Neuroethics & Law Blog

Roberts and Brain Fingerprinting

Today's NYT Magazine contains an article by Jeffrey Rosen on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts and the high-tech issues that he might face on the Court if he's confirmed.  Among the technologies prominently featured, there is a section entitled "Brain Fingerprinting and the Future of Privacy Rights." 

This portion of the article may be inadvertently misleading.  The term brain fingerprinting is usually used to refer to a particular technology based on electroencephalography or "EEG" (see here).  EEGs measure event related potentials that can be measured on a subject’s scalp a fraction of a second after the subject is exposed to certain stimuli.  See, e.g., Paul Root Wolpe, Kenneth R. Foster, Daniel D. Langleben, Emerging Neurotechnologies for Lie-Detection: Promises and Perils, 5 Am. J. of Bioethics 39, 41 (2005).  The NYT article, however, seems to use the term to apply to functional magnetic resonance imaging "fMRI".

Also, I believe the case that is referenced in the article is Harrington v. State, 659 N.W.2d 509 (Iowa 2003), which relied on EEG rather than fMRI, contrary to the article.  If I'm missing something here, please let me know in the comments.

Emotions, Brains, and Robots

Zack Lynch at Brain Waves Blog previews his forthcoming book review in Lancet Neurology on the book  Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot (Oxford University Press, 2005).  The book sounds quite interesting, as does the review.  (Thanks to Zack for his kind reference to the Neuroethics & Law Blog here!)

Neuroethics Interview on Australian Radio

Natasha Mitchell, host of the Australian radio program, "All in the Mind," has this excellent interview (link is to the transcript) with Judy Illes and Martha Farah on neuroethics.  The interview is titled, "Neuroethics and the 21st Century Brain."  It's hard not to love this opening quotation from Kierkegaard:

What a sensation stethoscopy caused! Soon we will have reached the point where every barber uses it; when he is shaving you, he will ask: 'Would you care to be stethoscoped sir?' Then someone else will invent an instrument for listening to the pulses of the brain. That will make a tremendous stir, until in 50 years’ time every barber can do it. Then, when one has had a haircut and shave and been stethescoped, for by now it will be quite common, the barber will ask, 'Perhaps sir, you would like me to listen to your brain pulses?'

– Kierkegaard, 1846.

Neuroethics Collection Forthcoming

July Illes (Neuroethics/Radiology, Stanford) is the editor of a collection of essays on neuroethics that is slated to come out on October 15th.  Here's the info. from the Oxford University Press web site, and here's the TOC:

• Part I - Neuroscience, ethics, agency and the self
• 1 Patricia S. Churchland: Moral decision-making and the brain
• 2 Adina Roskies: A case study in neuroethics: the nature of moral judgment
• 3 Stephen J. Morse: Moral and legal responsibility and the new neuroscience
• 4 Tom Buller: Brains, lies and psychological explanations
• 5 Laurie Zoloth: Being in the world
• 6 Erik Parens: Creativity, gratitude and the enhancement debate: on the fertile tension between two ethical frameworks
• 7 Agnieszka Jaworska: Ethical dilemmas in neurodegenerative disease: respecting the margins of agency
• Part II - Neuroethics in practice
• 8 Ronald M. Green: From genome to brainome: charting lessons learned
• 9 Franklin G. Miller & Joseph Fins: Protecting human subjects in brain research: a pragmatic perspective
• 10 Michael S. Gazzaniga: Facts, fictions and the future of neuroethics
• 11 Judy Illes, Eric Racine & Matthew P. Kirschen: A picture is worth 1000 words, but which 1000?
• 12 Turhan Canli: When genes and brains unite: ethical implications of genomic neuroimaging
• 13 Kenneth R. Foster: Engineering the mind
• 14 Megan S. Steven & Alvaro Pascual-Leone: Transcranial magnetic stimulation and the human brain: an ethical evaluation
• 15 Paul J. Ford & Jaimie Henderson: Functional neurosurgical intervention: neuroethics in the operating room
• 16 Robert Klitzman: Clinicians, patients and the brain
• Part III - Justice, social institutions and neuroethics
• 17 Henry Greely: The social effects of advances in neuroscience: legal problems, legal perspectives
• 18 Martha J. Farah, Kimberly G. Noble & H. Hurt: Poverty, privilege and the developing brain: empirical findings and ethical implications
• 19 Kim Sheridan, Elena Zinchenko & Howard Gardner: Neuroethcis in education
• 20 Paul Root Wolpe: Religious responses to neuroscientific questions
• 21 Maren Grainger-Monsen & Kim Karetsky: The mind in the movies: a neuroethical analysis of the portrayal of the mind in popular media

Attempted Murder and PTSD

You may have heard about a marine with recent combat experience who was charged with attempted murder after firing a shotgun at a noisy crowd.  Bullet fragments struck two people. See here.  And here's a bit more:

Fitchburg native Daniel Cotnoir was the 2005 Marine Corps Times "Marine of the Year," an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran charged with the awful job of gathering bodies, body parts and belongings and preparing them for return to families back home.

Now Cotnoir is being charged with two counts of attempted murder after police said he fired a 12-gauge shotgun into a noisy crowd outside his Lawrence apartment.

Cotnoir's psychological condition is unclear, but professionals dealing with those returning from the war in Iraq say soldiers are facing extraordinary, unprecedented psychological pressures.

Mind Hacks has recently posted interesting links on PTSD from combat stress, including this one from the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs.

Common Sense in Theory Selection

In today's NYT, science writer John Horgan writes in defense of (what he deems) common sense in evaluating scientific theories.  He notes, in particular, his skepticism about metaphysical entities that cannot be observed.  He also adds this criticism of "mind-science":

OVER the past century, moreover, mind-science has been as faddish as teenage tastes in music, as one theory has yielded to another. Everything we think and do, scientists have assured us, can be explained by the Oedipal complex, or conditioned reflexes, or evolutionary adaptations, or a gene in the X chromosome, or serotonin deficits in the amygdala. Given this rapid turnover in paradigms, it's only sensible to doubt them all until the evidence for one becomes overwhelming.

Ironically, while many scientists disparage common sense, artificial-intelligence researchers have discovered just how subtle and powerful an attribute it is. Over the past few decades, researchers have programmed computers to perform certain well-defined tasks extremely well; computers can play championship chess, calculate a collision between two galaxies and juggle a million airline reservations. But computers fail miserably at simulating the ordinary, experience-based intelligence that helps ordinary humans get through ordinary days. In other words, computers lack common sense, and that's why even the smartest ones are so dumb.

AI and ELIZA

Inspired by this post on artificial intelligence at Mind Hacks, I offer a blast from the past.  Here and here are links to versions of ELIZA, a sort-of-natural-language computer therapist.  For other versions and background information, see here.

Gazzaniga Neuroethics Interview

See U.S. News & World Report here.  Here's one q&a on the insanity defense:

Do you believe in an insanity defense?

I never have. You know one of the reasons is if you look at schizophrenics for example. Their rate of violent behavior is not above that of the normal population, especially when they're on their medication. So, if that's true, how can you use that as a defense, that they're doing something because they're insane. But the notion of personal responsibility has to do with the fact that people follow rules because they're in a social group and people with these various kinds of disorders can still follow those rules.

3 JAMA Law & Mental Health Articles

Great summaries and links by Douglas Mossman here.

Fake Memories to Help Lose Weight?

New Scientist reports on research led by Elizabeth Loftus indicating that we can suggest "memories" to people that will lead them to avoid eating certain foods:

In her latest work, her team convinced volunteers that they had been sick after eating strawberry ice cream as a child. Loftus and her colleagues gave 228 undergraduate students questionnaires about food. The volunteers subsequently received feedback on their questionnaires that suggested they had had an unpleasant experience related to food in the past. The researchers told them this conclusion had been generated by a sophisticated computer program. A control group of 107 received no feedback.

It was found that 41 per cent of the first group took on the false childhood memory and were more averse to eating strawberry ice cream afterwards (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0504869102).

For more, including the above, see here, here, and here. 

Article on Gov't Regulation of Irrationality

Jonathan Klick and Gregory Mitchell (both Florida State University College of Law) have posted Government Regulation of Irrationality: Moral and Cognitive Hazards (Minnesota Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. (Thanks Legal Theory Blog). Here is the abstract:

Behavioral law and economics scholars who advance paternalistic policy proposals typically employ static models of decision-making behavior, despite the dynamic effects of paternalistic policies. In this article, we consider how paternalistic policies fare under a dynamic account of decision-making that incorporates learning and motivation effects. This approach brings out two important limitations on the efficiency effects of paternalistic regulations. First, if preferences and biases are endogenous to institutional forces, paternalistic government regulations may perpetuate and even magnify a given bias and cause other adverse psychological effects. Second, for some biases, it will be more efficient to invest resources in debiasing than to change legal rights and remedies or, in some cases, to do nothing in light of the natural variation in irrational propensities. We propose dynamic models for determining ex ante and ex post when accommodation of bias will be second-best efficient. These models direct decision-makers to consider (1) the efficiency cost of the bias; (2) the extent to which accommodation worsens the bias or, alternatively, the extent to which non-accommodation improves the bias or has other benefits; and (3) the potential for education or other mechanisms to debias an individual. We argue that the concept of "cognitive hazard" - the potential for the costs of a bias to increase as individuals are insulated from the adverse effects of the bias - should be added to the concept of moral hazard as important qualifications to paternalistic proposals.

Intentional Battery and Double Effect

John Mikhail (Law, Georgetown) has posted "Aspects of the Theory of Moral Cognition: Investigating Intuitive Knowledge of the Prohibition of Intentional Battery and the Principle of Double Effect" on SSRN.  I had the pleasure of being in the same small section as John in law school, and I have always been interested in his work.  Here is the abstract:

Where do our moral intuitions come from? Are they innate? Does the brain contain a module specialized for moral judgment? Does the human genetic program contain instructions for the acquisition of a sense of justice or moral sense? Questions like these have been asked in one form or another for centuries. In this paper we take them up again, with the aim of clarifying them and developing a specific proposal for how they can be empirically investigated. The paper presents data from five trolley problem studies of several hundred individuals, including one group of Chinese adults and one group of American children, which suggest that both adults and children ages 8-12 rely on intuitive knowledge of moral principles, including the prohibition of intentional battery and the principle of double effect, to determine the permissibility of actions that require harming one individual in order to prevent harm to others. Significantly, the knowledge in question appears to be merely tacit: when asked to explain or justify their judgments, subjects were consistently incapable of articulating the operative principles on which their judgments appear to have been based. We explain these findings with reference to an analogy to human linguistic competence. Just as normal persons are typically unaware of the principles guiding their linguistic intuitions, so too are they often unaware of the principles guiding their moral intuitions. These studies pave the way for future research by raising the possibility that specific poverty of the stimulus arguments can be formulated in the moral domain. Differences between our approach to moral cognition and those of Piaget (1932), Kohlberg (1981), and Greene et al. (2001) are also discussed.

Psychology of Stage Magic

Article here (via Mind Hacks). A sample:

Psychologists can use these tricks to catch a glimpse into how our minds interpret the world around us.

"Magicians are manipulating your consciousness. They are showing you something impossible," says Wiseman. "They're getting you to construct a narrative, which simply isn't true. So that means they know how to make you aware of certain things and blind to other things. What I'm hoping is that magic, this entertainment vehicle that has been around for a long time, will give us a real insight into the deep mysteries of consciousness."

Our brains filter out a huge amount of the mass of sensory input flooding in from our environment. Kuhn explains that we see what we expect to see and what our brains are interested in. "Our visual representation of the world is much more impoverished than we would assume. People can be looking at something without being aware of it. Perception doesn't just involve looking at an object but attending to it."