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The following post is part of a special series emerging from Contemporary Issues in Neuroethics, a graduate-level course out of Emory University’s Center for Ethics. People often ask me what language I dream in. I usually tell them that I dream in both languages – Romanian and English – and that it depends on the content of the dream and on the people featured in it. I associate emotional states with my native Romanian, while organized, sequential thinking is easier in English. Most of the time, I am not even aware of the identity of the language I produce and hear in my dreams. Leaving the mysterious dimension of dreams behind, how does the multilingual brain navigate the world? Faced with an information-dense environment, it is able to switch its language of appraisal at the moment’s need. Consider the increasingly large group of bilingual English-speaking Hispanics in the United States. Most of them use English in their academic and work environments, then effortlessly switch to Sp...

I made and abandoned several attempts at an opening sentence for this post and all of them included a deft way to bury the lead. The lead is this: I’m thrilled for two of my students whose video, Empathy and your Brain , was selected as one of the top submissions to the 2014 Brain Awareness Video Contest . Their video now has the chance to be selected as the fan favorite in the People’s Choice contest. But why was I burying it? I suppose I’ve become accustomed to integrating Neuroethics content and dialogue in courses that I teach, sometimes as part of the formal curriculum, but more often as implicit or hidden curriculum . Since Neuroethics courses are still not yet standard fare in most academic institutions, I generally don’t have an opportunity to explicitly test out some of the currently evolving creative techniques in Neuroethics education like those featured on NeuroethicsWomen Leaders teaching resources page . Instead, I often work the ideas and concepts into other mor...

By Lindsey Grubbs Lindsey Grubbs is a PhD student in the English Department at Emory University , where she is also working on a certificate in bioethics. She holds a master’s degree in English and gender studies from the University of Wyoming . She is interested in the relationship between literature and science, and works with American literature from the nineteenth century until today to interrogate and complicate the boundaries between health and wellness, normalcy and aberrance, and physical and mental complaints. As neuroscientists begin to approach topics usually falling under the purview of other specialties, how can they ethically incorporate various forms of knowledge rather than provide simplified metrics that will, in a data hungry society, be easier for most to latch onto? In 2013, we saw the publication of at least two high profile studies claiming neuroscientific proof for the potential moral benefits of reading fiction. Greg Berns and his associates published “ Short- ...

Sara Freeman Graduate Student Department of Neuroscience Emory University In this post, I would like to highlight the work of another Emory graduate student, Sara Freeman. Just when Cyd Cipolla and I (in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) were coming up with our plan to teach an interdisciplinary course bringing together gender studies and neuroscience, we found out that Sara (in the Neuroscience Graduate Program) was developing her own interdisciplinary course bringing together developmental biology and the sociology of gender. Sara’s course, which she is teaching this semester, is called “Intersex: Biology & Gender,” and is cross-listed in the departments of Biology, Sociology, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. “Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with physical reproductive or sexual characteristics that cannot be easily classified as male or female (for more information, visit the Intersex Societ...

"N" is for Neurosexism Twenty or thirty years ago, single-sex education for girls was a feminist clause célèbre. However, beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people began to worry that boys were “underperforming” in school and in life (an idea nicknamed “the boys’ crisis” by the popular press). The media framing of the boys’ crisis has been critiqued on a number of fronts – specifically, critics have pointed out that both girls and boys are performing better in school than in the past and that the difference in educational achievement between white and middle-class students and low-income and minority students is far more pronounced than the difference between female and male students (see a 2008 report from the American Association of University Women ). However, despite these critiques, cultural commentators began to advocate for single-sex education in public schools as a solution to the boys’ crisis. Commentators like Michael Gurian (author of Boys and Girls Lea...

16 significant women in science for details visit: http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/ My entering class of 2002 at Emory University consisted almost entirely women with the exception of maybe 2-3 men in a large group of maybe 15 or so people. This super-sized class was a complete fluke--almost everyone who received offers from Emory chose Emory as their top pick that year to the chagrin of many fine graduate neuroscience programs. In retaliation, other schools moved their deadlines up the following year. I felt lucky to have such a large diverse class, like I had a better sampling of the population of future neuroscientists. Read more here: http://emoryethics.blogspot.com/2012/01/women-in-science-is-pregnancy-short.html  

This year, Emory's First Year Neuroscience Graduate Students were asked to write a blog post for the Neuroethics portion of their Neuroscience and Communications Course. These posts are delivered in 4 weekly installments, each week featuring a commentary on a different neuroethics piece. This is final installment! This week, we feature blogs covering the following article: Neuroethics: Give memory-altering drugs a chance Nature 476, 275–276 (2011) Want to cite this post? Rommelfanger, K. (2011). Fourth Installment: First Year Neuroscience Students at Emory Write about the Ethics of Memory-Altering Drugs. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2011/12/fourth-installment-first-year.html