PEBS Neuroethics Roundup from JHU Guest Blogger

Last edition's most popular article: Fear memories erased without drugs Nature News December 9 2009 In the Academic Literature: Stably maintained dendritic spines are associated with lifelong memories Nature December 17 2009 Rapid formation and selective stabilization of synapses for enduring motor memories Nature December 17 2009 Moral principles or consumer preference? Alternative framings of the trolley problem Cognitive Science December 11 2009 Reduced hippocampal activity in youth with posttraumatic stress symptoms: an fMRI study J of Pediatric Psychology December 7 2009 Acute depression and suicidal attempt following lowering the frequency of deep brain stimulation  J of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences 21 Fall 2009 Deep brain stimulation reveals emotional impact processing in ventromedial prefrontal cortex PLoS one December 7 2009 Personality change during depression treatment Archives of General Psychiatry 66(12) December 2009 Personality judgments based on physical appearance Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin December 1 2009 Amygdala damage affects event-related potentials for fearful faces at specific time windows Human Brain Mapping December 16 2009 Atypical neural self-representation in autism Brain December 13 2009 Neural population-level memory traces in the mouse hippocampus PLoSone December 16 2009 Product scent and memory Journal of Consumer Research December 4 2009 The neural circuitry of a broken promise Neuron 64(5) December 2009 In the Popular Press: Poorer children more likely to get antipsychotics NY Times December 11 2009 Amputee able to move robotic hand with his mind LA Times December 5 2009 Is synaesthesia a high level brain power? New Scientist December 17 2009 Study may show whether neurofeedback helps people with ADHD and other disorders Washington Post December 15 2009 Neuroscience and sentencing: diminished culpability and capacity for change Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences Blog December 14 2009 Tool use found in octupuses Wired December 14 2009 Locked-in man controls speech synthesizer with thought New Scientist December 15 2009 Bionic fingers point to future of digit replacement ABC News December 14 2009 The silent scream: misdiagnosis in disorders of consciousness Bioethics Forum December 11 2009   Robotic exoskeletons: suited for superhuman power ABC News December 13 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.