I'm pleased to see that the new journal, Neuroethics, will provide free full-text access to its articles in 2008 and 2009. It's hard to imagine a better way for a new journal to develop a wide following.
Legal academia has been transformed to some extent by a kind of de facto open access provided by SSRN and BePress. Law bloggers frequently cite to draft and sometimes final articles that appear on those sites. Law review articles can now be read not just by lawyers or law professors with access to Westlaw or Lexis but also by those who do interdisciplinary work who wouldn't ordinarily use law-related databases.
I understand that paper-and-ink publishers need to make some revenue to survive. But information "wants to be free" as they say. It's nice to learn that publishers can accommodate open access, even if it's only for a limited, though substantial, period of time.
I'm pleased to announce that a new journal, Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology, has published its first issue online at the Berkeley Electronic Press. The editors-in-chief are Anthony Mark Cutter of the University of Central Lancashire and Bert Gordijn of Radboud University. The first issue concerns human enhancement, a particularly timely subject in the United States given the release of the much-discussed Mitchell Report on performancing-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball.
Here is the table of contents (you can download the articles for free at the link above):
Articles
Athlete or Guinea Pig? Sports and Enhancement Research
Nancy M. P. King and Richard Robeson
Enhancement in Sport, and Enhancement outside Sport
Thomas Douglas
Social Perspectives and Genetic Enhancement: Whose Perspective? Whose Choice?
Sarah E. Wilson
Virtue Ethics and Prenatal Genetic Enhancement
Colin Farrelly
Discussions
Life Span Extension Research and Public Debate: Societal Considerations
Aubrey D.N.J de Grey
Medical Nanorobotics: Breaking the Trance of Futility in Life Extension Research (A Reply to de Grey)
Below Adam links to Matthew Hutson's piece in the New York Times Magazine on the use of brain scan images in popular periodicals. In the paragraph that follows the section Adam excerpts, Hutson quotes Deena Weisberg who argues the way conclusions from cognitive neuroscience studies are reported in the popular press "they don’t necessarily tell us anything we couldn’t have found out without using a brain scanner.” This strikes me as a decidedly more controversial claim than the initial conclusion that readers assign more credibility to reports accompanied by brain images. I'd like to hear comments on whether neuroimaging studies do tell scientists anything that they couldn't have discovered otherwise.
Today's WSJ has an article on the use of neuroscience technologies to aid political campaigns. You may recall that Martha Farah wrote a guest post for the Neuroethics & Law Blog in which she discussed her skepticism about the ability of this sort of technology to do what some of its advocates say it can already do.
Here's how Martha gets quoted today in the WSJ:
Politics has always lagged behind business in adopting new marketing methods. One reason is cost: A typical brain-scan study costs around $10,000 for a small sample and can run up to $50,000 for multiple demographics. Moreover, candidates may shy away from tactics that could be seen as calculating or manipulative. "Taken to its logical limit," says Martha Farah, director of the neuroethics program at the University of Pennsylvania, "it's a kind of mind reading."
Well, sure, taken to its logicallimit, it is a kind of mind reading. But I'm willing to bet that this was not the take home message Martha was trying to send. Granted, journalists have no obligation to quote a person's "take home" message. And, they do have very limited space. And, Liz Phelps has already played the role of the skeptical neuroscientist at this point in the article. But I do think that the quote can leave a very blurry impression of Martha's views. (But how should I know? I'm no mind reader. Unless I have a brain scanner. Then, I am.)
Fowler, Baker & Dawes (2007) recently showed in two independent studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Here we investigate two specific genes that may contribute to this heritability via their impact on neurochemical processes that influence social behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that a polymorphism of the MAOA gene significantly increases the likelihood of voting. We also find evidence of a gene-environment interaction between religious attendance and a polymorphism of the 5HTT gene that significantly increases voter turnout. These are the first results to ever link specific genes to political behavior.
By now you've probably seen Anthony Appiah's piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. If you haven't you should definitely check it out (see here). The piece is not only a nice short statement of the work going on in experimental philosophy, it also mentions the new journal, Neuroethics, of which our very own Neil Levy is the editor-in-chief:
The publisher Springer is starting a new journal called Neuroethics, which, pointedly, is about not just what ethics has to say about neurology but also what neurology has to say about ethics.
Matthew Hutson wrote a brief piece on "Neurorealism" in Sunday's New York Times Magazine:
A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans. And a paper accepted for publication by The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience demonstrates that adding even an extraneous reference to the brain to a bad explanation of human behavior makes the explanation seem much more satisfying to nonexperts.
Eric Racine, a bioethicist at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute, coined the word neurorealism to describe this form of credulousness. In an article called “fMRI in the Public Eye,” he and two colleagues cited a Boston Globe article about how high-fat foods activate reward centers in the brain. The Globe headline: “Fat Really Does Bring Pleasure.” Couldn’t we have proved that with a slice of pie and a piece of paper with a check box on it?
This contribution to the Fordham Law Review's symposium on ethics and evidence relies upon developments in other disciplines to lay the groundwork for a more finely tuned understanding of emotions' place in the courtroom. The ethical uncertainties surrounding lawyers' use of emotional appeals, and the increasing disparity between the ways in which the legal community and scholars in related displines talk about the role of emotions in rational decision making, are in large part the product of the legal community's simplistic understanding of emotions themselves. In the evidentiary setting in particular, the legal community needs to move beyond the notion that all emotional influences automatically fall on the "unfair prejudice" side of the balance that Rule 403 prescribes for testing the relative weight of evidence's probative value and potential for unfair prejudice. Some emotional influences are indeed undesirable, but others are vitally important. Legal professionals need to understand the ways in which emotions aid rational decision making, while also better understanding the ways in which emotions can undesirably skew jurors' judgments. By coming to a clearer understanding of the roles that emotions play in jurors' decisions, we will be better able to debate the propriety of appeals to emotions in particular instances.
My thanks to Adam for inviting me to guest-blog. I normally blog on international-law issues at Opinio Juris, so it's great to branch out for a couple of weeks.
I have to admit at the outset that I am something of a dilettante when it comes to neuroethics and law, although I do have a very strong interest in the cognitive psychology of jury decision-making. I am particularly interested in Kahneman and Tversky's simulation heuristic: the idea that the ability to imagine a scenario is positively correlated with one's assessment of its likelihood. It's my suspicion that simulation plays a much larger role in jury decision-making than legal scholars, still far too enthralled with Bayesian analysis than is good for them, have recognized -- an idea I explore at length in a recent essay in the Michigan Law Review entitled "The Cognitive Psychology of Circumstantial Evidence." (It's available here.) Oversimplifying dramatically, the essay argues that jurors' skepticism well-documented reluctance to convict in cases based on circumstantial forensic evidence, and their concomitant tendency to overconvict in cases based on direct evidence like eyewitness identifications and confessions, can be explained by the fact that direct evidence is far easier to visualize -- i.e., simulate -- than circumstantial evidence. I am currently working on a companion essay that uses the simulation heuristic, via research into projection and prototyping, to argue that some criminal defenses are far more likely to succeed than others. Alas, my guest-blogging will end long before it is finished...
Think you're smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old
chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in
tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.
That
challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that
"humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said
researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.
"No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age
of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said
in a statement.
Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps,
said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the
results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology.
One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught
the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.
They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they
touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares.
The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers
that used to be there.
Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.
This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before
they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch
these squares in the proper sequence.
When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second,
Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly
about 80 percent of the time.
But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or
two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those
times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those
tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40
percent.
That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.
As most readers of this blog will likely know, scientists recently concluded that human DNA differs from chimp DNA by more than 5%, not by the 1.5% of conventional wisdom. Predictably, right-wingers have seized upon the new findings to trumpet human superiority over their monkey cousins. Is it too facile to suggest that the memory study may actually indicate that it is we, not the chimps, who received the short end of the genetic stick?
Today's opinion piece in the LA Times by SPECT imager Daniel Amen proposes that all behavioral mishaps by past presidents and current candidates are due to their dysfunctional brains, and that we should "take a look" to ensure that the next president is one of the "brain-healthiest" people around.
What do Rudy Giuliani's messy personal life, John McCain's temper and
Hillary Clinton's inability to seem authentic have in common? Maybe
nothing. They may be just overblown issues in the otherwise normal
lives of candidates under the political microscope.
Such
symptoms, however, may mean a lot -- such as evidence of underlying
brain dysfunction. Sometimes people with messy personal lives have low
prefrontal cortex activity associated with poor judgment; sometimes
people with temper problems have brain damage and impulse control
problems; sometimes people who struggle with authenticity have trouble
really seeing things from someone else's perspective.
Amen claims that three of the last four presidents had some sort of brain dysfunction. Reagan was indeed diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. But the only other president-patient he offers is Bill Clinton, relying on observed violation of social norms to diagnose frontal-lobe pathology:
President Clinton's moral lapses and problems with bad judgment and
excitement-seeking behavior -- indicative of problems in the prefrontal
cortex -- eventually led to his impeachment and a poisonous political
divisiveness in the U.S.
While we should indeed be concerned about the overall health and cognitive capacities of our elected leaders, the claim that we should submit them all to brain-scanning procedures is absurd, particularly given the questionable prognostic accuracy of single-subject SPECT scanning for psychological disorders other than those involving gross neuropathology. Amen must be trying to ride the neuro-political wave on the tails of the recent (derided) NYT op-ed and drum up some new business for his SPECT scanning operation. The over-hype of neuro-based technologies, particularly with regards to the political process, represents irresponsible use of editorial powers.