Neuroethics & Law Blog

Lie Detection using fMRI in the New Yorker

Margaret Talbot has written an article for the New Yorker on efforts to develop fMRI-based methods of lie detection (link to abstract).  This is another version of the sort of article you've probably read many times by now in mainstream publications, but I think this one has somewhat more depth than most.  Here are some highlights of recent events that you may not know about:

• Joel Huizenga, who started No Lie MRI, "has charged about a dozen clients approximately ten thousand dollars apiece for an examination";
• In response to the ACLU's FOIA request about C.I.A. use of fMRI-based lie detection, "the C.I.A. would neither 'confirm nor deny' that it is investigating fMRI applications."
• Huizenga told Talbot "that he was trying to get fMRI evidence evidence admitted into a California court for a capital case that he was working on. (He would not go into the case's details.)"

The article also claims that "[s]ome bioethicists have been particularly credulous, assuming that MRI mind reading is virtually a done deal, and arguing that there is a need for a whole new field: 'neuroethics.'"  I'm skeptical of both parts of this claim.  I'm sure there are some bioethicists who think that this is a done deal, but I suspect that's less common than the article seems to suggest; admittedly, many more think that it will someday be a done deal (and they may well be right!).  As to the second claim, I'm not sure what it means to "need a . . . whole new field," but I think it's pretty obvious that whatever "neuroethics" is, it is surely closely tied to many existing, well-established fields of inquiry.  And, whatever "neuroethics" is, it is surely about more than just fMRI scanning.

NYT: Personalized Psychopharmacology (Murphy)

This week's NYTimes Health section features an article by Dr. Richard Friedman titled "On the Horizon, Personalized Depression Drugs."  He gives an overview of recent advances in pharmacogenomics and highlights the benefits of the field to psychiatry as: 1) producing better therapeutic outcomes for patients, 2) avoiding undesirable or risky side effects, and, as an indirect consequence, 3) "chang(ing) the relationship between doctors and the drug industry and between the industry and the public":

Direct-to-consumer advertising will become nearly irrelevant because the drugs will no longer be interchangeable, but will be prescribed based on an individual’s biological profile. Likewise, doctors will have little reason to meet with drug company representatives because they won’t be able to give doctors the single most important piece of information: which drug for which patient. For that doctors will need a genetic test, not a salesman.

An interesting angle, given the recent press about drug companies influence over physician prescribing habits.  Certainly a new DTC/DTP advertising market would emerge for companies producing gene chips or other technology used in pharmacogenomic assessments.

Dr. Friedman closes his article with an appeal to the reader's "common sense psychology" of dualism, that the mind is fundamentally different from the brain (to borrow from Bloom and Weisberg, Science 18 May 2007, and Bloom's Descartes' Baby).  Friedman closes:   

Soon, your psychiatrist will really get to know you — not just your mind, but your brain, too. Treatment doesn’t get more personal than that.

Perhaps the improving influence of pharmacogenomics on psychiatric treatment of depression and other mental illnesses will further nudge the the public zeitgeist away from dualism towards a unified sense of mental processes, both normal and maladapted, arising from processes in the brain that may be altered by medical intervention.

Ethics, Neuroimaging, and Limited States of Consciousness (Murphy)

It is great to be a part of this blog!  Thanks to Prof. Kolber for hosting and to all the other guest bloggers for their contributions. 

An upcoming neuroethics event may be of interest to readers: "Ethics, Neuroimaging, and Limited States of Consciousness" is a one-day workshop at Stanford on June 28th.  This event will bring together experts in neuroimaging and neuroscience, law, biomedical and clinical ethics, as well as patient and community stakeholders for a discussion of the issues surrounding consent, research, and clinical objectives for this patient population.  The morning session is free and open to the public.  More information can be found here.

I will post an update on the proceedings after the conference. 

Welcome Emily Murphy

I'm pleased to report that neuroscientist Emily Murphy is about to begin a guest blogging stint at the Neuroethics & Law Blog.  Emily is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Neuroethics program and will soon be a fellow at the Center for Law and Biosciences at Stanford Law School.  Welcome!

Pain Treatment in the NYT

The most recent New York Times Magazine cover story (see here) concerns the prescription of opiods to treat pain.  The principal theme of the article is that there is sometimes a fine line between adequately treating a patient's pain and overprescribing medicines that are likely to be abused.  Here is an excerpt:

(Illustration by Suellen Parker for the NYT)

Identifying the scammers is especially tricky because there is no objective test for pain — it doesn’t show up on an X-ray. In one British study, half the respondents who complained of lower-back pain had normal M.R.I.’s. Conversely, a third of those with no pain showed disk degeneration on their M.R.I.’s. The study suggested there could be a profound disconnection between what an M.R.I. sees and what a patient feels.

There are red flags that indicate possible abuse or diversion: patients who drive long distances to see the doctor, or ask for specific drugs by name, or claim to need more and more of them. But people with real pain also occasionally do these things. The doctor’s dilemma is how to stop the diverters without condemning other patients to suffer unnecessarily, since a drug diverter and a legitimate patient can look very much alike. The dishonest prescriber and the honest one can also look alike. Society has a parallel dilemma: how to stop drug-dealing doctors without discouraging real ones and worsening America’s undertreatment of pain.

In this article draft, I discuss some promising technologies that may someday make our pain measurements more objective, along with some of the neuroethics-related issues the technology may raise along the way.

MR/PET Scan Fusion Technology

MindHacks posts here about advances in neuroimaging technology that combine magnetic resonance images with PET images.  Apparently, the technology makes it easier to combine information from each kind of image--you don't have to take images in two different machines and then try to overlay them.  Here's some more from Radiology Today:

In recent years, the MRI/PET fusion has been successfully tested in the imaging of small animals, but industry observers didn’t expect to see a commercially available clinical system until the end of the decade. However, development has moved along at a relatively rapid clip. In 2006, Siemens Medical Solutions acquired the first images of human subjects. By the end of that year, at RSNA 2006, Siemens previewed its hybrid system (which it terms MR/PET) as an investigational device. The company expects to make the first version of this system commercially available in the United States this year.

That first commercial system will be a head-only system designed for neurological applications, particularly brain tumors and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and epilepsy.

“Those are the key applications we’re looking at with this initial version,” says Jeffrey Bundy, PhD, Siemens’ senior director of MR research and development in the United States.

Complementary Modalities
When it does become commercially available, Bundy believes users will realize the accurate coregistration of anatomical data provided by MRI and functional data supplied by PET. “That was the main factor that drove the development of the system,” he says.

“Considered in conjunction, MRI and PET are very complementary to each other. Magnetic resonance provides high resolutions of soft tissue while PET yields important functional information.”

Thanks to Caitlin Connors

I send my thanks to Caitlin Connors for her most recent guest blogging stint.  If you haven't already, you should check out her last post (directly below this one) .  We'll look forward to having her back again soon!

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience (Connors)

Yale University PhD student Deena Skolnick Weisberg just sent out notice that her article, "The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations," is now in press at the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.  In short, Weisberg's study suggests that people are much more willing to buy bad scientific explanations of phenomenon if they contain some sort of neuroscience reference - such as a comment that the phenomenon is associated with activity in a certain part of the brain - even if that reference is irrelevant to the logic of the argument being made.  Her work provides a little confirmatory data for some long-held suspicions about the power of neuro-talk to overwhelm good critical thinking.  Skolnick notes that this power deserves consideration given the increasing use of neuroimaging or neuroscience data in courtroom evaluations of guilt, free will, and responsibility.

Weisberg's initial data received a lot of prepublication attention back in June 2006, when Paul Bloom referenced it in his Seed magazine discussion of fMRI hype, "Seduced by the Flickering Lights."  Her findings, and the article in general, inspired a lot of discussion about the value/hype ratio of fMRI science and about the general social impact of neuroscience research.  Although not all of them agreed with Bloom's assertions (for example, that fMRI was dramatically overfunded and overvalued), I remember many of my colleagues relishing the opportunity for more critical discussion of contemporary neuroimaging.  Perhaps Weisberg's new article will spark a continuation of that discussion in the academy and the blogworld - I'm very happy she's found a home for it.

It's worth note that some significant changes to the findings have occurred since Paul Bloom's reference of Weisberg's original findings.  The study evaluated the effect of neuroscience data on argument evaluation in three groups: novices, students in a cognitive neuroscience class, and scientific experts (cognitive neuroscientists).  Bloom's version of the data suggested that even the Yale Psychology experts were seduced by the misleading neuroscience details.  However, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience version reports significant effects only in the novice and neuroscience student groups, not the expert group.   This pattern of results isn't particularly surprising, but it tells a slightly different story than we'd expected from the Seed article, which implicated that scientists as a whole had been duped by the neuroscience enterprise and imaging data.  Make sure to update your neuroscience water-cooler talk, folks!

Until publication time, Weisberg's study can be accessed via her homepage, here.

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Update: It looks like Deena's last name has changed this year from Skolnick to Skolnick Weisberg. I've updated the entry accordingly.  My apologies to the author.

The Law & Psychology of Proximity

Adam Hirsch (FSU, Law) and Gregory Mitchell (UVA, Law) have posted Law and Proximity to SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Perceptions of proximity matter to people. When something that harms them was nearly avoided, or when they narrowly escape being harmed by something, or when they almost acquire something they want, but nevertheless fail to do so, they tend to react more strongly than when a harm that befalls them was unavoidable or when a potential harm never came close to occurring, or when they miss getting the thing they want by a lot. In this article, we explore these psychological phenomena and their implications for legal policy and process. We begin by reviewing the existing literature on the psychology of proximity and proceed to consider the implications of that psychology for the law of torts and crimes (i.e., harms), and for the law of auctions and gambling (i.e., goods). We then turn to examples of the phenomena produced by law itself - that is, to near misses of legality. Here we address how lawmakers could mitigate the frustrations of near misses by structuring law, and the manner in which legal judgments are issued, differently. In particular, we will focus on the implications of the psychology of proximity for the rules-standards debate and assess the virtues of substantial compliance doctrines in that context, a form of legal structure that has received insufficient attention in the course of that debate. Our ultimate conclusion is that lawmakers should take the psychology of proximity into consideration when they make policy choices, but in so doing lawmakers need to bear in mind the potential functionality of that psychology. Near miss experiences can be painful but simultaneously educational, stirring behavioral adjustments in those who endure them.

Dutch Kidney Contest Was a "Hoax"

The Dutch "reality" show in which we were led to believe that a kidney donor would select a donee (see earlier post here) is not what it appeared to be.  From MSNBC:

Shortly before the controversial program was to air, Patrick Lodiers of the “Big Donor Show” said the woman was not actually dying of a brain tumor as claimed and the entire exercise was intended to add pressure on the government and to raise public awareness of the need for organs.

The three prospective recipients were real patients in need of transplants and had been in on the hoax, the show said.

For some discussion, see the AJOB Editors Blog.