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By Laura Y. Cabrera, Rachel McKenzie, Robyn Bluhm Image courtesy of the U.S. Airforce Special Operations Command . Treatments for psychiatric disorders raise unique ethical issues because they aim to change behaviors, beliefs, and affective responses that are central to an individual’s sense of who they are. For example, interventions for depression aim to change feelings of guilt and worthlessness (as well as depressed mood), while treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder try to diminish both problematic obsessive beliefs and compulsive behaviors. In addition to the specific mental states that are the target of intervention, these treatments can also affect non-pathological values, beliefs, and affective responses. The bioethics and neuroethics communities have been discussing the ethical concerns that these changes pose for individual identity [1,2], personality [3,4], responsibility [5], autonomy [6,7], authenticity [8], and agency [9,10].  What we did Pharmacological interv...

By Sol Lee This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris of Summer 2016. Sol Lee studies Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. As a pre-med student, he is enthusiastic about primary care and global health concerns. Sol is currently doing research on glutamate receptors in Parkinson’s Disease in the Smith Lab. Ever since its inception in 2002 [1], neuromarketing has been a rapidly developing and highly controversial field. Neuromarketing employs neuroscience research in order to advertise products and services and is primarily utilized by companies to better understand the brain’s responses to marketing stimuli and advertising [2]. Methods include analysis of galvanic skin response, which can be used to measure stress, and eye tracking, which measures eye location and movement. Common medical research techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain ac...

by Tabitha Moses  Tabitha Moses, M.S., is Administrative and Research Coordinator at Lehman College, CUNY, as well as a Research Affiliate at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. Tabitha earned her BA in Cognitive Science and Philosophy and MS in Biotechnology from The Johns Hopkins University. She has conducted research in the areas of addiction, mental illness, and emerging neurotechnologies. She hopes to continue her education through a joint MD/PhD in Neuroscience while maintaining a focus on neuroethics. The introduction of “addiction vaccines” has brought with it a belief that we have the potential to cure addicts before they have ever even tried a drug. Proponents of addiction vaccines hold that they will: prevent children from becoming addicted to drugs in the future,  allow addicts to easily and safely stop using drugs, and  potentially lower the social and economic costs of addiction for society at large. However, it is cri...

By Walter Glannon, PhD Walter Glannon is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Ethical Theory. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience editorial board. Philosophers have argued that moral and criminal responsibility presuppose that actions cannot result from sequences that bypass agents’ control of their mental states as the causes of their actions (A. Mele, Autonomous Agents , 1995). Agents must act from their own mechanisms, which cannot be influenced by drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain, brainwashing or other interventions (J. M. Fischer and M. Ravizza, Responsibility and Control , 1998). Moral and criminal responsibility excludes all forms of brain manipulation. Via thejuryexpert.com With deep-brain stimulation (DBS) and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), neuroscientists can alter the brain and the mental capacities it mediates. The first device modulates dysfunctional neural cir...

By Eric Racine, PhD and Victoria Saigle Dr. Eric Racine is the director of the Neuroethics Research Unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal and holds academic appointments in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Université de Montréal and in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, the Department of Medicine, and the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. Victoria Saigle is a research assistant at the Neuroethics Research Unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal. In the public eye, one of the most striking types of findings neuroscience research claims to unravel concerns how decisions are made and whether these decisions are made “freely”. Unpacking the relationship between what is meant by “freely” and other neighboring notions such as “voluntarily”, “informed”, “conscious”, “undetermined”, “uncoerced”, “autonomous”, “controlle...

In the early 1970’s, eight people checked themselves into psychiatric hospitals throughout the United States, complaining of hearing voices. They were all admitted, and during their hospitalizations exhibited no unusual behavior and claimed to no longer be experiencing auditory hallucinations. After stays between 7 and 52 days in the institutions, the patients were discharged and given diagnoses of either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. None of these people had any mental illnesses, and had, in fact, falsified their symptoms as part of an experiment conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan (who was himself one of the “pseudopatients”). The results of the study were published in a 1973 paper in Science titled “On being sane in insane places” . In the paper Rosenhan argues that it is difficult to distinguish between “normality” and “abnormality” when it comes to mental health, and that, once applied, the label of a psychiatric diagnosis can be so strong that all of an individual’s ac...