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By Jonathan D. Moreno, PhD Dr.  Jonathan D. Moreno is one of 14 Penn Integrates Knowledge university professors at the University of Pennsylvania , holding the David and Lyn Silfen chair. He is also Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, of History and Sociology of Science, and of Philosophy. Moreno is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. In 2008-09 he served as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. In September I arrived in Geneva to keynote a conference at the Brocher Foundation on the banks of Lake Geneva, where the ghost of John Calvin still casts a long shadow over the stern ethos of the Swiss. It was a glorious day in that oasis of calm and cleanliness, where the sheer power of holding much of the world’s money in its vaults justifies a muffled smugness. Compulsively, I checked my email as my taxi glided past the Hotel President Wilson, the monument o...

Last December 2013, the neuroscience graduate students at Emory University spearheaded an effort alongside many other sponsors to organize and implement a symposium to explore the neuroscientific basis of race and gender bias. The program, entitled “Bias in the Academy: From Neural Networks to Social Networks,”  awarded the Laney Graduate School New Thinkers/New Leaders fund and support from CMBC and the Center for Ethics, aimed to provide students and faculty alike an overview of the psychological and neuroscientific research on race and gender bias and how this might be used to mitigate harmful effects of stereotype and bias in the academy. After listening to and participating in the symposium, I realized that the symposium speakers and student planners all hoped to answer a similar question regarding the nature of the brain: Is the brain “hard-wired” to categorize people into groups in a way that makes negative stereotyping inevitable or is the brain exquisitely plastic insof...

On December 13, 2013 the Marcus Autism Center and the Atlanta Autism Consortium co-hosted a mini-symposium looking at the role of faith and religion in the lives and well-being of individuals living and working with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Organized by Marcus psychologist Dr. Samuel Fernandez-Carriba and Georgia State professor Dr.  Anne-Pierre Goursaud the event, titled “Faith, Values and Autism,” included a panel of six individuals from a variety of faith perspectives and featured a presentation by Dr. Alfiee M. Breland-Noble on the development and implementation of faith based mental health promotion. This topic has important implications for neuroethics and neurodiversity , the perspective that autism and other neurological disorders are part of natural human neurological diversity that should be neither cured nor normalized. The religious or faith-based perspective of a family impacts how the presence of autistic traits in a child is framed. Some religions, for ...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex disorder typically characterized by social impairment and communication deficits, and most recently the CDC has estimated that 1 in 88 American children are affected by a form of ASD. 1 A reliable diagnosis for autism can be offered at 24 months, but most children are diagnosed later after attending school. For the first Neuroethics journal club of the spring semester, ILA graduate student and Neuroethics Scholar Jennifer Sarrett led a discussion on a new technology that could offer preclinical risk assessment in children as young as 2 months. Even though children and adults with autism exhibit a wide variety of individual and unique symptoms, a common attribute of those diagnosed with autism is a deficit in the ability to make eye contact. In a paper published in Nature late last year, researchers from the Marcus Autism Center and Emory University School of Medicine used special eye-tracking equipment to measure eye fixation in children on...

Did you miss our annual neuroethics symposium?  Now you can watch the video archive of the event! Just click below on the link of the title of the session and then click play. Neuroethics Symposium December 10, 2013 Bias in the Academy: From Neural Networks to Social Networks.   This neuroethics symposia is designed to discuss the complex influence of stereotype/bias on academia and apply advances in the science of stereotype bias to university policies and practices. Through a pre-symposia seminar series and symposia, a white paper will be produced to highlight challenges and to put forth practical solutions to move toward mitigating the detrimental influence of bias and stereotyping in academia.   Part I: 9:15-10:15 am - Elizabeth Phelps The Neuroscience of Race Bias          Part II: 10:30-11:30 am - Chad Forbes Gaining Insight from a Biased Brain: Implications for the Stigmatized       ...

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...

By Eric Racine, PhD and Victoria Saigle Dr. Eric Racine is the director of the Neuroethics Research Unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal and holds academic appointments in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Université de Montréal and in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, the Department of Medicine, and the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. Victoria Saigle is a research assistant at the Neuroethics Research Unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal. In the public eye, one of the most striking types of findings neuroscience research claims to unravel concerns how decisions are made and whether these decisions are made “freely”. Unpacking the relationship between what is meant by “freely” and other neighboring notions such as “voluntarily”, “informed”, “conscious”, “undetermined”, “uncoerced”, “autonomous”, “controlle...