Neuroethics & Law Blog

Enhancing Ability to Deceive

Free full text here, abstract below:

"The Truth about Lying: Inhibition of the Anterior Prefrontal Cortex Improves Deceptive Behavior"

Ahmed A. Karim^1,2, Markus Schneider^1,2, Martin Lotze^1,3, Ralf Veit¹, Paul Sauseng^1,4, Christoph Braun¹ and Niels Birbaumer^1,5

Abstract: Recent neuroimaging studies have indicated a predominant role of the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) in deception and moral cognition, yet the functional contribution of the aPFC to deceptive behavior remains unknown. We hypothesized that modulating the excitability of the aPFC by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could reveal its functional contribution in generating deceitful responses. Forty-four healthy volunteers participated in a thief role-play in which they were supposed to steal money and then to attend an interrogation with the Guilty Knowledge Test. During the interrogation, participants received cathodal, anodal, or sham tDCS. Remarkably, inhibition of the aPFC by cathodal tDCS did not lead to an impairment of deceptive behavior but rather to a significant improvement. This effect manifested in faster reaction times in telling lies, but not in telling the truth, a decrease in sympathetic skin-conductance response and feelings of guilt while deceiving the interrogator and a significantly higher lying quotient reflecting skillful lying. Increasing the excitability of the aPFC by anodal tDCS did not affect deceptive behavior, confirming the specificity of the stimulation polarity. These findings give causal support to recent correlative data obtained by functional magnetic resonance imaging studies indicating a pivotal role of the aPFC in deception.

^{(via Mindhacks)}

"Fractional Parents" in Today's NYT

My work on "fractional (biological) parents" is highlighted on the editorial page of today's New York Times.  The piece, by Adam Cohen, adeptly connects the more futuristic issues of parenthood that I discuss to a current case in New Jersey.  The case, with the not-so-easy-to-remember name A.G.R. v. D.R.H. & S.H., hearkens back to Baby M; so far at least, the case gives substantial weight to biological parenthood. 

You can find my more detailed discussion of fractional biological parenthood here. 

Facelift for Westlaw and Lexis

According to the New York Times, Westlaw and Lexis are about to modernize their web interfaces.  It's about time!  The article is short on details, but having read it, I'm not very optimistic that the updates will be anything near what they could and should be.  Three years ago, I put my wishlist up on Prawfsblawg (see also the helpful comments there).  I've reprinted the post after the jump. (X-posted)

"The Costs and Benefits of Calculation and Moral Rules"

Recently posted to SSRN:

"The Costs and Benefits of Calculation and Moral Rules" 

Perspectives on Psychological Science, Forthcoming

WILL M. BENNIS, Northwestern University
DOUGLAS L. MEDIN, affiliation not provided to SSRN
DANIEL M. BARTELS, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago GSB
There has been a recent upsurge of research on moral judgment and decision making. One important issue with this body of work concerns the relative advantages of calculating costs and benefits versus adhering to moral rules. The general tenor of recent research suggests that (i) adherence to moral rules is associated with systematic biases, and (ii) systematic cost-benefit analysis is a normatively superior decision strategy. The current paper queries both the merits of cost-benefit analyses and the shortcomings of moral rules. We argue that outside the very narrow domain where consequences can be unambiguously anticipated, it is not at all clear that calculation processes optimize outcomes. In addition, there are good reasons to believe that following moral rules can lead to superior consequences in certain contexts. More generally, different modes of decision making can be seen as adaptations to particular environments.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup from JHU Guest Blogger

Last Edition's Most Popular Article The Americanization of mental illness  The New York Times January 8 2010  In the Academic Literature: Neuroscience: The most vulnerable brains  Nature 2010:463:154-156 Neuroscience: Astrocytes as aide-mémoires  Nature 2010:463:169-170 Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network  Nature 2010 January 20 2010 Genetically Increased Cell-Intrinsic Excitability Enhances Neuronal Integration into Adult Brain Circuits  Neuron 2010:65(1):32-30  Heritability of the Specific Cognitive Ability of Face Perception  Cell Biology January 7 2010    Nanowire transistor arrays for mapping neural circuits in acute brain slices  PNAS January 19 2010 Basic mathematical rules are encoded by primate prefrontal cortex neurons  PNAS January 19 2010 Reduction of Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis Confers Vulnerability in an Animal Model of Cocaine Addiction  The Journal of Neuroscience 2010:30(1):304-315 Alleviation of drenching sweats following subthalamic deep brain stimulation in a patient with Parkinson's disease — A case report  Journal of Neurological Sciences 2009:285(1-2):246-249 Neurolaw  Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 2010:1(1):18-22 Brain-reading of perceived colors reveals a feature mixing mechanism underlying perceptual filling-in in cortical area V1  Human Brain Mapping January 19 2010  Stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus and impulsivity: Release your horses  Annals of Neurology 2009:66(6):817-824 Impulsive and compulsive behaviors in Parkinson's disease  Movement Disorders 2009:24(11):1561-1570 Deep brain stimulation and cognitive functions in Parkinson's disease: A three-year controlled study  Movement Disorders 2009:24(11):1621-1628 Unsupervised statistical learning underpins computational, behavioural, and neural manifestations of musical expectation  NeuroImage December 11 2009  In the Popular Press: Scientists Find a Shared Gene in Dogs With Compulsive Behavior  The New York Times January 18 2010 Rude Awakening: How the media frenzy around a Belgian man misdiagnosed as being in a vegetative state came to haunt the doctor who treated him.  Newsweek January 7 2010 Bornean orangutan acts as ‘peacemaker' in Japan zoo  BBC Earth News January 20 2010   How is the internet changing the way that you think?  Neuroethics at the Core January 15 2010 Some Social Skills May Be Genetic  Wired Science January 19 2010 Face Recognition Ability Inherited Separately from IQ  Science Daily January 20 2010 Video Game Success May Be in the Mind BBC News January 20 2010  Brain asymmetry eases hypnotic trance  New Scientist January 20 2010

The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

"Neuroimaging and the Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Treatment from Patients in Vegetative State"

Recently posted to SSRN:

"Neuroimaging and the Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Treatment from Patients in Vegetative State" 

Medical Law Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2009
U of Melbourne Legal Studies Research Paper No. 433

LOANE SKENE, University of Melbourne - Law School
DOMINIC WILKINSON, University of Oxford - Division of Public Health and Primary Health Care
GUY KAHANE, University of Oxford – Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
JULIAN SAVULESCU, University of Oxford - Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
In a recent English case before the Family Division of the English High Court, the Official Solicitor objected to the withdrawal of treatment from a patient diagnosed as being in vegetative state (VS) despite agreement between the NHS Trust and the patient’s family that treatment should be withdrawn: An NHS Trust v. J. One objection arose from the possibility, based on a recent medical article, that a functional magnetic resonance imaging test (fMRI, commonly called a brain scan) might indicate that the patient retained a degree of consciousness. This seems to be the first objection of this kind and in this case, after a short time, the Official Solicitor agreed with the family and the Trust that treatment should be withdrawn without performing fMRI. However, all cases involving the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from patients in VS must come before a court (now the Court of Protection) and the issue is likely to be raised again. Indeed, given the significant advances in neuroimaging studies of VS since 2006, and probable further scientific progress in the near future, questions about the legal significance of fMRI are likely to become increasingly important.

This paper assesses the possible effects on decision making about the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment if fMRI suggests that a patient in VS has some level of consciousness. It focuses on the principles set out in the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (UK) (which has come into force since the case mentioned above), the Mental Capacity Act Code of Practice (CoP) and the common law. Relevant legal factors include the patient’s wishes expressed in an ‘advance decision to refuse medical treatment’ under the Act, decisions by a donee of a lasting power of attorney appointed under the Act, both of which are binding under the Act if they apply in the circumstances; and, if there is no such provision, the patient’s best interests, taking account of the patient’s wishes inferred from general evidence and the futility of continuing treatment. Current research suggests that neuroimaging will at most establish that some patients diagnosed as being in VS are in fact in a condition that clinicians describe as a ‘minimally conscious state’ (MCS). The patients reported to date have not recovered beyond that state and, indeed, may revert to VS. However, applications for fMRI when judicial approval is sought from the Court of Protection to withdraw treatment from patients in VS may delay the process and raise issues for the Court in assessing the relevance of fMRI to the patient’s interests. This paper outlines legal principles relevant to judicial review and discusses underlying philosophical issues, including the limited availability of resources for health care.

"Forgetting We Forget: Overconfidence and Memory"

Recently posted to SSRN:

"Forgetting We Forget: Overconfidence and Memory" 

Journal of the European Economic Association, Forthcoming

KEITH M. MARZILLI ERICSON, Harvard University - Department of Economics
Do individuals have unbiased beliefs, or are they over- or underconfident? Overconfident individuals may fail to prepare optimally for the future, and economists who infer preferences from behavior under the assumption of unbiased beliefs will make mistaken inferences. This paper documents overconfidence in a new domain, prospective memory, using an experimental design that is more robust to potential confounds than previous research. Subjects chose between smaller automatic payments and larger payments they had to remember to claim at a six-month delay. In a large sample of college and MBA students at two different universities, subjects make choices that imply a forecast of a 76% claim rate, but only 53% of subjects actually claimed the payment.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup from JHU Guest Blogger

Last Edition's Most Popular Article On the relevance of neuroscience to criminal responsibility  Criminal Law and Philosophy November 26 2009  In the Academic Literature: Morphine use after combat injury in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder New England Journal of Medicine 2010: 362: 110-7 Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms Nature 2010:463:49-53    A neurosemantic theory of concrete noun representation based on the underlying brain codes  PLoSONE January 13 2010    Role of the amygdala in antidepressant effects on hippocampal cell proliferation and survival and on depression-like behavior in the rat PLoSONE January 8 2010    How to read a picture: lessons from nonhuman primates  PNAS January 8 2010    Remission of Major Depression Under Deep Brain Stimulation of the Lateral Habenula in a Therapy-Refractory Patient  Biological Psychiatry 2010:66(10):e9-e11    Bithalamical deep brain stimulation in Tourette Syndrome Is associated with reduction in dopaminergic transmission  Biological Psychiatry 2010:66(10):e15-e17  bilateral epidural prefrontal cortical stimulation for treatment-resistant depression Biological Psychiatry 2010:67(2):101-109  Nucleus accumbens deep brain stimulation decreases ratings of depression and anxiety in treatment-resistant depression  Biological Psychiatry 2010:67(2):110-116  Genetic and environmental contributions to neonatal brain structure: a twin study Human Brain Mapping January 8 2010    Observations on unaided smoking cessation after deep brain stimulation of the nucleus accumbens  European Addiction Research 2009:15(4)    Weight changes associated with unilateral STN DBS and advanced PD  Parkinsonism & Related Disorders 2009:15(8):709-711    Waking up the brain: a case study of stimulation-induced wakeful unawareness during anaesthesia  Progress in Brain Research 2009:177:125-145  In the Popular Press: Monkeys go out on a limb to show gratitude Nature News January 12 2010   Deciphering the chatter of monkeys and chimps  The New York Times January 11 2010      The Americanization of mental illness  The New York Times January 8 2010    You won’t find consciousness in the brain  New Scientist January 07 2010    The future of brain-controlled devices  CNN January 4 2009    Major step forward in developing ‘real’  pharmacological cognitive enhancers  Neuroethics at the Core January 12 2010  Burst of neural activity marks transition between not seeing and seeing Science Daily January 14 2010 Before you quit antidepressants… The New York Times January 11 2010

The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

Alcoholism's Prozac Moment?

This New Scientist article discusses advances in treating alcoholism using pharmaceuticals.  Such treatments are not used very frequently, though that may change before long.  Here's a sample:

Encouraged by advances in the neuroscience of addiction, positive results from clinical trials and stirrings of interest from big pharma, Heilig and his colleagues are pushing for medication to become a mainstream treatment. Today, the few drugs available to treat alcohol abuse are rarely used outside a small number of specialist centres, but NIAAA's vision is for more and better drugs to be prescribed routinely by psychiatrists and even family doctors.

If they are successful, the result will be alcoholism's "Prozac moment", says Mark Willenbring, NIAAA's head of treatment and recovery research, recalling the time when Prozac revolutionised the way depression was treated following its launch in 1986. By invoking Prozac, however, he will raise both hopes and fears. While it's widely recognised that Prozac and other members of its class - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) - have helped to lift the stigma surrounding depression and greatly expanded treatment options, some analyses suggest that their benefits have been exaggerated.

What's more, the pharmaceutical industry's aggressive marketing of SSRIs to ever wider groups of patients, despite evidence that they may sometimes trigger suicidal feelings, has become a major controversy. In this light, could recent advances in developing anti-alcoholism drugs be the first tentative steps towards the medicalisation of social drinking?

Here's some more:

The available drugs for alcoholism are unlikely to be the new Prozac, however. Naltrexone, for instance, which cuts the desire to drink by blocking opioid receptors in the brain's reward system, has two major drawbacks. First, its benefits vary widely between patients, although genetic tests may help predict which people are likely to respond best to the treatment (see "Different drinkers, different drugs").

Naltrexone's biggest stumbling block, however, is that it fails to treat some of the more painful aspects of abstinence. Drinking dampens the brain's response to stress - indeed, many heavy drinkers become hooked on alcohol for this reason alone. The result is that going cold turkey without also calming the brain's stress pathways can be a distressing experience. "People feel just terrible," says George Koob, a specialist in the neurobiology of addiction at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. "These individuals are miserable. They have panic attacks."

Targeting these drink-hijacked stress pathways - often without even touching the brain's pleasure circuits - is now the hottest area in alcoholism research. In 2008 a team led by Heilig reported that an experimental drug called LY686017, made by Eli Lilly, suppressed cravings for alcohol in a small group of recently detoxified alcoholics (Science, vol 319, p 1536). The drug is known to block the brain's neurokinin 1 receptor, which is involved in behavioural responses to stress.

"You Won't Find Consciousness in the Brain"

Ray Tallis, in New Scientist, claims that "You Won't Find Consciousness in the Brain".  Here's a sample:

Many neurosceptics have argued that neural activity is nothing like experience, and that the least one might expect if A and B are the same is that they be indistinguishable from each other. Countering that objection by claiming that, say, activity in the occipital cortex and the sensation of light are two aspects of the same thing does not hold up because the existence of "aspects" depends on the prior existence of consciousness and cannot be used to explain the relationship between neural activity and consciousness.

This disposes of the famous claim by John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley: that neural activity and conscious experience stand in the same relationship as molecules of H₂O to water, with its properties of wetness, coldness, shininess and so on. The analogy fails as the level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond to different "levels" at which we are conscious of it. But the existence of levels of experience or of description presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these levels.

We cannot therefore conclude that when we see what seem to be neural correlates of consciousness that we are seeing consciousness itself. While neural activity of a certain kind is a necessary condition for every manifestation of consciousness, from the lightest sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, it is neither a sufficient condition of it, nor, still less, is it identical with it. If it were identical, then we would be left with the insuperable problem of explaining how intracranial nerve impulses, which are material events, could "reach out" to extracranial objects in order to be "of" or "about" them. Straightforward physical causation explains how light from an object brings about events in the occipital cortex. No such explanation is available as to how those neural events are "about" the physical object. Biophysical science explains how the light gets in but not how the gaze looks out.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup from JHU Guest Blogger

Last Edition's Most Popular Article Why We Cant Separate Science and Ethics Science Progress December 18 In the Academic Literature: Reducing the desire for cocaine with subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation  PNAS December 28 2009 High-performance genetically targetable optical neural silencing by light-driven proton pumps Nature January 7 2009 Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity  PNAS December 28 2009 Neurodynamics of mental exploration  PNAS December 28 2009 Don't forget the artists when studying perception of art  Nature 2009:463:984    Reproducibility Distinguishes Conscious from Nonconscious Neural Representations  Science 2009:327(5961):97-99 Somatotopic organization of pain responses to direct electrical stimulation of the human insular cortex  Pain 2009:146(1-2):99-104 Evaluating self-generated decisions in frontal pole cortex of monkeys  Nature Neuroscience 2009:13:120-126 Rewiring of hindlimb corticospinal neurons after spinal cord injury  Nature Neuroscience 2009:13:97-104 On the Relevance of Neuroscience to Criminal Responsibility  Criminal Law and Philosophy November 26 2009  In the Popular Press: How to Train the Aging Brain  New York Times December 29 2009    Chimps use cleavers and anvils as tools to chop food  BBC Earth News December 24 2009    Molecules and synapses cement memories, say scientists  BBC News December 24 2009     Wild Chimps Have Near Human Understanding of Fire  Science Daily December 23 2009    Tweeting the brain  Neuroethics at the Core December 23 2009   Neuroethics & the Trolley Dilemma  Youtube October 23 2009

The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

"Sharing the Blame: The Law and Morality of Punishing Collective Entities"

Brooklyn Law School has put together a very interesting program on Feb. 5, 2010 on blaming collective entities.  Here's a link to the program (Download BLS_sharing_blame), and here's a blurb about the event:

About the Program
This Symposium will discuss the nature, ethics, and law of imposing punishment on collective entities. Does it make sense to impose blame on a group as a group, as opposed to its individual members? Even if blame is appropriate, how do we decide the proper form and amount of punishment? How do we even conceive of a group as having its own independent existence or identity? The answers to these questions have significant implications for the scope and enforcement of criminal law. Over the course of several panels, the Symposium will seek to derive broad general insights from various academic disciplines and will consider the practical legal applications of those findings. It will address the psychological processes that lead people to treat groups as having independent existence, and the moral and philosophical consequences of doing so. Later discussion will apply these lessons to the specific legal context of corporate crime.

Exploring Ethical Dualism (Carolyn Suchy-Dicey)

I recently published a paper in Neuroethics called, "It Takes Two: Ethical Dualism in the Vegetative State." In this paper I explore the possibility of ethical dualism, a type of ethical pluralism that I think might help us to answer the problems raised by cases like that of vegetative patients, such as Terri Schiavo and Lauren Richardson. That is, numerous problems in ethics seem to arise when two of our ethical interests conflict: our interest in securing wellbeing for ourselves and others and our interest in respecting the intentions of others. In punishment, for example, these have long been taken to be mutually exclusive types of justification. In ethics, likewise, many theorists seem aligned with either an autonomy-centered or welfare-centered background. By introducing a dualist system I hope to have my cake and eat it; when a case satisfies the minimum conditions of potentially increasing or decreasing welfare, the rules of welfare-centered theories apply, but when a case also satisfies the condition of involving the intentional wishes of an autonomous agent (or a potentially autonomous agent, understood widely), then the rules of autonomy-centered theories also apply. Of course, the interesting cases are those when the two values are in conflict, and I do not yet have a system of solving these conflicts. I am interested in how viable others see this type of dualist picture (and pluralist programs in general). For those still in the dark, a sample application could be animal ethics: in the autonomy-centered approach we may have to refuse animals direct ethical treatment, but in the welfare-centered approach we may have to consider non-autonomous animals as ethically equivalent to autonomous humans. In my dualist approach, the first stage of welfare would apply to all beings that experience welfare, but a second, narrower level would also apply to those who experience autonomy. Thus, we could have both wide scope and special treatment. If you have any thoughts on this, please post them. This is a relatively new project to me, and I would be interested in working on it more.