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By Ryan Purcell Image courtesy of Pexels . On a sunny, late fall day with the semester winding down, Emory neuroscientist Dr. Gregory Berns gave a seminar in the Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News series on campus. Berns has become relatively famous for his ambitious and fascinating work on what he calls “the dog project”, an eminently relatable and intriguing study that has taken aim at uncovering how the canine mind works using functional imaging technology. The seminar was based on some of the ideas in his latest book, What It’s Like to Be a Dog (and other adventures in Animal Neuroscience) . In it, Berns responds to philosopher Thomas Nagel’s influential anti-reductionist essay “ What Is It Like to Be a Bat? ” and recounts his journey to perform the world’s first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session on an awake, unrestrained dog. Like so many seemingly impossible tasks, when broken down into many small, discrete steps, getting a dog to step into an fMRI mac...

By Nathan Ahlgrim Even computer programs, like DeepDream, hallucinate. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . Experiencing hallucinations is one of the most sure-fire ways to be labeled with one of the most derogatory of words: “crazy.” Hearing voices that no one else can hear is a popular laugh line (look no further than  Phoebe in Friends ), but it can be a serious and distressing symptom of schizophrenia and other incapacitating disorders. Anderson Cooper demonstrated the seriousness of the issue, finding the most mundane of tasks nearly impossible as he lived a day immersed in simulated hallucinations. Psychotic symptoms are less frequently the butt of jokes with increasing visibility and sensitivity, but people with schizophrenia and others who hear voices are still victims of stigma . Of course, people with schizophrenia deserve to be treated like patients in the mental healthcare system to ease their suffering and manage their symptoms, but there is a population who are at peace w...

By Jonah Queen Image courtesy of  Pixabay . As neurotechnology advances and our understanding of the brain increases, there is a growing debate about if, and how, neuroscience can play a role in the legal system. In particular, some are asking if these technologies could ever be used to accomplish things that humans have so far not been able to, such as performing accurate lie detection and predicting future behavior. For September’s Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News event, Dr. Eyal Aharoni of Georgia State University spoke about his research on whether biomarkers might improve our ability to predict the risk of recidivism in criminal offenders. The results were published in a 2013 paper titled “ Neuroprediction of future rearrest 1 ," which was reported in the media with headlines such as “ Can we predict recidivism with a brain scan? ” The study reports evidence that brain scans could potentially improve offender risk assessment. At the event, Dr. Aharoni led a discus...

by Lindsey Grubbs An intellectually diverse and opinionated crowd gathered recently for the most recent Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News journal club at Emory University—“Your brain on movies: Implications for national security.” The discussion was one of the liveliest I've seen in the years I've been attending these events, which is perhaps not surprising: the talk touched on high-profile issues like neuromarketing (which is controversial enough that it has been banned in France since 2011) and military funding for neuroscience. The seminar was led by Dr. Eric Schumacher , Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgia Tech, director of the Georgia State University/Georgia Tech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging , and principle investigator of CoNTRoL —Cognitive Neuroscience at Tech Research Laboratory. Currently, the lab investigates task-oriented cognition, as well as the relationship between film narratives and “transportation” (colloquially, the sense of “getting l...

The 6.1 Issue of the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience ( AJOB Neuroscience ) is now hot off the presses with two target articles highlighting ethical issues behind the use of two very different therapeutic interventions: first-in-human trials to treat Parkinson’s disease using stem-cell based therapies and prescription stimulants to enhance motivation. The Target Article “Ethical Criteria for Human Trials of Stem-Cell Derived Dopaminergic Neurons in Parkinson’s Disease” 1 by Samia A. Hurst et al. discusses three specific considerations of a phase I(safety)-II (efficacy) clinical trial designed to test an experimental neurorestorative stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a result of the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra, and significant depletion of dopamine leads to the tremors, rigidity, and difficulty initiating or halting movement that is often seen as the disease progresses. To compensate for the diminishing level...

Men and women experience fluctuations in sexual motivation over a lifetime. Whether sexual desire is enhanced or diminished at any particular time can depend on a number of factors and circumstances, but researchers from McGill University recently set out to determine specifically how pain impacts sexual behavior. 1 Results from this study , published in The Journal of Neuroscience earlier this year, were the topic of the most recent “Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News” discussion facilitated by Emory Women’s Gender and Sexuality graduate student Natalie Turrin and Neuroscience graduate student Mallory Bowers. To study how pain impacts sexual motivation, researchers used a partitioned Plexiglas chamber where the partition contained small, semi-circular openings only large enough for the female mice to pass through (this study required that male mice be greater than 45 g and female mice smaller than 25 g). In this set-up, the females were free to either cross the partit...