Neuroethics & Law Blog

Neuroethics Roundup from JHU Guest Blogger

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Jury Reaches Decision in Brain-Scan Test Case, Wired Science In the Popular Press: Brain-boosting bacterium helps mice conquer a maze twice as fast, Discover/80 Beats Mistakes in silicon chips help boost computer power, BBC News Bumpology: What does an amniotic cocktail taste like? NewScientist Health Testosterone makes people suspicious of one another, Wired Science The fiction of affliction in addiction, Practical Ethics Love on the global brain, New York Times Swarming 'swells' locusts' brains, BBC News Could humans be infected by 'computer viruses'?, ScienceDaily From the Academic Literature: Neuroscience: The rat pack, Nature Cognition following bilateral DBS surgery of the STN for Parkinson's disease, Int'l Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry Identification of an immune-responsive mesolimbocortical serotonergic system: potential role in regulation of emotional behavior, Neuroscience Playing god, playing adam: The politics and ethics of enhancement, Bioethical Inquiry Secondary failure after ten years of pallidal neurostimulation in a patient with advanced Parkinson's disease, Journal of Neural Transmission A unique adolescent response to reward prediction errors, Nature Neuroscience

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.

Jones & Kurzban on Intuitions of Punishment

Owen D. Jones  (Vanderbilt, Law, Biology)  and Robert Kurzban (University of Pennsylvania, Psychology) have posted Intuitions of Punishment (University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Recent work reveals, contrary to wide-spread assumptions, remarkably high levels of agreement about how to rank order, by blameworthiness, wrongs that involve physical harms, takings of property, or deception in exchanges. In The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726) we proposed a new explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of agreement.

Elsewhere in this issue, Professors Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman offer a critique of our views, to which we reply here. Our reply clarifies a number of important issues, such as the interconnected roles that culture, variation, and evolutionary processes play in generating intuitions of punishment.

 

Tennessee Hearing on fMRI Lie Detection Evidence

Owen Jones discusses the Tennessee hearing on Cephos's lie-detection evidence here.  Expect to hear more about this case in the near future, as I'm told the case is scheduled to go to trial in the coming week.

"Madness, Badness, and Neuroimaging-Based Responsibility Assessments"

Recently posted to SSRN:

"Madness, Badness, and Neuroimaging-Based Responsibility Assessments" 

LAW AND NEUROSCIENCE, CURRENT LEGAL ISSUES, Michael Freeman, ed., Vol. 13, OUP, 2010

NICOLE A. VINCENT, Delft University of Technology - Philosophy

On the capacitarian account responsibility tracks capacity - i.e. reductions in a person’s agency-relevant mental capacities entail reductions in the degree of their responsibility. This entails that if the mental capacity to (e.g.) empathise was necessary for moral agency, then a person that commits murder but who lacks this capacity should be at least partially excused. The capacitarian account also allows that if neuroimaging scans could reveal people’s mental capacities then such scans could play some role in assessing responsibility. However, viewed from another angle, a person who lacks the capacity to empathise could also be described as cold blooded killer - i.e. as a bad rather than a mad person - and under this description it seems more appropriate to condemn rather than to excuse them. Although this might seem to challenge the capacitarian account, and with it the idea that neuroscience might have some role to play in helping us to assess people’s responsibility, I will argue that this challenge is illusory. On my account, this challenge rests on a conflation of two different kinds of culpability, and on a failure to notice that each of these kinds of culpability plays a role at a different stage in the criminal trial.

Slate on Elizabeth Loftus and Memory Contamination

See here.

Mycobacterium Vaccae and Neuroenhancement

Mycobacterium vaccae seem to have powerful neuroenhancing effects on rodents, at least according to this article.

Bleg on Neuroscience and Mental Retardation

A colleague in legal academia is researching the neuroscience of mental retardation/developmental disabilities.  If you have any background in this area and would be willing to briefly speak or email with her, she'd love to hear from you: Betsey Nevins-Saunders (email: [email protected]).  Alternatively, if you have some helpful sources or studies you can point her/us to, please note them in the comments.

"A Psychology of Intellectual Property"

Recently posted to SSRN:

"A Psychology of Intellectual Property" 

Northwestern University Law Review, Vol. 104, 2010
Fordham Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1575843

JEANNE C. FROMER, Fordham Law School

This Article analyzes how the strict standard for protectability in patent law - novelty, nonobviousness, and utility - looks so different from the undemanding standard of originality in copyright law, even though they derive from the same constitutional power, “To promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This Article argues that this difference accords with the psychological literature on creativity, something these laws seek to induce. This literature explores both how scientists and engineers - ultimately protected by patent - and artists - ultimately protected by copyright - go about creating their works and how individuals in the audience for these works value the different components of creativity. This Article suggests that creativity in scientific and engineering inventions is distinguished by an emphasis on problem solving and individuals’ tolerance and willingness to embrace large degrees of newness. By contrast, artistic creativity is characterized by an emphasis on problem finding and individuals’ psychological preference that artistic works be new, but not too new. These differences accord with the dissimilar protectability standards for copyright and patent. These distinctions in protectability standards are also normatively desirable, but only to the extent that the law addresses how to treat protected forms of creativity that do not fit the archetype of creativity for the relevant intellectual-property regime.

Call for Abstracts: Neuroscience in European and North-American Case-Law and Judicial Practice

Here's a call for abstracts for a conference in Milan on September 17, 2010.  For more information, including a July 1 deadline to submit an abstract, click here: Download CallforAbstracts_Italy.

Neuroethics Roundup from JHU Guest Blogger

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: The Moral Life of Babies, The New York Times  In the Popular Press: The Claim: Caffeine Helps Prevent Nighttime Accidents on the Job, New York Times Can MRIs Help Solve Crimes?, NPR fMRI Lie Detection Hearing Ends, Decision Still to Come, Science Insider Neuroscience: The rat pack, Nature News Monkeys' art of war has lessons for human conflict, New Scientist Jury Reaches Decision in Brain-Scan Test Case, Wired Science Judge Issues Legal Opinion in Brooklyn fMRI Case, Wired Science Dementia Caregivers More Likely to Also Get the Disease, Wired Science Dopamine System in Highly Creative People Similar to That Seen in Schizophrenics, Study Finds, Science Daily Shiny New Neuroscience Technique (Optogenetics) Verifies a Familiar Method (fMRI), Discover From the Academic Literature: Treating Dementia: Do We Have a Pill for It?, JAMA Detecting individual memories through the neural decoding of memory states and past experience, PNAS Newborn infants learn during sleep, PNAS A snapshot of the age distribution of psychological well-being in the United States, PNAS Global and local fMRI signals driven by neurons defined optogenetically by type and wiring, Nature First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality, PLoSONE A new method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects, Journal of Neurophysiology Spectral Responses of the Human Circadian System Depend on the Irradiance and Duration of Exposure to Light, Science Translational Medicine Abrupt Transitions between Prefrontal Neural Ensemble States Accompany Behavioral Transitions during Rule Learning, Neuron

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.

Optogenetics and the fMRI BOLD Signal

Some evidence that the fMRI BOLD signal measures what we think it does: see here.

"The Neuroscience of Pain, and a Neuroethics of Pain Care"

Recently published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

James Giordano^{1, 2} 

(1)	Departments of Medicine and Neurosciences, Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University Medical Center, 4000 Reservoir Rd, Bldg D, Washington, DC 20057, USA

(2)	Center for Neurotechnology Studies, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Arlington, VA 22203, USA

Received: 19 January 2009  Accepted: 21 January 2009  Published online: 11 February 2009

Abstract  

Neuroscience, together with a broadened concept of “mind” has instigated pragmatic and ethical concerns about the experience and treatment of pain. If pain medicine is to be authentic, it requires knowledge of the brain-mind, pain, and the relative and appropriate “goodness” of potential interventions that can and/or should be provided. This speaks to the need for an ethics that reflects and is relevant to the contemporary neuroscience of pain, acknowledgment and appreciation of the sentient being in pain, effects of environment and value(s), and the nature of healing. It may be that neuroethics provides this viable meta-ethic for pain care. This essay describes how an integrative neuroethics of pain care allows, if not obligates, alignment of facts, values, and moral attitudes as a continuing process of re-investigation, analysis, and revision of what we know (and don’t know) about brains, minds, selves, and how we regard and treat the painient.

"Novel Neurotechnologies in Film—A Reading of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report"

Recently published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

Novel Neurotechnologies in Film—A Reading of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report

Timothy Krahn¹, Andrew Fenton² and Letitia Meynell³

(1)	Novel Tech Ethics, Intellectual Commons, Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University, 1234 LeMarchant Street, Halifax, NS, B3H 3P7, Canada

(2)	Novel Tech Ethics, Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University, 1234 LeMarchant Street, Halifax, NS, B3H 3P7, Canada

(3)	Department of Philosophy, Dalhousie University, McCain Building, 6135 University Avenue, Halifax, NS, B3H 4P9, Canada

Received: 10 December 2008  Accepted: 16 February 2009  Published online: 20 March 2009

Abstract  

The portrayal of novel neurotechnologies in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report serves to inoculate viewers from important moral considerations that are displaced by the film’s somewhat singular emphasis on the question of how to reintroduce freedom of choice into an otherwise technology driven world. This sets up a crisis mentality and presents a false dilemma regarding the appropriate use, and regulation, of neurotechnologies. On the one hand, it seems that centralized power is required to both control and effectively implement such technologies and, on the other hand, individual heroic resistance is required to protect citizens from the invasions of personal privacy and state control made possible through neurotechnologies. While Minority Report, as a dystopic vision of emergent neurotechnologies, engages surface ethical issues it risks cheapening them through its rather simplistic, dichotomous analysis. Most conspicuously absent from this approach is a sense of the social matrices that work to circumscribe or augment expressions of human freedom, privacy, control and power that are all implicated in our engagement with novel neurotechnologies. Were Minority Report unique in this respect it would have little interest, but we think this type of cheapening of ethical discourse about novel technologies is common. Because science fiction film informs the social imaginary in which ethical considerations and ultimately policy decisions take place, such cheapening risks subverting pervasive and tangible ethical issues by focusing on the sensationalistic and simplistic.

"Locked-in Syndrome, BCI, and a Confusion about Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enacted Cognition"

Published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

Sven Walter¹ 

(1)	Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Albrechtstraße 28, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany

Received: 6 August 2009  Accepted: 26 August 2009  Published online: 12 September 2009

Abstract  

In a recent contribution to this journal, Andrew Fenton and Sheri Alpert have argued that the so-called “extended mind hypothesis” allows us to understand why Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to change the self of patients suffering from Locked-in syndrome (LIS) by extending their minds beyond their bodies. I deny that this can shed any light on the theoretical, or philosophical, underpinnings of BCIs as a tool for enabling communication with, or bodily action by, patients with LIS: BCIs are not a case of cognitive extension. I argue that Fenton and Alpert’s claim to the contrary is the result of a widespread confusion about some related, but significantly different, approaches to cognition that all fall under the heading of “situated cognition.” I first provide a short taxonomy of various situated approaches to cognition, highlighting (some of) their important commonalities and differences, which should dissolve some of the confusions surrounding them. Then I show why the extended mind hypothesis is unsuitable as a model of BCI enhancements of LIS patients’ capacity to interact with their surroundings, and I argue that the situated approach with obvious bearings on the sort of questions that were driving Fenton and Alpert is not the idea that cognition is extended, but the idea that cognition is enacted.

U.S. Supreme Court Cites Brain Evidence

The opinion just came down in Graham v. Florida.  The U.S. Supreme Court holds that it is unconstitutional to sentence a person to life imprisonment for a nonhomicide crime committed before he was 18 years old. 

In several places, the Court makes reference to neuroscience research presented in amici briefs.  You may remember that in Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional to sentence a person to death for a crime committed before he turned 18.  In that case, however, it was not clear that the Court considered neuroscience research presented in amici.  The shift is interesting, even if it is ambiguous. 

You can find the new opinion here.