temp_copy

By Sunidhi Ramesh 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.  Sunidhi Ramesh, an Atlanta native, is a third year student at Emory University where she is double majoring in Sociology and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She plans to pursue a career in medicine and holds a deep interest in sparking conversation and change around her, particularly in regards to pressing social matters and how education in America is both viewed and handled. In her spare time, Sunidhi is a writer, bridge player, dancer, and violinist.  In 1893, Dr. Henry Howard Holmes opened his World’s Fair Hotel to the world [1]. But what his guests did not know was that the basement was filled with jars of poison, boxes of bones, and large surgical tables. Chutes from the guest rooms existed only to slide bodies into a pile downstairs. In the few months that the hotel was open for the public, Holmes, dubbed ...

How reliable are childhood memories? Are small children capable of serving as reliable witnesses in the courtroom? Are memories that adults recall from preschool years accurate? These questions are not only important to basic brain science and to understanding our own autobiographies, but also have important implications for the legal system. At the final Neuroscience, Ethics and the News journal club of the 2014 Fall semester, Emory Psychologist Robyn Fivush led a discussion on memory development, childhood amnesia, and the implications of neuroscience and psychology research for how children form and recall memories. This journal club discussion was inspired by a recent NPR story that explored the phenomenon of childhood amnesia. Why is it that most of us cannot form long-term memories as infants, at least in the same way that we can as adults? This fundamental question has fascinated many researchers and psychologists and neuroscientists today are tackling it in innovative ways. E...

By Mallory Bowers On November 14, the International Neuroethics Society convened for its annual meeting at the AAAS building in Washington, D.C. I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at INS through the generous support of the Emory Neuroethics Program. The society is an interdisciplinary group of scholars - including lawyers, clinicians, researchers, and policy makers - and the 2014 agenda reflected this diversity in expertise. The conference opened with a short talk by Chaka Fattah, the U.S. representative for Pennsylvania’s 2nd congressional district. As a Philadelphia native, I was excited to learn that Congressman Fattah was an architect of the Fattah Neuroscience Initiative , which was an impetus for developing the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Courtesy of Gillian Hue Discussion of the BRAIN initiative continued through the following panels, “The BRAIN Initiative & the Human Brain Project: an Ethical Focus” and “The...

By Stephen J. Morse, JD, PhD Stephen J. Morse is Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology and Law in Psychiatry, and Associate Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a board-certified forensic psychologist. His areas of expertise are criminal law, mental health law, and law and neuroscience. He is the recipient of the American Psychiatric Association’s 2014 Isaac Ray Award for distinguished contributions to forensic psychiatry and the psychiatric aspects of neuroscience. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience editorial board. What is the relevance to the law’s behavioral criteria of the “new” cognitive, affective and social neuroscience that has been fueled by non-invasive techniques for studying the brain? By behavioral criteria, I mean those that require evaluation of the subject’s acts and mental states. For example, did a defendant charged with homicide kill the victim intentionall...

Our memory can be unreliable, that comes as no surprise. But beyond forgetting where the car is parked or misremembering a date, a perhaps more interesting phenomenon is that of false memories of events that have never happened, or at least not to us directly. In most cases, the fallibility of memory is benign or occasionally embarrassing, but in the courtroom it can have serious consequences. In the final Neuroethics Journal Club of the semester, Emory University graduate student and  AJOB Neuroscience  editorial intern, Katie Strong, led a thought-provoking discussion of Ramirez’s 2013  Science  paper 1  entitled “Creating a false memory in the hippocampus” with a focus on the potential neuroethical implications of this research on the justice system. The discussion paper comes from  1987 Nobel laureate  Susumu Tonegawa’s lab and is in some ways a sequel to their 2012 paper published in  Nature 2 . In both studies this group utilized an elegantl...

Neuroscience, Law, and Ethics of Lie Detection Technologies   May 25th School of Medicine Auditorium from 1-5pm. You Can’t Handle the Truth! The Neuroscience Program, Center for Ethics Neuroethics Program, and the Scholars Program in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research (SPINR) are combining forces to hold a symposium on the intersection of neuroscience and law pertaining to the use of fMRI and other lie detection technologies in the courtroom. Drs. Hank Greely , director of the Center for Law and Biosciences at Stanford Law School, Daniel Langleben , a professor of Psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania and pioneer of using fMRI to detect lies, and Steven Laken , founder, president, and CEO of Cephos; a company that markets the use of fMRI for courtroom lie detection will be providing their expertise through a series of talks. Following the talks, Emory’s Carolyn Meltzer , Chair of the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, will join the speakers answering qu...