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By John Trimper Graduate Student, Psychology Emory University This post was written as part of the Contemporary Issues in Neuroethics course Remember the precogs in Minority Report ? The ones who could sync up their brains via the pale blue goo to see into the future? The precogs from the movie Minority Report Recent findings published in Scientific Reports (Pais-Vieira et al., 2013) suggest that the ability to sync up brains is no longer purely sci-fi fodder, and instead, has moved into the realm of laboratory reality. The relevant set of experiments, conducted primarily at the Nicolelis laboratory at Duke University, demonstrated that neural activity related to performance on a discrimination task could be recorded from one rat (“the encoder”) and transferred into a second rat’s brain (“the decoder”) via electrical stimulation. This brain-to-brain transfer of task-relevant information, provided the encoder rat was performing the task correctly, significantly enhanced the decoder...

The Neuroethics Journal Club videos are now available on YouTube. Watch each discussion to learn about a variety of neuroethics issues, from treatments for pedophilia to neural plasticity in mice. For each video, one presenter introduced the journal topic and opened discussion to the audience.  Neuroethics Journal Club : The Sexed Brain The Sexed Brain: Between Science and Ideology Catherine Vidal, Neuroethics, 2012  Abstract : Despite tremendous advances in neuroscience, the topic “brain, sex and gender” remains a matter of misleading interpretations, that go well beyond the bounds of science. In the 19th century, the difference in brain sizes was a major argument to explain the hierarchy between men and women, and was supposed to reflect innate differences in mental capacity. Nowadays, our understanding of the human brain has progressed dramatically with the demonstration of cerebral plasticity. The new brain imaging techniques have revealed the role of the environme...

By Elaine Walker, Ph.D., Sandy Goulding, MPH, MA., Arthur Ryan, MA., Carrie Holtzman, MA., Allison MacDonald, MA. Elaine Walker is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Emory University .  She leads a research laboratory that is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health  to study risk factors for major mental illness.  Her research is focused on child and adolescent development and the brain changes that are associated with adolescence. The identification of risk factors for illness is receiving increased attention in all fields of medicine, especially cardiology, oncology, neurology and psychiatry.  There are three potential benefits to identifying risk factors. The first is to reduce morbidity by reducing risk exposure. The second is to enhance opportunities for targeting preventive treatment toward those who are most likely to benefit. Finally, the identification of risk factors can shed light o...

Hysteria usually calls to mind thoughts of the Salem Witch Trials and delirious frenzies from history. However, mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness, is not simply an improbable, incomprehensible madness of the past. It has occurred throughout history and into our current generation, taking form as dancing plagues , dissociative possession of nuns , and involuntary twitches of high school girls in New York . Is it something they all ate? Or maybe there is something in the water… How is it that anxiety manifests itself into a dance that spreads among populations? Fear and distress terrorized populations in Medieval Europe and made them more prone to psychogenic illness . Certainly it seems there must be more to the story than merely these common denominators, for fear, anguish, stress, and trauma are commonly faced and dealt with sans mass hysteria. But the other factors needed for the exact formula of mass hysteria are difficult to pinpoint.  Is it the perfect combination o...

By Guest Contributor Jacob Billings  Neuroscience Graduate Student  Emory University Societal changes, when they occur, coincide with changing outlooks among the populace. Take for example the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. Largely, the motivations corresponding to economic and political enfranchisement for African-Americans and women resulted from changing identities among these groups during the mobilization of all of America’s resources during World War II. Notably, African Americans observed naturally pleasant interactions with European whites during tours of duty in WWII [1]. When returning to the US, it was impossible to allow American racism to continue unchallenged. During that same period, women acquired expertise in a great variety of professions for which they had been refused the opportunity to work [2]. The expectation that women return to a subordinate place in the household was immediately risen against. In our modern age, the outlooks held by our...