Jason Tougaw is an American author known for his memoir The One You Get and The Elusive Brain, a non-fiction account of neuroscienceâÂÂs cultural influence.
Tougaw was raised in San Diego, California. He attended San Pasqual High School. He graduated from UCLA. He received a PhD from The CUNY Graduate Center. He teaches writing and literature at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has also taught at American University and Princeton University.
TougawâÂÂs essays have been published in OUT magazine, DV8, Largehearted Boy, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Literature and Medicine, and The Quivering Pen. He writes a regular column for Psychology Today. He hosts a weekly music show â The Mixtape â on public radio station WJFF in Jeffersonville, New York.
The One You Get tells the story of growing up gay and poor in 1970s Southern California. Tougaw was in the shadow of his familyâÂÂs former wealth and celebrity. His grandfather, Ralph Neves, was a notorious and successful jockey. His parentsâ generation âÂÂdropped out,â became hippiesâ and rejected their parentsâ values and lifestyle, just as the family money dried up. They book chronicles the chaos, domestic abuse, addiction, and mental illness that shaped TougawâÂÂs childhood. Like much of his other work, the memoir is the story of what it meansâÂÂand feels likeâÂÂto be a human animal, shaped by mysteries of physiology, history, politics, and sexuality. The story is punctuated with âÂÂneurological vignettes.â TougawâÂÂs familyâÂÂs mantra was âÂÂthereâÂÂs something wrong with our blood, and it affects their brains.â In his retelling of the family mythology, Tougaw uses his expertise in the science of the brain to explore his family story down to the cellular level. Ultimately, it's 1980s new wave music and culture that saves Tougaw as a teenager, promising a world beyond the chaos of his family or the stifling conformity of his high school. A high school guidance counselor took one look at TougawâÂÂs dyed hair and makeup and told him heâÂÂd never make it to UCLA, dropping him from his college prep courses. Ultimately, it was TougawâÂÂs love of music and literature that enabled him to achieve his vague teenage goals.
The Elusive Brain is the story of neuroscienceâÂÂs enormous cultural influence during the early part of the twenty-first century. Focusing on literary responses to neuroscience, Tougaw argues that literature can play with and experiment with the big questions that elude empirical studies: What is the relation between brain and self? How does neurodiversity shape human culture? What accounts for the âÂÂexplanatory gapâ between brain physiology and perceptual experience? He examines these questions at work in neuronovels, brain memoirs, and graphic narratives, by writers like Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Siri Hustvedt, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, Christopher Haddon, Maud Casey, Jonathan Lethem, and Ellen Forney. He also discusses the work of philosophers Alva Noë, Catherine Malabou, David Chalmers, and Patricia Churchland as well as the research of neuroscientists Joseph Ledoux, Michael Gazzaniga, Antonio Damasio, Sebastian Seung, and Stanislas Dehaene. The Elusive Brain was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2018 by Choice magazine.