Neuroethics & Law Blog

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Atheism as mental deviance, Discover Magazine In The Popular Press: Brainwave Delay Makes Rats Feel Teleported, Wired Science Dyslexia Isn't a Matter of IQ, fMRIs Show, Science Daily Tool-Using Fish Caught on Tape, Scientific American How Exercise Can Strengthen the Brain, New York Times Well Blog Unlike Humans, Chimpanzees Don’t Enjoy Collaborating, Wired Science Medical Mystery: What explained second-grader's sudden panic and obsessions?, Washington Post Eyes (and Minds) Deceive: Witness Unrealiability Casts Doubt on Death Penalty Rulings, Scientific American A brief history of the brain, New Scientist Pathways of Pain-Blocking Medications Modeled by Computer, Science Daily MIND in Pictures: Illuminating Thoughts, Scientific American The Hedonic Nose: Pleasure May Organize Your Sense of Smell, Scientific American People Learn While They Sleep, Study Suggests, Science Daily Miracle Berry's Sour-Sweet Mystery Cracked, Wired Science 'Game transfer phenomena' and the problem of perception, Guardian Brain needs serotonin to restrain aggression, New Scientist Scientists Can Now Extract, Record and Return Information to the Brain, Gizmodo  The Neuroscience of Beauty, Scientific American   From the Academic Literature: Efficacy and Comparative Effectiveness of Atypical Antipsychotic Medications for Off-Label Uses in Adults, JAMA Intermittent synchronization in a network of bursting neurons, AIP Chaos Looking the Part: Social Status Cues Shape Race Perception, PLoSONE Processing Speed Mediates the Development of General Intelligence (g) in Adolescence, Psychological Science Medial prefrontal cortex as an action-outcome predictor, Nature 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.

Hill on Behavioral Law and Economics

Recently Posted to SSRN:

"A Positive Agenda for Behavioral Law and Economics" 

Cognitive Critique, Vol. 3, p. 85, 2011
Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-36

CLAIRE ARIANE HILL, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities - School of Law
Law has spent surprisingly little time developing a theory of human nature. Its efforts have largely focused on the abnormal - notably, those not responsible for their actions by reason of mental illness or diminished capacity. The normal has barely been addressed. Law and economics embeds a theory - that people are rational maximizers of their self-interest. Law and economics admits its theory is unrealistic; it touts instead its theory’s ability to predict. Behavioral law and economics aspires to more realism (and more predictive power). Its trajectory has, however, sometimes been contorted insofar as it has focused on exceptions to the law and economics view rather than a broader reconception of the overall endeavor. Such a reconception is desirable, necessary, and increasingly feasible.

Sentimental Attachments and Legal Decision-Making

Recently Posted to SSRN:

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"What has Love Got to Do with It?: Sentimental Attachments and Legal Decision-Making" 

FSU College of Law, Public Law Research Paper, No. 534

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DAVID L. MARKELL, Florida State University College of Law
TOM TYLER, Yale University

SARAH F. BROSNAN, Georgia State University - Department of Psychology
Our underlying premise in this article is that a government is likely to bolster its legitimacy when it uses legal decision-making procedures in which the public has confidence. Our findings, which are based on a survey about options for resolving disputes in the land use arena, identify an important anomaly in public preferences. While people generally preferred to resolve disputes through judicial adjudication, they did not prefer to have the courts make decisions involving sentimental value. These findings suggest that it is not possible to paint a simple picture of public procedural preferences because those preferences shift depending upon the nature of the issues at stake. 

Our results also offer insights as to why people held different preferences. We found that when monetary values predominated, people were most sensitive to their perceptions of the neutrality of a process and accepted decisions made by an arbiter they perceived to be neutral. When sentimental values were important, people were attuned to their trust in the motives and character of the decision maker. Trust in turn was influenced by the opportunities a process provided for voice and the quality of treatment it provided (the respect it signaled for participants and their rights), as well as by the neutrality of the decision making process. These features of voice and quality of treatment carried much less weight when monetary values predominated. These findings hold promise for procedural reforms that would increase satisfaction with litigation and other procedures when sentimental values are important, for example when the government is trying to take someone’s home for public purposes.

Building upon our findings, we offer a framework for structuring efforts to incorporate public views into the design of legal procedures in order to deal with issues of sentimental value. We also consider how our findings might be used in the field of eminent domain law, where dissatisfaction often runs high and sentimental values frequently are important. Here litigation, a generally acceptable procedure, is being used in a situation in which it needs to take account of sentimental values, something that people feel courts are ill-equipped to do.

Previous efforts to deal with sentimental value have focused upon trying to increase compensation to acceptable levels, for example via contingent valuation, or upon narrowing the allowable use of procedures such as eminent domain. We propose a new framework based upon designing procedures that produce publically acceptable decisions when sentimental values are at issue. We argue that this approach is a promising one in an arena in which prior approaches have met with at best limited success.  

Hauser and Mikhail

I, for one, would be interested in reading Gil Harman's comments on whether Marc Hauser used some of John Mikhail's ideas without giving John appropriate credit.  Apparently, Gil Harman posted the provocative piece on the Internet (accidentally, at least in part) and then took it down when he realized that it was distributed more widely than he anticipated.

Bruce S. McEwen: "Effects of Stress on the Developing Brain"

"Effects of Stress on the Developing Brain"

From Cerebrum, the Dana Foundation's online magazine:

"In a complementary article, Judge Cindy Lederman explains the importance of using science to inform family court decisions. Here, Dr. Bruce S. McEwen looks at that science in depth, discussing how early-life stress can lead to long-lasting behavioral, mental, and physical consequences. Fortunately, preventive measures can improve health outcomes, and while interventions for those who have already experienced debilitating early-life stress require considerable effort, they remain possible, thanks to the brain’s plasticity."

Judge Cindy S. Lederman on Using Science in Juvenile Court

From Lab Bench to Court Bench: Using Science to Inform Decisions in Juvenile Court

From Cerebrum, the Dana Foundation's online magazine:

"Juvenile court judges are asked to determine what is in the best interest of the child in every case they hear. As Judge Cindy S. Lederman writes, making these decisions without an awareness of the science of child development can be detrimental to the mental and physical well-being of the child. Yet until about a decade ago, court decisions were routinely made without taking into consideration the needs of toddlers and infants. The Miami Child Well-Being Court™ (MCWBC) program, a partnership of clinicians and judges, has brought science into the courtroom, making it integral to the decision-making process and working to ensure that the needs of the child are met."

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Brain scans reduce murder sentence in Italian court, New Scientist In The Popular Press: Mind-reading movies reconstruct what you see, New Scientist Cassidy: iPhone app can't stress calm enough, Mercury News Why Harmony pleases the brain, New Scientist Atheism as mental deviance, Discover Magazine Video-game studies have serious flaws, Nature News The Neuroscience of Choosing: Can We Understand How the Brain Makes Decisions?, Science Daily Teenage Brains, National Geographic Bombs' hidden impact: The brain war, Nature News How Far Will Dolphins Go to Relate to Humans? Women More Likely Than Men to See Nuance When Making Decisions, Scientific American Outside the criminal mind, Mind Hacks A Few Strokes of the Past in an Artist Who Lost Her Memory, New York Times Could Personality Differences Help Explain the Reality Gap on Climate Chance?, Science Progress The Cyborg in US All, New York Times Nursing homes try to reduce use of powerful antipsychotic drugs for dementia patients, Washington Post Stimulating brain with electricity aids learning speed, BBC News Why Being Relaxed Makes Us Spend Too Much Money, Wired The Frontal Cortex   From the Academic Literature: Circulating glucose levels modulate neural control of desire for high-calorie foods in humans, Journal of Clinical Investigation Neuroticism Influences Brain Activity During the Experience of Visceral Pain, Gastroenterology Contagious yawning and seasonal climate variation, Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience The evolution of overconfidence, Nature Regional brain activation with advertising images, Journal of Neuroscience   Epigenetics: From father to son, Nature Reviews Neuroscience Effects of Acute Tryptophan Depletion on Prefrontal-Amygdala Connectivity While Viewing Facial Signals of Aggression, Biological Psychiatry Neural mechanisms underlying freedom to choose an object, Human Brain Mapping Hedging Your Bets by Learning Reward Correlations in the Human Brain, Neurology

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.

List on Free Will and Determinism

Recently posted to SSRN: 

“Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility to Do Otherwise” 

CHRISTIAN LIST, London School of Economics
I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility to do otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behavior, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher-level one on a par with other higher-level phenomena such as agency and intentionality.

"Think You're Pretty Smart"

I'll be speaking on Thursday evening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.  My contribution is entitled, "The Neuroethics of Lie Detection."  Here's some more information from the BAM website:

Part of the 2011 Next Wave Festival and Between the Lines

Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 8pm
Bar opens at 7:30pm

Featuring: Adam Kolber, Neil LaBute & Tim Harms, Clancy Martin, Tim Wu, Moon Hooch and additional guests to be announced.

From financial disasters precipitated by the smartest guys in very big rooms to university classes where 87 percent of students consider themselves above average, we seem to be pretty convinced of our intelligence, whatever the facts may tell us. Between the Lines salutes the other 13 percent and asks how we think about thinking in both our boardrooms and our bedrooms, examining how our self-confidence and knowledge can sometimes lead us forward while leading others into trouble.

See here for tickets.

MacArthur Grant, Phase II

The MacArthur Foundation's phase II grant for research into law and neuroscience has now been officially announced.  Owen Jones at Vanderbilt will lead the $4.85 million grant.  As before, the project will focus on criminal justice, but this time it will focus on these three areas (according to a press release):

Mental States: Assessing probable mental states of defendants and witnesses, such as the defendant’s most likely state of mind when he committed a past bad act.

Capacity: Assessing a defendant’s capacity for self-regulating his behavior or self-control.

Evidence: Assessing whether, and if so how, various kinds of neuroscientific evidence should be admitted and evaluated in individual cases.

For more information, see the full press release, along with the project's new website.

"The False Memory Diet: False Memories Alter Food Preferences"

Recently posted to SSRN:

"The False Memory Diet: False Memories Alter Food Preferences" 
HANDBOOK OF BEHAVIOR, FOOD AND NUTRITION, pp. 1645-1663, V.R. Preedy, R.R. Watson, & C.R. Martin, eds., Springer
UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2011-34

DANIEL M. BERNSTEIN, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, University of Washington
NICOLE L.M. PERNAT, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS, University of California, Irvine - Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
A growing body of work shows how easy it is to manipulate memory for past events. In this chapter, we review recent research on false memories that can be planted about a non-existent past experience with a particular food or alcohol. These false memories have consequences for people; if the false memory is unpleasant, people avoid the food or drink.

If the false memory is pleasant, they want the food or drink more. We discuss possible explanations for these findings. Moreover, we explore which kinds of people are more susceptible and which foods are particularly amenable to forming false food memories. We end with a discussion of applications to other areas of health and disease. More generally these findings show that false memories have consequences; they influence people's thoughts, intentions, and actions.

Brown et al. on More Objective Measures of Pain

Another glimpse at what I call our experiential future:

Towards a Physiology-Based Measure of Pain: Patterns of Human Brain Activity Distinguish Painful from Non-Painful Thermal Stimulation

Justin E. Brown^1,2,3, Neil Chatterjee^1,4, Jarred Younger¹, Sean Mackey^1,2*

1 Department of Anesthesia, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States of America, 2 Neurosciences Program, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States of America, 3 Department of Biology and Environmental Science, Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa, United States of America, 4 Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

ABSTRACT: Pain often exists in the absence of observable injury; therefore, the gold standard for pain assessment has long been self-report. Because the inability to verbally communicate can prevent effective pain management, research efforts have focused on the development of a tool that accurately assesses pain without depending on self-report. Those previous efforts have not proven successful at substituting self-report with a clinically valid, physiology-based measure of pain. Recent neuroimaging data suggest that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and support vector machine (SVM) learning can be jointly used to accurately assess cognitive states. Therefore, we hypothesized that an SVM trained on fMRI data can assess pain in the absence of self-report. In fMRI experiments, 24 individuals were presented painful and nonpainful thermal stimuli. Using eight individuals, we trained a linear SVM to distinguish these stimuli using whole-brain patterns of activity. We assessed the performance of this trained SVM model by testing it on 16 individuals whose data were not used for training. The whole-brain SVM was 81% accurate at distinguishing painful from non-painful stimuli (p<0.0000001). Using distance from the SVM hyperplane as a confidence measure, accuracy was further increased to 84%, albeit at the expense of excluding 15% of the stimuli that were the most difficult to classify. Overall performance of the SVM was primarily affected by activity in pain-processing regions of the brain including the primary somatosensory cortex, secondary somatosensory cortex, insular cortex, primary motor cortex, and cingulate cortex. Region of interest (ROI) analyses revealed that whole-brain patterns of activity led to more accurate classification than localized activity from individual brain regions. Our findings demonstrate that fMRI with SVM learning can assess pain without requiring any communication from the person being tested. We outline tasks that should be completed to advance this approach toward use in clinical settings.

Law and Neuroscience Event in San Diego

It's tomorrow from 2-5pm at the University of San Diego.  The event is free and open to the public.  For more information, see here.

Panelists

• Deborah Denno, Fordham University, The School of Law
• Adam Kolber, Professor, Brooklyn Law School
• Michael Moore, Professor, Law & Philosophy, University of Illinois
• Stephen Morse, Professor, Law & Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania
• Michael Pardo, Professor, University of Alabama School of Law
• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor, Philosophy, Duke University

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Brain scans reduce murder sentence in Italian court, New Scientist In The Popular Press: How Human Are You? A New Turing Test Relies on Spatial Relations, Discover Blogs 80 beats Stanford scientists work towards developing a “painometer”, SCOPE Babies Distinguish Pain from Touch at 35-37 Weeks, Research Finds, Science Daily Mapping Manchester's Mood, Guardian Parenting tips from neuroscience, New Scientist Culture Lab Neurology vs. Psychiatry: The Social Production of Knowledge, Sociological Images Can Brain Research Keep Us Safe?, Slate The United States of Adderall, Huffington Post Birth Control Pills Affect Memory, Researchers Find, Science Daily Treating depression with magnetic energy, Boston Globe The Changing Mental Health Aftermath of 9/11--Psychological "First Aid" Gains Favor over Debriefings, Scientific American Peace of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations, Scientific American Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand, New York Times Detecting covert consciousness in the vegetative state, Guardian Neurophilosophy Mo Costandi  SpongeBob impairs little kids' thinking, study finds, LA Times Booster Shots SpongeBob drains attention, but doesn't harm brains, New Scientist Fatherhood Lowers Testosterone, Keeps Dads at Home, Scientific American  New Research on Detecting Pain, Law and Biosciences Blog Addiction is Not a Disease of the Brain, NPR  Quitting Smoking Enhances Personality Change, Science Daily Neuroscience Fails Stats 101, Neuroskeptic  Debating Human Enhancement, Slate Novelty May Dynamically Rearrange The Prefrontal Hierarchy, Developing Intelligence  Insulin Spray May Stave Off Alzheimer’s, Preliminary Study Suggests, Discover Blogs 80 beats Could a robot be conscious?, BBC News Motor Memory: The Long and Short of It, Science Daily   From the Academic Literature: Human brain changes across the life span: A review of 56 longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging studies, Human Brain Mapping Neural Circuits Look Forward, PNAS Constructing scenes from objects in human occipitotemporal cortex, Nature Neuroscience  Ligand-binding domain of an α7-nicotinic receptor chimera and its complex with agonist, Nature Neuroscience Association of Alzheimer disease pathology with abnormal lipid metabolism, Neurology Deep Brain Stimulation of Nucleus Accumbens on Heroin-Seeking Behaviors: A Case Report, Biological Psychiatry  Brain energization in response to deep brain stimulation of subthalamic nuclei in Parkinson's disease, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism

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.

Remarkable Good Samaritan Video

Here's a video where strangers self-organize for positive collective action.  An injured person is trapped under a car as flames burn.  Risking substantial injury to themselves, they find a remarkable solution.  I suspect this video will be watched in lots of social psychology classes to come.

 

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)