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By Katie L. Strong, PhD  In a quiet room in a London office building, artificial intelligence history was made last October as reigning European Champion Fan Hui played Go , a strategy-based game he had played countless times before. This particular match was different from the others though – not only was Fan Hui losing, but he was losing against a machine. The machine was a novel artificial intelligence system named AlphaGo developed by Google DeepMind . DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 for an alleged $617 million (their largest European acquisition to date), is a company focused on developing machines that are capable of learning new tasks for themselves. DeepMind is more interested in artificial “general” intelligence, or AI machines that are adaptive to the task at hand and can accomplish new goals with little or no preprogramming. DeepMind programs essentially have a kind of short-term working memory that allows them to manipulate and adapt information to ma...

By Ryan Purcell Reconstruction of DBS electrode placement, image courtesy of Wikipedia Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an extraordinarily popular topic in neuroethics. In fact, you could fill a book with all of the articles written on the subject just in AJOB Neuroscience alone (and the editors have considered doing this!). A special issue on the topic in AJOBN can be found here . Among the most widely discussed neuroethical issues in the DBS arena are concerns over the effects on patient identity and authenticity. But perhaps one perspective that has not been fully represented in the academic literature is that of the patients for whom this is actually their last hope to find a way out of a profound, debilitating and often years-long episode of depression. At February’s Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News journal club, Dr. Helen Mayberg spoke passionately about the approach that led her team to attempt DBS for major depressive disorder (MDD), the ensuing media response, and ho...

By Jennifer Laura Lee Jenn Laura Lee recently received her undergraduate in neuroscience from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and hopes to pursue a PhD in neurobiology this fall. Her current interests include the advancement of women in STEM and the ethics of animal experimentation. The “ Bell Let’s Talk ” initiative swept through Canada on January 27, hoping to end the stigma associated with mental illness, one text and one share at a time. Michael Landsberg shares his thoughts in a short  video  on the Facebook page. “The stigma exists because fundamentally there’s a feeling in this country still that depression is more of a weakness than a sickness,” he explains. “People use the word depression all the time to describe a bad time in their life, a down time. But that’s very different than the illness itself.” Perhaps such a bold statement merits closer examination. Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists find themselves rallying behind two starkly...

By Scott O. Lilienfeld, Ph.D. Scott O. Lilienfeld is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University. He received his A.B. from Cornell University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in Psychology (Clinical) from the University of Minnesota in 1990. His interests include the etiology and assessment of personality disorders, conceptual issues in psychiatric classification, scientific thinking and evidence-based practice in psychology, and most recently, the implications of neuroscience for the broader field of psychology. Along with Sally Satel, he is co-author of Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (2013, Basic Books). I’m a clinical psychologist by training, although I no longer conduct psychotherapy. In the course of my graduate work at the University of Minnesota during the 1980s, I – like virtually all therapists in training – learned all about the ethical mandates of clinical practice. By now, all mental health professionals can practically r...

By Joseph Wszalek, J.D. and Sara Heyn Joseph Wszalek, J.D., is a fourth-year PhD student in the Neuroscience Training Program/Neuroscience and Public Policy Program at the University of Wisconsin. His research work focuses on the interaction between social cognition, language, and traumatic brain injury, with an emphasis on legal contexts. He holds a law degree cum laude and Order of the Coif from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he was a US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow through the Center for European Studies and a member of the Wisconsin International Law Journal’s senior editorial board.  Sara Heyn is currently a graduate student pursuing a J.D. along with a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include psychopathy, decision-making processes, and the use of neuroscientific evidence in the courtroom.  Ethical guidelines are a fundamental aspect of the legal profession. The modern attorney ser...