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It is my pleasure to present you with our first edition of The Neuroethics Blog reader. This reader includes some of the most popular posts on the site and highlights our junior talent. While the blog showcases cutting-edge debates in neuroethics, it also serves as a mechanism for mentoring junior scholars and students and providing them with exciting opportunities to have their pieces featured alongside established scholars in the field. In addition, the blog allows for community building, inviting scholars from multiple disciplines to participate. Our contributors have included individuals at various levels of education from fields such as law, neuroscience, engineering, psychology, English, medicine, philosophy, women’s studies, and religion, to name a few. Each blog post is a collaborative process, read and edited numerous times by the editorial leadership in partnership with the author. We aim to continue to mentor and deliver quality posts that serve to cultivate not only our ne...

by Karen Rommelfanger Miguel Nicolelis is dedicated to liberating the human brain from the physical constraints of a body . Recently, brain-machine interface engineer extraordinaire  Miguel Nicolelis  connected nonhuman animal brains in a modern-day mind meld called the brainet. For those who don't already know him, Nicolelis is an innovator, dedicated to pushing the limits of what is possible with neurotechnology, and a media darling to boot. One focus of Nicolelis' work has been developing neural prostheses whose function is mediated through wired or wirelessly transmitted electrical activity from arrays of electrodes implanted on the surfaces of nonhuman animal brains. One well-known experiment from the Nicolelis lab involved monkeys that  learned to feed themselves a marshmallow   or even operate a robot on a treadmill via direct connection electrodes implanted in their brains and a prosthetic arm. For extra flash, Nicolelis had a 12-lb monkey (based out of...

By Carolyn C. Meltzer, MD Dr. Carolyn C. Meltzer is a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine Departments of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Neurology. She is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell , 1984 In the iconic geopolitical thriller “ The Manchurian Candidate ,” advanced mind control techniques are used on a Korean War prisoner to turn him into an assassin. As we move into an era in which functional neuroimaging may be applied in ways akin to “mind reading,” such as applied to lie detection and economic choices, this fictional work more closely mimics reality. Functional neuroimaging tools have helped us to tease out neuronal networks and to better understand how we think and act in health and disease. With the exception of few specific instances of validated clinical use (such a...

Neuroessentialism is the belief that you , your mind, your identity, are essentially just your brain. It gets touted as an example of how science has triumphed, once again, over superstitions of the past - your soul hasn't died , it was just an illusion! Created by the brain. With memory, sensation, speech, and just about every other human attribute found to be located in one gyrus or another, it seems like there isn't anything left that could be outside of the brain. Francis Crick referred to this as the “astonishing hypothesis[1],” and while Stephen Pinker pointed out that for most neuroscientists this idea hardly warranted much astonishment[2], what might be more astonishing is how quickly the idea is bleeding out of the laboratory into popular media.  The basic philosophical foundations of this notion have been around for a long time (as mentioned on the [highly entertaining] podcast “ very bad wizards, ” we've known for a long time that when you remove the head, the mi...

We are now at a point where we can scan brain activity with fMRI, decode the patterns, and use the information to “read minds” or predict what a person is experiencing. For example, the Gallant Lab at the University of California, Berkley , published a paper in 2011 1 showing that by recording subjects watching a set of movies, they can estimate what visual features parts of the brain are encoding. Then, when they show you a new movie, their model can predict what you are seeing based on your brain activity. This “mind-reading” has limitations: the reconstruction is primitive, worse on abstract or rare stimuli, and each subjects must be scanned many times to tune the model to his or her individual brain. However, this experiment proves the principle that we create models that use brain activity to predict dynamic conscious experience even with the low visual and temporal resolution and indirect measures of an fMRI. Other labs are progressing in different domains, for example Chang and...

“I know what you’re thinking….” It’s a common saying and one that belies any functional capacity to predict another’s thoughts. Yet our drive to uncover arguably the most secretive and private form of information – thoughts – has led to major advances in the science of “reading one’s mind.” Current technologies are able to perform generally accurate predictions about robust neurologic phenomena such as distinguishing if an individual is looking at (or imagining) a face or a home (Haynes and Rees, 2006). However, as technologies advance it may well soon be possible to detect and identify more complex and covert thoughts – lies (Langleben et al., 2005) and even subconscious thought (Dehaene et al., 1998). With this ability, we must question the ethics surrounding the pursuit of this knowledge. Figure 3 from Haynes and Rees, 2006 The foremost concern with use of this technology is the right to privacy. At what length are we able to sidestep an individual’s basic right to privacy? If an in...

With advances in neuroimaging the ability to decode mental states in humans by recording brain activity has become a reality. In a review for Nature Neuroscience that is now six years old, John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees detail how fMRI can be used to accurately predict visual perception. They explain that with advanced statistical pattern recognition, not only can the perception of broadly different visual inputs be differentiated, such as faces versus landscapes, but even the perception of subtly distinct objects, such shoes versus a chair, can be recognized. Further, fine details can also be distinguished, including image orientation, direction of motion, and perceived color. Indeed, the orientation of masked images can even be discriminated by activity in the primary visual cortex despite the subject being unable to consciously distinguish the orientation of the image. Decoding unconscious processing (from Haynes and Rees, 2006 ) While the power of fMRI and other imaging te...

Last month I blogged a little bit about constitutional protection, lie detection technology, and wildly speculative but totally valid concerns about what happens if someone else could tell what I was thinking. As promised, this month I’m going to follow up with some information about “precrime”: what it is, outside of a science-fiction context, what it could become, and what neuroscientific knowledge contributes to the area. This is a wonderful book ; everyone should go read it. Pre-crime is exactly what it sounds like; it is the science of predicting when crimes are likely to happen and trying to intervene and prevent them. The idea that police officers could prevent crime by predicting it captures the public imagination in a big way, leading to a lot of sensationalism. There were a series of articles starting in 2004 about London’s so-called “Homocide Prevention Unit,” which captured public imagination so much it had a television show based on it. [1] According to more recent reports...

The undergraduate Neuroethics Program Creative Team embarked on making one of their first videos featuring Dr. Paul Root Wolpe .  This short 3 minute video discusses the ethical implications of using neuroimaging as evidence in the courtroom. This video is a teaser for our upcoming event on May 25th at Emory (see below for more information).  Thanks to our Neuroethics Creative Team! Giacomo Waller Sabrina Bernstein Lauren Ladov The Truth About Lies: the Neuroscience, Law, and Ethics of Lie Detection Technologies 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 Ps...

Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, Dr. Paul Root Wolpe puts his foot down on CNN's Belief Blog. Dr. Paul Root Wolpe, neuroethics expert "Throughout human history, the inner workings of our minds were impenetrable, known only to us and, perhaps, to God. No one could see what you were thinking, or know what you were feeling, unless you chose to reveal it to them." Read more about it by following the link below. My Take: Keep government out of mind-reading business

Subliminal messaging has always been a fascinating topic: Can we (should we) manipulate people's thoughts, choices, and subsequent behaviors by tapping into their private subconscious space, below the threshold of conscious perception? Subliminal messaging via wearing headphones to listening to recordings meant to induce weight loss or confidence-building has been deemed as the relatively innocuous self-help realm. Subliminal messaging used for marketing purposes has been greeted with a bit more judgment and suspicion. We know that current marketing techniques utilize interviews with focus groups to sell a variety of products. These interview data are then correlated with behavioral (purchasing decision) data. But why not cut out the middle (wo)man--namely you, the consumer--and go straight to your brain? This is precisely what several companies have begun to do. "Don't just advertise. Neurotise" is the slogan of the the new Houston neuromarketing firm Neurotis...