books Network audience survey. After that, Miranda Melcher welcomes Jeremy Stolow to discuss Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography, published by MIT Press in 2025. The interview starts with a basic but slippery question: what counts as a body, and how do different traditions define embodiment? Stolow contrasts modern anatomical representation with traditions that think about embodiment through energy, subtle presence, or other forms of human organization. The conversation spends time with the modern Western anatomical gaze. Stolow traces it back to ancient figures like Galen and then forward to the modern period, when anatomy becomes central to medicine and to the visual systems that support it. He points to endoscopes, MRIs, surgery, and pharmacology as examples of how that biomedical view now shapes ordinary life. The episode places that model alongside other ways of thinking about the body instead of treating it as the default. From there, the discussion turns to other ways of mapping embodiment. Stolow brings in charts of meridians in Chinese acupuncture as a recognizably human but differently ordered visual system. He also names Ayurveda, classical Chinese medicine, and a range of esoteric, indigenous, and other knowledge traditions. These frameworks do not start from the assumption that the body ends at the skin or reduces to organs and ligaments. They begin elsewhere, and that changes what an image is meant to show. Melcher keeps the conversation moving through those contrasts. The result is a discussion that treats medical imagery as historical and shaped by assumptions about what matters and what can be seen. It also shows visual culture as part of how scientific ideas are organized, not just as decoration. As the interview goes on, the book's title becomes a way into a wider intellectual terrain. Aura is not treated as a fixed object. It becomes a route into the overlap of scientific practice, applied sciences, art, and esoteric imagination. Near the end, Stolow says that a new rabbit hole has opened and that color will take him deeper into that territory. The episode ends on that note of open inquiry rather than neat closure.

As heard by us

A careful tour of aura, anatomy, and the visual habits that shape bodily understanding.

Jeremy Stolow uses aura as a way into a larger argument about how bodies are pictured, sorted, and made legible. The conversation moves from the anatomical gaze to Chinese classical medicine, Ayurveda, and other traditions that treat embodiment as more than a collection of…

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