Neuroethics & Law Blog

Stanford's "Reading Minds" Conference

Prof. Hank Greely at Stanford Law School has sent me information about "Reading Minds: Lie Detection, Neuroscience, Law, and Society" a conference to be held Friday, March 10th.  Here is a link to the poster: Download RdgMindsPoster.pdf  and here is a link to the conference agenda: Download CLBagenda.doc.  With top scientists and neuroethicists from Stanford and elsewhere, this is sure to be a great event.

Neuroethics in Film: "A Scanner Darkly"

Director Richard Linklater (Waking Life, Dazed and Confused) is coming out with a new film based on the Philip K. Dick novel, "A Scanner Darkly." The film stars Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey, and Woody Harrelson in a style of animation reminiscent of Waking Life.  I haven't read the novel, but based on the movie trailer, it appears to have a lot to do with mind-altering drugs, split brain hemispheres, and the dark future of brain scanning.  For more about the film, see here, here, and here. 

Two Books on Happiness

In the most recent New Yorker, John Lanchester reviews two books discussing the science and history of happiness: Jonathan Haidt (Psychology, Virginia), The Happiness Hypothesis, and Darrin McMahon (History, Florida State), Happiness: A History. Along the way, he offers something of a primer on recent work in the field:

For most of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed—a highly contested figure, but let’s call it a million years—it has made good adaptive sense to be fearful, cautious, timid. As Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, puts it in “The Happiness Hypothesis” (Basic; $26), “bad is stronger than good” is an important principle of design by evolution. “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.”

. . .

We can’t be sure, but it seems unlikely that our prehistoric forebears spent much time thinking about whether or not they were happy. As Darrin McMahon, a historian at Florida State University, argues in his heavyweight study of the subject, “Happiness: A History” (Atlantic Monthly Press; $27.50), the idea of happiness is not a human universal that applies across all times and all cultures but a concept that has demonstrably changed over the years. When your attention is fully concentrated on questions of survival, you don’t have the time or the inclination even to formulate the idea of happiness. You have to begin to feel that you have some control over your circumstances before you begin to ask yourself questions about your own state of mind.

. . .

According to positive psychologists, once we’re out of poverty the most important determinant of happiness is our “set point,” a natural level of happiness that is (and this is one of the movement’s most controversial claims) largely inherited. We adapt to our circumstances; we don’t, or can’t, adapt our genes. The evidence for this set point, and the phrase itself, came from a study of identical twins by the behavioral geneticist David Lykken, which concluded that “trying to be happier is like trying to be taller.” Contrary to everything you might think, “in the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you,” Haidt writes. Consider the opposing examples of winning the lottery or of losing the use of your limbs. According to Haidt, “It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. . . . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.” Can that possibly be true? Here we run into one of the biggest problems with the study of happiness, which is that it relies heavily on what people tell us about themselves. The paraplegics in these studies may well report regaining their previous levels of happiness, but how can we know whether these levels really are the same?

(Hat Tip: William Edmundson, group blogging at the Leiter Reports)

Pre-Industrial Sleep

Apropos the prior post on drugs to reduce our need for sleep, a NYT op-ed by A. Roger Ekirch suggests that, as much as we complain about not getting enough sleep, we likely sleep better than those in pre-industrial societies.  Here's an excerpt:

In all likelihood, we have never slept so soundly. Yes, the length of a single night's sleep has decreased over the years (upward of 30 percent of adults average six or fewer hours), but the quality of our sleep has improved significantly. And quality, not quantity, sleep researchers tell us, is more important to feeling well rested.

This is not to minimize the torment of insomnia over the course of a restless night. But for most of us, slumber is reasonably tranquil — especially when compared with what passed for a night's rest before the modern era. Despite nostalgic notions about sleep in past centuries, threats to peaceful slumber lurked everywhere, from lice and noxious chamber pots to tempestuous weather.

Worst in this pre-penicillin age was sickness, especially such respiratory tract illnesses as influenza, pulmonary tuberculosis and asthma, all aggravated by bedding rife with mites. One 18th-century diarist recounts that asthma forced her husband to sleep in a chair for months, with "watchers" required to hold his head upright. Among the laboring poor, whose living conditions were horrendous, sleep deprivation was probably chronic, prompting many to nap at midday, much to the annoyance of their masters.

As if these maladies were not enough, we now also know that pre-industrial families commonly experienced a "broken" pattern of sleep, though few contemporaries regarded it in a pejorative light. Until the modern age, most households had two distinct intervals of slumber, known as "first" and "second" sleep, bridged by an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. Usually, people would retire between 9 and 10 o'clock only to stir past midnight to smoke a pipe, brew a tub of ale or even converse with a neighbor.

Sleep Deprivation/Elimination

The cover story in the most recent issue of New Scientist (subscription req'd) discusses new drugs to reduce our need for sleep and, perhaps someday, largely eliminate the need for it.  Here's the futuristic part:

"The more we understand about the body's 24-hour clock the more we will be able to override it," says Russell Foster, a circadian biologist at Imperial College London. "In 10 to 20 years we'll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening." Foster envisages a world where it's possible, or even routine, for people to be active for 22 hours a day and sleep for two. It is not a world that everyone likes the sound of. "I think that would be the most hideous thing to happen to society," says Neil Stanley, head of sleep research at the Human Psychopharmacology Research Unit in the University of Surrey, UK. But most sleep researchers agree that it is inevitable.

If that sounds unlikely, think about what is already here. Modafinil has made it possible to have 48 hours of continuous wakefulness with few, if any, ill effects. New classes of sleeping pills are on the horizon that promise to deliver sleep that is deeper and more refreshing than the real thing. Further down the line are even more radical interventions - wakefulness promoters that can safely abolish sleep for several days at a stretch, and sleeping pills that deliver what feels like 8 hours of sleep in half the time. Nor is it all about drugs: one research team even talks about developing a wearable electrical device that can wake your brain up at the flick of a switch.

And here are some reflections on a world where people struggle to overcome sleep:

We seem to be moving inescapably towards a society where sleep and wakefulness are available if not on demand then at least on request. It's not surprising, then, that many sleep researchers have nagging worries about the long-term impact of millions of us using drugs to override the natural sleep-wake cycle.

Stanley believes that drugs like modafinil and CX717 will tempt people to overdose on wakefulness at the expense of sleep. "Being awake is seen to be attractive," he says. "It's not cool to be asleep." Foster has similar worries. "It seems like that technology will help us cope with 24/7, but is coping really living?" he asks. Others point out that there are likely to be hidden health costs to overriding our natural sleep-wake cycles. "Pharmaceuticals cannot substitute for normal sleep," says Vaught.

Still, even the doubters admit that to all intents and purposes we are already too far down the road of the 24-hour society to turn back. For millions of people, good sleep and productive wakefulness are already elusive, night work or nightlife a reality, and the "stimulant-sedative" loop all too familiar. As Vaught puts it, "We're already there." So why not make it as clean and safe as possible?

"Law, Mind, and the Brain": UCL-Gruter Conference

This week, I will be presenting a paper at the "Law, Mind, and Brain Programme" at University College London, co-sponsored by the UCL Faculty of Law and the Gruter Institute.   Larry Solum has posted the program here.  Any readers of this blog planning to attend are encouraged to introduce themselves.

Nerve Regeneration

Here is an article in New Scientist (subscription required) provocatively titled "'Walk Again' Drugs to be Tested in People."  The article says that "Two antibodies that enabled the severed spinal nerves of rats to be regenerated are to be tested in humans."  According to the article, "The antibodies have helped rats with damaged spinal cords to walk again, by blocking the action of Nogo, a protein that stops nerve cells [from?] sprouting new connections."

Lie Detection in the NYT Magazine

The New York Times Magazine cover story this Sunday was called "Looking for the Lie," and discusses all manner of recent research into lie detection.  Here are some disparate excerpts from the article:

Most people think they're good at spotting liars, but studies show otherwise. A very small minority of people, probably fewer than 5 percent, seem to have some innate ability to sniff out deception with accuracy. But in general, even professional lie-catchers, like judges and customs officials, perform, when tested, at a level not much better than chance. In other words, even the experts would have been right almost as often if they had just flipped a coin.

. . .

Responding to federal research incentives, a handful of scientists are building a cognitive theory of deception to show what lying looks like — on a liar's face, in a liar's demeanor and, most important, in a liar's brain. The ultimate goal is a foolproof technology for deception detection: a brain signature of lying, something as visible and unambiguous as Pinocchio's nose.

. . .

According to Langleben, certain regions of the brain were more active on average when his 18 subjects were lying than when they were telling the truth. Lying was associated with increased activity in several areas of the cortex, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the superior frontal gyrus. "We didn't have a map of deception in the brain — we still don't — so we didn't know exactly what this meant," Langleben said. "But that wasn't the question we were asking at the time in any case. What we were asking with that first experiment was, 'Can the difference in brain activity between lie and truth be detected by functional M.R.I.?' Our study showed that it can." He said that the prefrontal cortex — the reasoning part of the brain — was generally more aroused during lying than during truth-telling, an indication that it took more cognitive work to lie.

Moral Heuristics

John Mikhail (Law, Georgetown) has posted "Moral Heuristics or Moral Competence? Reflections on Sunstein," to SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

In “Moral Heuristics,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(4), 531-573 (2005), Professor Cass Sunstein draws on recent scientific literature on heuristics in judgment and decision-making to argue that heuristics play a pervasive role in moral cognition and often lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. In this commentary, I argue that by focusing on moral judgments he assumes are distorted or mistaken, Sunstein reverses the normal order of inquiry in the cognitive sciences, which seeks to understand the ideal operations of a cognitive system before attempting to explain its occasional pathologies or disorders. What Sunstein gives us, in effect, is a theory of performance errors without a corresponding theory of moral competence. Additionally, I argue that Sunstein's objections to thought experiments like the footbridge and trolley problems are unsound. Exotic and unfamiliar stimuli are used in theory construction throughout the cognitive sciences, and these problems enable us to uncover the implicit structure of widely shared moral intuitions.

Death Sentence for Aibos

Sony has announced that it will no longer make the mass-marketed canine robot known as the Aibo.  Sony will, however, continue to repair the machines for another seven years. 

This article describes how some people have developed surprisingly deep attachments to their aibos.  Here's an excerpt:

An Aibo can understand 100 words and phrases and recognize three people's faces as it stores digital photos in its brain. It knows when its behavior is being praised because it has a sensor on its head that recognizes when it's being petted. Later versions have a built-in camera so Aibos can serve as home sentinels, and e-mail their owners if something appears to be amiss.

Takeshi Ohashi, a Kyushu Institute of Technology professor, considers Aibo a gem of technological finesse. He plans to appeal to Sony to bring the robots back. . . .

Masato Maruyama, an engineer, believes Sony isn't just hurting Aibo owners, who feel as if they're being told their pets have just seven more years to live.

"I feel the decision to withdraw from a product that's so representative of Sony heralds an end for Sony as a global leader," he said.