Neuroethics & Law Blog

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Erased Memories and Spotless Minds, BBC Radio 4 In The Popular Press: Test Tube DNA Brain Gets Quiz Questions Right, Discovery News Amy Winehouse: Why is there so little understanding of addiction?, Guardian Comment is free Anti-addiction drugs face more than medical issues, New Scientist The phantom phenomenon, Wellcome Trust Blog Men in Grief Seek Others Who Mourn as They Do, New York Times Girl loses half her brain in car crash…and gains an amazing new artistic ability, Mail Online What Causes Someone to Act on Violent Impulses and Commit Murder?, Scientific American The Hazy Science of Hot Weather and Violence, Wired Science Big pharma’s role in mental illness, Public Radio International Bomb-blast brain injuries explained, Nature News Bad Memories Don’t Have to Last Forever, Brain Blogger Age-related brain shrinking is unique to humans, BBC News An On/Off Switch for Sex and Violence, Scientific American The princess who swallowed a glass piano, Mind Hacks Is reading fiction good for you?, Culture Lab Learning by experiment Is all in a day’s play, Nature News From the Academic Literature: Neural network computation with DNA strand displacement cascades, Nature Identity: Key to Children’s Understanding of Belief, Science Genetics and criminal responsibility, Trends in Cognitive Science What birds have to say about language, Nature Neuroscience Prior and prejudice, Nature Neuroscience Owl’s behavior and neural representation predicted by Bayesian influence, Nature Neuroscience Is Human Enhancement also a Personal Matter?, Science and Engineering Ethics

Subscribe to our mailing list 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.

"The Neuroethics of Pleasure and Addiction in Public Health Strategies"

The Neuroethics of Pleasure and Addiction in Public Health Strategies; Moving Beyond Harm Reduction: Funding the Creation of Non-Addictive Drugs and Taxonomies of Pleasure by Robin Mackenzie has been published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

Abstract

We are unlikely to stop seeking pleasure, as this would prejudice our health and well-being. Yet many psychoactive substances providing pleasure are outlawed as illicit recreational drugs, despite the fact that only some of them are addictive to some people. Efforts to redress their prohibition, or to reform legislation so that penalties are proportionate to harm have largely failed. Yet, if choices over seeking pleasure are ethical insofar as they avoid harm to oneself or others, public health strategies should foster ethical choice by moving beyond current risk management practices embodied in the harm reduction movement. The neuroscience of pleasure has much to offer neuroethics and public health strategies. Distinguishing between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ fosters new understandings of addiction. These hold promise for directing the search for pharmacotherapies which prevent addiction and relapse or disrupt associated neuromechanisms. They could inform new research into creating lawful psychoactive substances which give us pleasure without provoking addiction. As the health and well being of human and other animals rests upon the experience of pleasure, this would be an ethical objective within public health strategy. Were ethical and neurobiological obstacles to ending addiction to be overcome, problems associated with excessive consumption, the lure of unlawful psychoactive substances and the paucity of lawful means to achieve pleasurable altered states would remain. Non-addictive designer drugs, which reliably provided lawful access to pleasures and altered states, would ameliorate these public health concerns insofar as they fostered citizens’ informed, ethical choices according to a neurobiological taxonomy of pleasures.

"Drug-Induced Impulse Control Disorders: A Prospectus for Neuroethical Analysis"

Drug-Induced Impulse Control Disorders: A Prospectus for Neuroethical Analysis byAdrian Carter, Polly Ambermoon and Wayne D. Hall has been published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

Abstract

There is growing evidence that dopamine replacement therapy (DRT) used to treat Parkinson’s Disease can cause compulsive behaviours and impulse control disorders (ICDs), such as pathological gambling, compulsive buying and hypersexuality. Like more familiar drug-based forms of addiction, these iatrogenic disorders can cause significant harm and distress for sufferers and their families. In some cases, people treated with DRT have lost their homes and businesses, or have been prosecuted for criminal sexual behaviours. In this article we first examine the evidence that these disorders are caused by DRT. If it is accepted that DRT cause compulsive or addictive behaviours in a significant minority of individuals, then the following ethical and clinical questions arise: Under what circumstances is it ethical to prescribe a medication that may induce harmful compulsive behaviours? Are individuals treated with DRT morally responsible and hence culpable for harmful or criminal behaviour related to their medication? We conclude with some observations of the relevance of DRT-induced ICDs for our understanding of addiction and identify some promising directions for future research and ethical analysis.

"Addicted to Food, Hungry for Drugs"

Addicted to Food, Hungry for Drugs by Bennett Foddy has been published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

Abstract

There is a growing consensus among neuroscientists that people can become addicted to food, and that at least some cases of obesity have addiction as their cause. By contrast, the rest of the world continues to see obesity as either a disease of the metabolism, or as a reckless case of self-harm. Among obesity researchers, there has been a lively debate on the issue of whether obesity ought to be considered a disease. Few researchers, however, have suggested that obesity is a disease in the same sense as addiction is usually claimed to be a disease—that is, a disease of behaviour with a neurological cause. In this piece, I review what is now a compelling body of evidence for food addiction, to establish that many or most cases of obesity have addiction at their foundation. I then argue that in spite of this, obesity ought not to be considered a neurobehavioural disease in the sense usually attributed to drug addiction. Given the link between addiction and obesity, this implies that the disease conception of addiction must be abandoned. I conclude by assessing some of the implications this move has for policy and ethics, with regard to both obesity and drug addiction.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Who wouldn’t want to take the sting out of painful memories?, Guardian In The Popular Press: Slovenly or Sick? The Medicalization of the Messy, Sociological Images Erased Memories and Spotless Minds, BBC Radio 4 KDDI’s mind-reading Android app monitors your brainstorms, or lack thereof…, Engadget Why Brains Get Creeped Out by Androids, Wired Science The human paradox that is common sense, New Scientist Better Packaging via Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing The Need for a Progressive Neuroethics, University of Oxford Practical Ethics Is Google Ruining Your Memory?, The Frontal Cortex Mental Math in Infants, Scientific American Baboon Study Shows Benefits for Nice Guys, Who Finish 2nd, New York Times The extended mind—how Google affects our memories, Discover Morality as a Biological Phenomenon?, BMJ Group Blogs Lingering Lies: The Persistent Influence of Misinformation, Scientific American Binge drinking 'can damage memory skills' in teen girls, BBC News The Neuroscience of the Debt Debate, or Why Cooperation Takes a Backseat to Mistrust, Scientific American When Will We Be Transhuman? Seven Conditions for Attaining Transhumanism, Discover The Joy of a Sun Bath, a Snuggle, a Bite of Pate. The New York Times Disgraced cognition researcher resigns from Harvard, Short Sharp Science   From the Academic Literature: Executing Facial Control During Deception Situations, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior Google Effects of Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information, Science Understanding Otherness: The Neural Bases of Action Comprehension and Pain Empathy in a Congenital Amputee, Cerebral Cortex Oscillatory patterns in temporal lobe reveal context reinstatement during memory search, PNAS Blue again: perturbational effects of antidepressants suggest monoaminergic homeostasis in major depression, Frontiers in Evolutionary Psychology Neural mechanisms of the cognitive model of depression, Nature Reviews Neuroscience Psychiatric disorder: The dark side of depression, Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Subscribe to our mailing list 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.

BBC Radio on "Erased Memories and Spotless Minds"

Last evening, BBC Radio 4 broadcast "Erased Memories and Spotless Minds".  In addition to featuring academics like Liz Phelps, Todd Sacktor, Anders Sandberg, Roger Pitman, and me, it has some rather powerful comments from victims of traumatic events.  Also, Roger Pitman describes a promising study on the use of mifepristone (aka RU486) to block reconsolidation of fear memories in rats.

"The Paradox of Addiction Neuroscience"

The Paradox of Addiction Neuroscience by Daniel Z. Buchman, Judy Illes and Peter B. Reiner has been published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

Abstract

Neuroscience has substantially advanced the understanding of how changes in brain biochemistry contribute to mechanisms of tolerance and physical dependence via exposure to addictive drugs. Many scientists and mental health advocates scaffold this emerging knowledge by adding the imprimatur of disease, arguing that conceptualizing addiction as a “brain disease” will reduce stigma amongst the folk. Promoting a brain disease concept is grounded in beneficent and utilitarian thinking: the language makes room for individuals living with addiction to receive the same level of compassion and access to healthcare services as individuals living with other medical diseases, and promotes enlightened social and legal policies. However such claims may yield unintended consequences by fostering discrimination commonly associated with pathology. Specifically, the language of neuroscience used to describe addiction may reduce attitudes such as blame and responsibility while inadvertently identifying addicted persons as neurobiological others. In this paper, we examine the merits and limitations of adopting the language of neuroscience to describe addiction. We argue that the reframing of addiction in the language of neuroscience provides benefits such as the creation of empowered biosocial communities, but also creates a new set of risks, as descriptive neuroscience concepts are inseparable from historical attitudes and intuitions towards addiction and addicted persons. In particular, placing emphasis on the diseased brain may foster unintended harm by paradoxically increasing social distance towards the vulnerable group the term is intended to benefit.

Ketzel the Cat and Her Musical Composition

Here's a mid-summer distraction: Don't we suspect that the "transcriber" of the cat's music may have euphonized it? 

UPDATE: Well, after listening to it at the New York Times link I guess I can believe that a cat invented it.

Hauser Resigns

See here and here.

Legal Judgments Did *Not* Show Hindsight Bias

One rarely sees the publication of psychological research reporting on judges' lack of bias.  That makes this paper on SSRN pretty remarkable.  It's by Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew Wistrich, and Chris Guthrie, entitled Probable Cause, Probability, and Hindsight:

Abstract: When judges assess probable cause, they must do so either in foresight (when determining whether to issue a warrant) or in hindsight (when determining whether to allow the admission of evidence obtained without a search warrant). Although the legal standard for probable cause is the same, and the facts that might support cause are the same, judges who assess probable cause in hindsight invariably know whether a search produced incriminating evidence or not. Research on the hindsight bias suggests that judges will be unable to set aside this knowledge and judge probable cause as if they were working in foresight. In this paper, we present of three experiments in which we asked 900 state and federal judges to make judgments of probable cause either in foresight or in hindsight, in hypothetical cases. Surprisingly, we found that that judges make similar rulings on probable cause in foresight and in hindsight. We also found that hindsight appears to cloud judges’ abilities to assess the likely outcome of the search, but hindsight does not influence their legal judgments.

(hat top: CrimProf Blog)

Progress in Genetically Engineering E. Coli

See New Scientist article here.  Here's a taste:

James Collins of Boston University says the paper represents an important advance for synthetic biology. "The team shows it is possible to introduce in a rational way large-scale changes in the genome of an organism. They have very cleverly swapped one punctuation mark with another punctuation mark, which opens up the possibility of rewriting the genome wholesale."

Even more remarkably, it opens the possibility of rewriting the genetic code.

Theoretically, once a particular codon – say, TAG - has been removed from a genome, the cell's protein-making machinery could be reprogrammed to assign TAG to an amino acid, instead of being a stop signal.

And if the amino acid were not one of the dominant 20 found in nature or a completely new, synthetic amino acid, then the cell could produce entirely novel proteins. "That's the vision," says Blattner, "completely refactoring the genome to where it is quite substantially different from any other life forms."

Cloaking an Event in Space-Time

See here.  Of course, the actual research is not nearly as sexy as the fluff in the early part of the article would suggest.  But it's still quite impressive!

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Animal Models: Inside the Minds of Mice and Men, Nature In The Popular Press: Who wouldn’t want to take the sting out of painful memories?, Guardian In Defense of Antidepressants, New York Times Are Antidepressants Just Placebos with Side Effects?, Scientific American The New York Times’ Defense of Antidepressants, Mad in America Against Neuroethics, Mind Hacks In Search of a Robot More Like Us, New York Times Justice Breyer cites neuroscience research in videogame dissent, The Law and Neuroscience Blog Stanford researchers build a device for brain-inspired computing, SCOPE The Neurobiology of Bliss—Sacred and Profane, Scientific American Chimp recognizes synthetic speech, BBC News Beauty is in the brain of the beholder, Discover Blogs Not Exactly Rocket Science Masterpieces, but only if unmedicated, StarTribune Two weeks of hell, forty years ago, Mind Hacks Is Happiness Always a Good Thing?, Brain Blogger The trolley problem and the evolution of war, Neuroethics at the Core Angie Varona, Grace Kelly and Scrambling your mOFC, Dean’s Corner Mass psychosis in the US, Al Jazeera Lizard has problem-solving skills, BBC Nature Don’t call me Polly—parrots have individual ‘names’ in the wild, Nature News Blog     From the Academic Literature: Mutation of the conserved polyadenosine RNA binding protein, ZC3H14/dNab2, impairs neural function in Drosophila and humans, PNAS Me, My “Self” and You: Neuropsychological Relations between Social Emotion, Self-Awareness, and Morality, Emotion Review Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population: Evidence for an increased role of temporal-lobe instability, body-distortion processing, and impairments in own-body transformations, Cortex Genetic and Environmental Influences on Female Sexual Orientation, Childhood Gender Typicality and Adult Gender Identity, PLoSONE Preventing interference between different memory tasks, Nature Neuroscience Target Article: How the Neuroscience of Decision Making Informs Our Conception of Autonomy, American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience Target Article: Diminishing and Enhancing Free Will, American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience Neuroscience: Weight loss through smoking, Nature Dementia: A problem for our age, Nature

Subscribe to our mailing list 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.

Bruni and Davenport Guest Blogging Stints

I send my thanks to Tommaso Bruni and Sasha Davenport for their much-welcome guest contributions to the blog last month!

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Moral dilemmas and fMRI, Neuroethics & Law Blog In The Popular Press: The Neurology of the Undead, Mind Hacks Casting Memory in Doubt, Science Blogs When Bell Sounds, Surgeon Enters Ringside Call, New York Times Some with Histories of Mental Illness Petition to Get Their Gun Rights Back, New York Times Artificially Intelligent machines that can argue back with humans are just years away, The Daily Mail Ender's Game Proves that Every Child Deserves to be Gifted and Talented, Discover Magazine Is the Internet Bad for Our Brains?, Scholarly Kitten What Happens in the Brain When We Experience a Panic Attack?, Scientific American Specs that See Right Through You, New Scientist Project Nim: A Chimp Raised like a Human, New Scientist Why Does Excercise Make Us Feel Good?, New York Times Tendancy Towards Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive, New York Times Naomi Wolf, Porn, and the Misuse of Dopamine, Mind Hacks Ready for My Close-Up: Monkey's Talent for Photography, New Scientist Dostoyevsky, Prescient Neuroessentialist, Neuroethics at the Core From the Academic Literature: Emotional and Social Behaviors Elicited by Electrical Stimulation of the Insula in the Macaque Monkey, Science Grand challenges in global mental health, Nature Animal Models: Inside the Minds of Mice and Men, Nature

Subscribe to our mailing list 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.