Neuroethics & Law Blog

Bruce Wexler's Brain and Culture (Connors)

Last night I attended a reading from Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change, a new work from Psychiatrist Bruce Wexler at Yale University.  The book is just off the presses (Amazon currently offers pre-ordering only) and promises to be splashy; Wexler's book has been endorsed by such psychology superstars as Oliver Sacks and Howard Gardner.  I picked up a copy last night and am eager to run through it.

Brain and Culture reportedly grew out of a sabbatical review of recent findings in neuroscience and psychology.  The published product begins with a review of the developmental trajectory of neural plasticity in the brain (roughly stated: neural plasticity and the likelihood of significant neural rewiring decrease with age) and uses basic physiology concepts as a framework to address more complex social interactions between people and cultures. 

In part, Wexler argues that our need for consonance between our internal conceptions of the world and the structures of the external world itself, coupled with our decreasing abilities to alter our internal mental structures, helps explain the difficulty human beings have adjusting to changes in their lives or worlds -- e.g., adjusting to the loss of a loved one after bereavement, accepting political and social shifts in one's culture, and accepting new cultures or ideas.  From Dr. Wexler's introduction:

"...Individuals seek out stimulation that is consistent with their established internal [neural and psychological] structures, and ignore, forget, or attempt to actively discredit information that is consistent with these structures.  Things are experienced as pleasurable because they are familiar, while the loss of the familiar produces stress, unhappiness, and dysfunction... Since individuals develop internal cognitive structures that are consonent with their own culture, the appearance in their environment of individuals from a foreign culture, thinking and acting differently, creates an uncomfortable dissonance between internal and external realities."

"Because of the neurobiological importance of the fit between internal structure and external environment, cultures will fight to maintain control over the symbolic environment in which they live and which shapes their children."

I'm not sure yet how far the book will try to push corrollaries between basic sensory development - the aspect of brain plasticity we seem to know the most about - and the higher order processes of individual development and cultural evolution.  I worry a bit that some of the analogies that grow out of these comparisons (Is the blindness or visual system weakness of a dark-reared kitten really the same as the "blindness" we have to the practices of cultures we have not been "exposed" to?) can be misleading; our understanding of basic developmental sensory plasticity doesn't necessarily apply to the more complex plastic changes that occur in the mature, thinking adult interacting with his or her environment and culture.

That said, Wexler's grounding the last fifty years or so of neuroscience literature in an interdisciplinary context makes for a thought-provoking read, and I'm very curious to see where he takes it. His talk was greatly appreciated by both myself and my neuroscience-phobic language philosopher partner - a feat in itself.  Enjoy.

---C.C.

Transhumanism on Tape (Connors)

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Hartford hosted a conference in January of this year titled Forbidding Science.  Transhumanism poster child Nick Bostrom was among the speakers at the event, and video presentation of his talk is now up.

For those in need of a transhumanism primer or on Nick Bostrom, Wikipedia has very nice coverage here and here.  Bostrom is currently the director of Oxford's Institute for the Future of Humanity and argues agressively for free application of neuroscience and technological advances that he believes may serve some benefit for human kind.  He seems to my eyes the most popular and powerful spokesperson of the "posthuman" movement, placed in direct opposition to Francis Fukuyama in the bioconservative - biolibertarian spectrum. 

I imagine that his website words it best:

"I think it is likely that in this century, we will master technologies that will enable us to overcome many of our current biological limitations. Possible outcomes range from extinction to lives that could be wonderful beyond imagination. We might at last get rid of involuntary suffering, aging, and disease, and get the opportunity to truly grow up and experience life as it should have been all along.            

In addition to transformative technology, we need the wisdom and the good will to use it well. In my view, all of us ought to have the option of becoming ageless creatures with vastly enhanced intellectual, emotional, and moral capacities. Why aim for less?"

A full schedule for the conference with accompanying video presentations can be found here.

----C.C.

Bird Brains and Grammar

According this brief AP story, UCSD psychology professor Tim Gentner trained 9 of 11 songbirds to recognize a basic grammatical feature in so-called "bird sentences."  The article suggests that Gentner's findings make the human language faculty just a bit less special.  I suspect that linguists will dispute the significance of the findings.  Here's an excerpt:

Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing, but they failed. The results were seen as upholding famed linguist Noam Chomsky's theory that "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language.

But after training, nine out of Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. Two continued to flunk grammar.

"We were dumbfounded that they could do as well as they did," Gentner said. "It's clear that they can do it."

Gentner trained the birds using three buttons hanging from the wall. When the bird pecked the button it would play different versions of bird songs that Gentner generated, some with inserted clauses and some without. If the song followed a certain pattern, birds were supposed to hit the button again with their beaks; if it followed a different pattern they were supposed to do nothing. If the birds recognized the correct pattern, they were rewarded with food.

Introducing Guest Blogger Caitlin Connors

The Neuroethics & Law Blog welcomes our first guest blogger: Caitlin Connors.  Caitlin works at Yale's Developmental Neuroimaging Laboratory.  Welcome to NELB!

Morse on "Brain Overclaim Syndrome"

Stephen J. Morse (Law/Psychology, U Penn) has posted "Brain Overclaim Syndrome and Criminal Responsibility: A Diagnostic Note" on SSRN.  I very much enjoyed this piece.  It is both substantively interesting and cleverly written.  Here is the abstract:

This brief diagnostic note identifies a cognitive pathology, "Brain Overclaim Syndrome [BOS]," that often afflicts those inflamed by the fascinating new discoveries in the neurosciences. It begins by suggesting how one should think about the relation of neuroscience (or any other material explanation of human behavior) to criminal responsibility, distinguishing between internal and external critiques based on neuroscience. It then describes the signs and symptoms of BOS, the essential feature of which is to make claims about the implications of neuroscience for criminal responsibility that cannot be conceptually or empirically sustained. It then applies the diagnostic lens of BOS to the claims in Roper v. Simmons. Finally, the article recommends Cognitive Jurotherapy [CJ] as the therapy of choice for BOS.

Huang & Anderson on "Emotional Legal Decision Making"

Peter Huang (Law, Temple) and Christopher Anderson (Psychology, Temple) have posted "A Psychology of Emotional Legal Decision Making: Revulsion and Saving Face in Legal Theory and Practice" to SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

We provide an overview of interactions between emotions, psychology, and laws. We analyze roles that revulsion can and should play in law. We examine roles that saving and losing “face” can and should play in law. We speculate about constructive role that positive and negative emotions may play in law, to respond to Martha Nussbaum’s argument that two negative emotions, disgust and shame, threaten to disrupt functioning of legal systems. Finally, we offer ideas for future research based on foundations that are suggested by Martha Nussbaum’s book, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law.

Mikhail's "Poverty of the Moral Stimulus"

John Mikhail (Law, Philosophy; Georgetown) has posted The Poverty of the Moral Stimulus to SSRN.  Here is the abstract for John's highly recommended piece:

One of the most influential arguments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science is Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In this response to an essay by Chandra Sripada, I defend an analogous argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. I argue that Sripada's criticism of moral nativism appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the learning target in moral cognition consists of a series of simple imperatives, such as 'share your toys' or 'don't hit other children.' In fact, the available evidence suggests that the moral competence of adults and even young children is considerably more complex and exhibits many characteristics of a well-developed legal code, including abstract theories of crime, tort, contract, and agency. Since the emergence of this knowledge cannot be explained by appeals to explicit instruction, or to any known processes of imitation, internalization, socialization and the like, there are grounds for concluding it may be innate. Simply put, to explain the development of intuitive jurisprudence in each individual, we must attribute unconscious knowledge and complex mental operations to her that go well beyond anything she has been taught.

UCSD Talk on Memory Dampening

Today, I will be presenting my paper on memory dampening at the Biomedical Ethics Seminar Series at the University of California, San Diego.  The presentation will take place at the medical school and will run from 4:30 to 6:30pm.  Click here for more details.  Blog readers in attendance are encouraged to introduce themselves.

Tracking People By Cellphone

Among those who study the implications of new technologies, there are some who fear that future humans will be embedded with some sort of chip that the government will use to track our thoughts and feelings, to say nothing of our location.

Whether or not the sky really is falling, it's hard not to at least consider the possible ramifications of Sprint's new Family Locator Service.  Sprint will use GPS technology to let parents "track up to four cell phones over the Internet or on their own wireless device. Parents can periodically ask the service to find the child's phone, displaying the location on a road map."  In addition:

Parents can also set alerts, automatically warning the parent if the child isn't at a certain place, such as school or soccer practice, at a specific time. . . .  Last week, CATS Communication Inc. said it was releasing a service to warn parents if their child goes near the home of a registered sex offender . . .

It is easy to think of the benefits of such services (e.g., the number of children whose health and safety will be protected) as well as the possible harms (e.g., the psychological effects on children from being so closely monitored, their loss of freedom and possibly stunted opportunities to develop responsibility.)  It is also easy to imagine scenarios where a tracking-enabled cellphone is surreptitiously placed in the possession of, say, a spouse suspected of adultery or a witness to a crime who may provide incriminating evidence to police. 

Of course, the significance of Sprint's new service probably pales in comparison to the implications of this 2002 LA Times article which described the testing of subdermal human tracking devices as right around the corner:

An embedded chip with GPS capabilities would be slightly larger than a quarter and require actual surgery to implant. Unlike the VeriChip, it also would require Food and Drug Administration approval. That will slow down its U.S. introduction.

"We believe we have solved the battery issue, which leaves the question of an antenna that can transmit through skin tissue," said Keith Bolton, Applied Digital's chief scientist. The devices will be powered by lithium ion batteries, which can be charged remotely from outside the body.

Using fMRI to Select Therapy

The April issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry reports on fMRI research by lead author Greg J. Siegle.  In this small-sample-size research, subjects were given a task to test their reactivity to emotional stimuli while their brains were scanned.  The amount of activity in certain areas of the brain during the task correlated with the amount of improvement subjects subsequently experienced from cognitive behavior therapy.  The research holds out the realistic promise of someday using fMRI to determine which subjects are better suited to which forms of therapy. 

Here is the research (subscription required), here is a news article describing it, and here is the researchers' abstract:

OBJECTIVE: In controlled treatment trials, 40%–60% of unmedicated depressed individuals respond to cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The authors examined whether pretreatment neural reactivity to emotional stimuli accounted for this variation. METHOD: Unmedicated depressed individuals (N=14) and never depressed comparison subjects (N=21) underwent fMRI during performance of a task sensitive to sustained emotional information processing. Afterward, depressed participants completed 16 sessions of CBT. RESULTS: Participants whose sustained reactivity to emotional stimuli was low in the subgenual cingulate cortex (Brodmann’s area 25) and high in the amygdala displayed the strongest improvement with CBT. CONCLUSIONS: The presence of emotion regulation disruptions, which are targeted in CBT, may be the key to recovery with this intervention. 

Neuroenhancement and Cochlear Implants

(Cross-posted at Prawfsblawg):

You probably remember the television show, "The Six Million Dollar Man," featuring Lee Majors as Col. Steve Austin, the bionic man.  I always found it puzzling that, in order to suggest that Austin was moving extremely rapidly, they would show him moving in slow motion.  While six million dollars apparently doesn't buy what it used to, researchers have made surprising advances in developing, to name a few,  artificial limbs controlled by the brain, exoskeletons to help people with limited mobility, and artificial retinas.

The field of neuroethics addresses, inter alia, ethical issues that may arise when we enhance our abilities to control our bodies and brains through machinery.  I think that many of the concerns expressed by ethicists about human enhancement are overstated.  As is frequently noted, we have long been using technology to enhance our bodies, and these technologies can radically improve our opportunities to interact with the world without creating some dystopic, dehumanized future.

In related news, an acquaintance of mine, Caroline Benn, had virtually no hearing for most of her life. Though she is a remarkably good lip-reader, about a year ago, she received a cochlear implant to enable her to hear much better.  Six months later, she wrote, "Then there are the sounds... WOW. Just mind blowing. So I always used to think a sound was a sound and nothing else. I now realise it totally ain't that simple... sounds are now having a distinct emotional component for me."  After six more months, she reports:

In 3 weeks, it's going to be the one year anniversary of when I had a hole drilled into my head!!! Now that I am coming up to my one-year point, I am so, so happy that I went ahead with this huge step and the whole experience. Definitely one of the better decisions in my life. There haven't been any huge drastic improvements over the last 4-5 months or so - it's been slow and steady. Having said that, I am still on the up and up. One thing that I like the most is that occasionally, I'll pick out words or sentences without lipreading them. . . .  It's still hit-and-miss and I seriously doubt that I could have a phone conversation unless I was feeling like it was a good day, but it's definitely there. The other MAJOR thing is that I am now seriously addicted to "American Idol" - which is kind of equivalent to the British "X-factor". For the first time in my life, I am enjoying listening to people sing... and during the auditions I was hugely entertained by the people who really couldn't sing! I am just blown away by the fact that I can tell the difference between them and that I can tell whether I enjoy someone's voice or not. Wicked awesome!

Of course, going from having almost no hearing to having limited hearing is typically described as "therapy," rather than "enhancement."  Why this line is thought to be morally significant, though, is often quite puzzling.