Neuroethics & Law Blog

Space Ethics: Paul Root Wolpe

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a profile on neuorethicist Paul Root Wolpe here.  The piece focuses much less on his neuroethics work than on his work as an ethics advisor to NASA:

Two or three times a month, Wolpe travels to NASA's headquarters in Washington. He has visited almost all the U.S. space centers. He also attends international conferences, writes papers, and sets guidelines for future space endeavors.

His latest NASA project, he said, is "developing new policies for long-duration flights" to Mars and the moon, which could start as early as 2020.

Wolpe works out ethical solutions that range from deciding what should be done with an astronaut who "becomes psychotic and attacks" the other crew members to working with Williams in determining the level of radiation to which an astronaut can be safely exposed, he said.

Relatedly, here's an AP story on surgeons performing cyst removal under very low gravity conditions in order to study the feasibility of surgery in space.

Intuitions of Justice by Robinson and Kurzban

Paul Robinson (Law, UPenn) and Robert Kurzban (Psychology, UPenn) have posted  Concordance & Conflict in Intuitions of Justice on SSRN.  I have heard Paul speak on this subject and think this may become a very important paper.  Here is the abstract:

The common wisdom among criminal law theorists and policy makers is that the notion of desert is vague and [. . . ] subject to wide disagreement. Yet the empirical evidence in available studies, including new studies reported here, paints a dramatically different picture. While moral philosophers may disagree on some aspects of moral blameworthiness, people's intuitions of justice are commonly specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself - physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions - people's shared intuitions cut across demographics and cultures. The findings raise interesting questions - such as, what could explain this striking result? - and hint at intriguing implications for criminal law and criminal justice policy.

Larry Solum comments on the piece here.

Purdy on Neuroeconomics

Jedediah Purdy (Law, Duke) has posted The Promise (and Limits) of Neuroeconomics to SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Neuroeconomics - the study of brain activity in people engaged in tasks of reasoning and choice – looks set to be the next behavioral economics: a set of findings about how people make decisions that casts both light and doubt on widely accepted premises about rationality and social life. This essay explains what is most exciting about the new field and lays out some specific research tasks for it.

By enabling researchers to view the mind at work, neuroeconomics calls into question the value of a methodological premise of twentieth-century empiricism, sometimes called positivism or behaviorism: that people are black boxes to one another, and scientific social inquiry must observe only their objective behavior, what they say and do. This premise came to the center of neoclassical economic method via the 1930s work of the economist Lionel Robbins, and it occasioned a methodological split in social inquiry. Positivists (most importantly, economists) follow the strictures of studying observable behavior, while interpretivists insist that we cannot understand social life without interpreting the minds and intentions of others, even though we cannot view them directly.

The limits of these two methods have restricted progress in understanding three critical issues for legal scholarship: 1) how people solve collective-action problems, 2) why some people are more susceptible than others to extremist political appeals, and 3) whether “commodification” creates a conflict between economic rationality and other values. I show how the progress already made in neuroeconomics could make each of these questions more tractable than it has recently seemed, with potentially significant payoffs.

(Hat Tip: Legal Theory Blog).

Pictures of thoughts

One of my constant themes in neuroethics – a theme I will stress in my forthcoming book – is that we ought not to identify neuroethics with the ethics of neuroscience, understanding the latter narrowly. We have learned much more about the mind from standard social and cognitive psychology than from neuroscience. Of course, in part this is because neuroscience is much younger, and we can certainly expect it to deliver results in the (near) future (though I do not expect neuroscience to displace the traditional approaches, which will remain essential). Given the state of the art, placing too much weight on neuroscientific findings, and especially fMRI results, is premature. Yet we do it all the time. Paul Bloom, writing in Seed Magazine, provides a lovely example.

Bloom reports a study by Deena Skolnick. Skolnick crafted pseudo-explanations of psychological phenomena, which were deliberately designed to be awful. She showed them to subjects, who were experts and laypeople. Both groups were able to detect which explanations were faulty. But in some pseudo-explanations, Skolnick inserted some irrelevant neuroscience (localizing the phenomena). With the neuroscientific jargon inserted, the explanations were regarded as satisfactory, by neuroscientists and by laypeople.

Why are we so easily taken in by neuroscience? There are several possible explanations. Some people point to the power of images; of course, neuroscience itself is very cutting-edge and shrouded in scientific authority. Bloom suggests a different explanation. Bloom thinks that people are natural dualists (he cites evidence that children think they need their brains for doing math, but not for playing or for loving their brother). So we are endlessly fascinated by ‘pictures of thought’ - precisely because they seem intuitively impossible - and give them far more significance than they deserve. Whatever the explanation, the phenomenon itself is something I encounter all the time, from philosophers, laypeople and sometimes even neuroscientists themselves. They take the discovery that a mental state or event has neural correlates as evidence for a startling thesis. A common example: putative evidence for differences in neurological processes in heterosexual people and homosexual people is cited as evidence that sexuality is biologically based, in the sense that it ‘not a choice’. Now, neuroscience could in principle provide evidence for the innateness of sexual preference, but merely showing that there are systematic brain differences is not such evidence all by itself. Suppose that sexuality were a choice; unless some dualist theory were true, it would still have neural correlates.

Neuroscience is important, and will grow in importance. But we shouldn't attribute its results with a significance greater than they can bear. Fortunately, the better neuroscientists are well aware of the limitations of their results (some in principle, some due to the technology). We are already seeing greater collaboration between different branches of the sciences of the mind; it is when neuroscience is combined with psychology - when we combine the behavioral, the developmental, and the morphological - that greatest light is shone on the mind/brain.

6 or So Degrees of Separation

It appears that the research Stanley Milgram used to support the claim that we are connected to each other within six degress of separation was very unreliable.  Milgram sent folders to random subjects, asking them to send the folder on to a particular named individual (with some general information about the individual, like his occupation and general location) or to someone they thought would know the individual and a record was kept of the path of the mailings.  Here is some more detailed information about Judith Kleinfeld's investigation and about the original experiments (including a pilot study), and here's a snippet from BBC News: 

Judith Kleinfeld, a professor psychology at Alaska Fairbanks University, went back to Milgram's original research notes and found something surprising.

It turned out, she told us, that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach the target.

Not only did they fail to get there in six steps, they failed to get there at all.

Milgram was a giant figure in his world of research, but here was evidence that the claim he was famously associated with was not supported by his experiments.

"I was shocked. I was horrified," she said.

And when she looked for other studies, none of those matched up to the claim either.

In the most recent, two years ago, only 3% of letters reached their target.

This appears to be old news, but I only recently came across it in a post by Arthur Caplan at the AJOB Editors Blog. 

Four Million Dollar Prosthetic Arm

CNN reports on a woman who received a "bionic" arm.  Here's the story (scroll down for really impressive video footage of the arm that starts after a 30 second commercial).  Here's a snippet:

"Most people have been looking at trying to tap into the brain, but that has a number of challenges," says Todd Kuiken, who heads neural engineering at the Chicago institute. Implants are "becoming more doable, but if something breaks you have to have surgery to fix it. The exciting thing about this technique is we are not implanting anything into her body."

Kuiken found a way to use chest muscles to connect the prosthetic to nerves that once sent signals to the hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder. After an amputation, the brain still thinks the arm is there. It feels sensations and sends signals to move. But those signals are too weak for modern mechanics to detect from the surface of the skin, so Kuiken's team amplified them.

First, plastic surgeon Greg Dumanian of Northwestern Memorial Hospital moved the targeted nerves into muscles in Mitchell's chest. Then, the nerves that cause the motion of those muscles were disconnected. Mitchell can no longer send a signal to flex her pectoral muscle, but when she wants to close her hand or bend her elbow, the nerve impulse moves her "pec."

When that muscle moves, it sends a signal strong enough for a sensor on the skin to detect. After some rewiring by Dumanian, six muscles in Mitchell's chest now move six motors in the bionic arm.

Imitation and Human Nature.

Adam previously linked to the videos of macaque infants imitating their human handlers. These studies show that social learning is not, as previously thought, limited to higher primates (us and our closest relatives) but appeared in earlier members of our lineage. But what is the purpose of imitation? And what does it tell us about human beings?

Why, first, would evolution select for imitation? Evolution is blind to means; it selects for ends only. Whatever works, reliably enough, is selected for. So one possibility is that imitation is simply a cheaper way of getting something primates could have got in some other way. On this hypothesis, imitation is a means whereby primates acquire – by learning – behaviors that could have been innately specified instead. It might be cheaper, in evolutionary terms (more easily accessible, requiring less internal machinery, and requiring less energetic costs) to allow behavior to be learned than to wire it in. Of course, this will have costs of its own: if for some reason the environment is unsuited for learning (eg. the infant primate finds itself abandoned) then it will not be able to acquire survival relevant skills. But evolution can’t plan for the future. If it works well enough – better than actual alternatives – it’ll get selected for, no matter what its costs.

However, though this might be part of the reason why primates developed a facility for imitation in the first place, I don’t think it’s the whole story. If imitation were simply a means whereby we acquired behaviors that might have been hard-wired, I think it would lack some features it exhibits. In particular, the cross-species differences in imitation would probably go the other way to the actual facts.

We often speak of someone “aping” someone else when they imitate. We seem to be suggesting that imitation is more a characteristic of “lower” primates than of humans. But that’s false. Consider this experiment, several variations of which have now been run. Researchers place tempting sweets out of reach of the subject, but show her how to use a rake to drag them toward her. The demonstration is performed with the prongs of the rake facing down: since the sweets are small, most of them slip through the gaps between the prongs, but a few are dragged within reach of the subject. It would be far more efficient to flip the take 180 degrees, so that the flat side is used: then no sweets would escape. But the subjects are not given a demonstration of this technique. Then they are given the rake and more sweets are scattered out of reach. How will the subjects respond?

That depends on who the subjects are. Chimps and orangutans generally flip the rake over, making it a more efficient tool. They don’t imitate the behavior they’ve been shown, in detail: they might get the idea of using the tool from the demonstration, but they quickly see how to improve it. Human children, though, use the rake in just the way they’ve been shown. They imitate not only the use of the technique, but also the implementation details. Similarly, infants shown by experimenters how to turn on a switch by butting it with their heads will themselves turn it on by butting, rather than using their hands. We are more likely to “ape” than are apes.

Now, if the hypothesis that imitation was simply a way of transmitting behaviors that might have been hard-wired were true, we shouldn’t find that humans – clever, versatile and innovative humans – are more prone to imitation than other primates. We would expect less imitation, perhaps, but certainly not more. Why do we imitate more than other primates? I suggest the answer is this: it is precisely because we are so innovative that we rely so heavily on imitation, and slavish imitation at that. Suppose a member of our group hits upon a nifty and rather surprising innovation: something rather counterintuitive, like certain ways of treating poisonous plants so that they become edible, or an activity in which the rewards are long delayed (like learning to read). If we were only apish imitators, if when we saw a technique employed we imitated it only if we quite quickly saw the point, and immediately attempted more efficient ways of achieving the goals, we would probably not bother with these techniques – because the rewards are delayed – or, worse, attempt shortcuts which might result in their complete failure. If complex and multistage behaviors and techniques are to be passed on, we must imitate them as exactly as possible, without seeking shortcuts and regardless of whether we can grasp the point. And that’s what we do. We slavishly imitate behaviors, long before we are capable of grasping their point.

Now, all of this is important, I believe, because it illustrates why the nature/nurture, or science/culture dichotomies are fundamentally misconceived. What studying the human mind, using all the relevant disciplines of cognitive science (not just neuroscience, but cognitive and social psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology and philosophy of mind), reveals is that we are by nature cultural animals. Our evolutionary success and the spectacular achievements in knowledge acquisition over recent millennia, are owed to the fact that we are prepared, by nature, for enculturation. Imitation is just one thing we are naturally good at and which makes us fundamentally enculturated. What it gives us is the ability to accumulate innovations: we can pass on very complex behaviors to the next generation, knowing that they will not attempt to innovate on them until they have very thoroughly grasped them first. Whereas a chimp can only pass on relatively simple cultural techniques – those which another chimp is capable of understanding quickly – we can pass on techniques that those who learn don’t understand for a very long time. And that enables us to build brainpower: we can pass on techniques that those who learn only come to understand from the inside: when they have thoroughly absorbed them. In other words, we can transform the cognitive abilities of later generations, by teaching them techniques which will transform their cognitive landscape, secure in the knowledge that the fact that before they learn them they won’t see their point won’t prevent them from learning them.

The Macbeth Effect

Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist provide evidence of what they call a "Macbeth Effect," finding "that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image."  The research is reported in their recent empirical study, "Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing."  The NYT has a story about it here, along with a follow-on op-ed today by Maureen Dowd (may require subscription).  Here's the abstract of the research (emphasis added):

Physical cleansing has been a focal element in religious ceremonies for thousands of years. The prevalence of this practice suggests a psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity. In three studies, we explored what we call the "Macbeth effect"—that is, a threat to one's moral purity induces the need to cleanse oneself. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. Furthermore, we showed that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image. Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they might seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality, enabling people to truly wash away their sins.

NELB Roundup

Here are some neuroethics links I encourage you to look at:

(1) A book review of Louann Brizendine's new book The Female Brain.  MindHacks points to a challenge to the book's claim that women use an average of 20,000 words per day, while men use 7,000;

(2) A neuroeconomics article in the New Yorker (Hat tip: Ivy Lapides);

(3) A link to a free, downloadable copy of Jack Balkin's book, "Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology."  You can also support his decision to make the full-text available online by buying it on Amazon;

(4) A NYT article on the "standing obstacle" to protecting chimpanzee rights;

(5) Finally, a few comments to Neil's thought-provoking post that I add here.

Persistent Vegetative States and Consciousness (Levy)

I’d like to thank Adam for the invitation to blog here. As he mentioned, my interest has been piqued by the recent study showing that a patient apparently in a persistent vegetative state showed brain activity indistinguishable from normal controls when asked to imagine certain actions. I won’t review the study here; Adam has already provided a pointer to popular summaries.  Instead, I want to think about how we should interpret the findings, and about the ethical implications of the studies.

First, are the findings evidence of consciousness? Nicholas Schiff, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, was quoted by the New York Times saying that the study provided “knock-down, drag-out” evidence for conscious activity (the authors of the study themselves are somewhat more cautious, suggesting that the patient is “probably” conscious). I beg to differ. It certainly provides evidence for the hypothesis that she is (perhaps minimally) conscious, but it is far from conclusive. The study shows, recall, that the patient is processing certain kinds of information. There was activity in brain regions associated with speech processing when she was presented with sentences in English, and extra activity when words or sentences were ambiguous. When she was asked to imagine engaging in activities, the relevant areas of the brain – the areas active in conscious controls – were active. This is strong evidence that she is processing the information in a way that is attuned to the semantic content of the sentences addressed to her. But it is not conclusive evidence that she is conscious.

In saying this, I am not supposing that there is anything spooky about consciousness. I am not supposing that consciousness cannot be investigated by imaging techniques. I am merely supposing that we do not – yet – know what counts as evidence for the presence of consciousness, but that we do know that evidence of processing is not evidence of consciousness. We already know that subjects who are, by most standard tests, unconscious engage in processing that is sensitive to the content of sounds they hear. Consider people in a state of automatism. They are able to engage in very complex series of actions, even driving cars while avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic signals. So long as the action is routine, they are capable of engaging in it. Or consider ordinary sleep. While you are asleep you engage in processing of sounds around you. Hence the well-known phenomenon of incorporating such sounds into one’s dreams (and the fact that the alarm clock wakes you). Subpersonal processing without consicousness - as in priming - is a very well-attested fact.

In many ways, this fascinating study is frustrating, because it demonstrates the limits of our knowledge about consciousness. Some of these limits seem very difficult to overcome, even in principle. Philosophers distinguish two kinds of consciousness: phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience, and access consciousness, which occurs when information is globally available for information processing. Neuroscientists routinely assume that the two are closely correlated. That is, they assume that if a subject is conscious of something, they can report it. But the assumption might be false. Suppose that we have subjective experiences that we cannot report, because they never become globally available. In that case, we will have experiences that we cannot express, or recall. If that’s right, investigating the neural correlates of consciousness will be almost impossible: we simply won’t know where to look. So there are several ways we might intepret this study. Here are just some.

(1)    the patient is engaged in information processing like that of a sleeper, and - like the sleeper - is unconscious.

(2)    The patient is engaged in information processing like that of a sleeper, and - like the sleeper - this processing is (phenomenally) conscious. But because this phenomenal consciousness is not access conscious, it is not available for reporting. Hence sleepers often fail to recall their dreams, and the woman can’t report her conscious awareness.

(3)    Sleepers, and some PVS patients, are minimally conscious: there is some, reduced, awareness of surroundings.

Finally, and very briefly,what are the ethical issues raised here? Others have commented on the possibility that this case will raise hopes that are probably unfounded. The young woman in the study suffered comparatively little brain damage; that is, compared to many other PVS patients. It is also important that we see whether the study can be replicated. But I want to set these questions aside, and instead focus on the implicit assumption that the value of a life – to the person whose life it is – is proportional to her degree of conscious awareness.

In general, this assumption has a lot going for it: conscious experience may be what makes life worth living. A lot of philosophers have wondered what consciousness is for: given that we can get along without it, why did evolution go to all the trouble and expense (from the evolutionary point of view) of developing it? Whatever the answer to that question may be, it is plausible that moral value is something that comes with consciousness: it is only because we can experience (music, art, a lover’s touch, the taste of wine, pain and pleasure) that we are ends and not merely means (to speak with Kant). But it doesn’t follow that for this woman her life is better if she is conscious. In fact, she may be much worse off if she is conscious. If she has no prospect of recovering any control over her body, then she is a state that is much like locked-in syndrome, only  worse. She is, if conscious, trapped in a state that must be horrifically frustrating and boring. If her responses are indicative of a good prognosis, then we should welcome these results. But if they are instead indicative of an indefinite future of consciousness without control, then they are not, for her, a good sign at all.