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By Ian Stevens Ian is a 4th year undergraduate student at Northern Arizona University. He is majoring in Biomedical Sciences with minors in Psychological Sciences and Philosophy to pursue interdisciplinary research on how medicine, neuroscience, and philosophy connect.  Introduction Brain recording technologies (BRTs), such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that collect various types of brain signals from on and around the brain could be creating privacy vulnerabilities in their users. 1,2 These privacy concerns have been discussed in the marketplace as BCIs move from medical and research uses to novel consumer purposes. 3,4  Privacy concerns are grounded in the fact that brain signals can currently be decoded to interpret mental states such as emotions, 5 moral attitudes, 6 and intentions. 7 However, what can be interpreted from these brain signals in the future is ambiguous. The current uncertainty that surrounds future capacities to decode complex mental states – and ...

By Hannah Maslen  Hannah Maslen is the Deputy Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics , University of Oxford. She works on a wide range of topics in applied philosophy and ethics, from neuroethics to moral emotions and criminal justice. Hannah is Co-PI on BrainCom, a 5-year European project working towards the development of neural speech prostheses. Here, she leads the work package on ‘Ethics, Implants and Society’.   Scientists across Europe are combining their expertise to work towards the development of neuroprosthetic devices that will restore or substitute speech in patients with severe communication impairments. The most ambitious application will be in patients with locked-in syndrome who have completely lost the ability to speak. Locked-in syndrome is a condition in which the patient is awake and retains mental capacity but cannot express himself or herself due to the paralysis of afferent motor pathways, preventing speech and limb movements (ex...

By Somnath Das Somnath Das recently graduated from Emory University where he majored in Neuroscience and Chemistry. He will be attending medical school at Thomas Jefferson University starting in the Fall of 2017. The son of two Indian immigrants, he developed an interest in healthcare after observing how his extended family sought help from India's healthcare system to seek relief from chronic illnesses. Somnath’s interest in medicine currently focuses on understanding the social construction of health and healthcare delivery. Studying Neuroethics has allowed him to combine his love for neuroscience, his interest in medicine, and his wish to help others into a multidisciplinary, rewarding practice of scholarship which to this day enriches how he views both developing neurotechnologies and the world around him.  Humans in the 21st century have an intimate relationship with technology. Much of our lives are spent being informed and entertained by screens. Technological...

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...

Imagine opening your email on your computer not by typing a number code, a password, or even by scanning a finger, but instead by simply thinking of a password. Physical keys and garage door openers could also become artifacts of the past once they are replaced with what could be referred to as pass-thoughts . Just last year, researchers at UC Berkley used EEG signals emitted from subjects as biomarker identifiers to allow access to a computer. The entire system – the headset, the Bluetooth device, and the computer – had an error rate of less than 1%. 1 While wearing EEG headsets to open our devices may seem futuristic, this type of scenario could become more prevalent in the future due to advances in physiological computing (PC). Physiological computing is a unique form of human computer interactions because the input device for a computer is any form of real-time physiological data, such as a heart-rate or EEG signal. This is in stark contrast to the peripheral devices that we are...