Ken Daniszewski
September 9th, 2009 at 19:20Hello everyone,
My name is Ken Daniszewski. I work as an administrative staff member at UCSD in San Diego. My background is mostly in accounting and education. I am interested in understanding neuroethics as it might relate to research administration, and also I am interested in the Peer 2 Peer University model. Also, I’ve read several articles lately about how popular neuroenhancing drugs are becoming, so I am interested in understanding how they might effect higher education in the future. I look forward to learning about Neuroethics and participating in this course.
Posted by kendaniszewski,
in peers
September 10th, 2009 at 5:46 am
Welcome, Ken! We’re certainly going to analyse neuro enhancement during our course and you can take the opportunity to discuss how neurohancement drugs impact on students performances (is it cheating?). Very, very interesting issue.
September 10th, 2009 at 10:17 am
The medically-unsupervised use of neuroenhancers certainly is a fascinating subject.
I think I’ve seen four articles on this topic in popular periodicals in the last few months. The first was a long article in the April 27 New Yorker titled “Brain Gain, The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs” by Margaret Talbot. Talbot took a provocative neutral stance towards their use. And just recently in Wired there was a non-scientific “product comparison” titled “Roundup: Smart Drugs” by Alexis Fitts. Fitts took four of these purported over-the-counter neuroenhancers and described her experiences as anecdotal evidence of their efficacy.
Here are the URLs for the two articles I mentioned:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot
http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_studydrugs
Cheers
September 10th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Thank you for the links, Ken!
Let’s save the links to discuss the theme together, when we read about neuroenhancement… It’s a hot topic indeed!
September 14th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Questions:
1) Is it appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age?
2) How the emergence of new neuroscientific techniques has provoked bioethical issues?
3) Are we our brains? Are all bioethical issues nothing but neuroethical issues?
4) How do cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging contribute to neuroethics field?
Prior to signing up for this course, I was completely unaware of the emergence of this field called “neuroethics” or of what I surmise to be a field – since I am not actually sure that to call “neuroethics” a “field” is correct academic parlance, but for the moment at least until corrected I will assume it is a field. But at any rate I was unaware of the interest gathering under this head.
Of some of the underlying constituent parts of this field I like everyone else was not unaware – for clearly a lot of what we are now apparently classing as “neuroethics” is not new. As someone said, for example, the use of lobotomies had long since been concluded to be unethical, many years before the term “neuroethics” came on the scene. But if “neuro” means “brain” and “neuroethics” by extension means ethics related to the brain, then clearly when society was wrestling with the morality of lobotomies, this was the decision of a neuroethical issue.
And, in the same way, this list could be easily extended to include other antecedent issues from psychology and medicine, such as for example electro-convulsive therapies or even manipulative psychological procedures, which while not conventionally thought of as issues of neuro-ethics, would seem to qualify under that classification if broadly defined to relate to ethical issues involving brain activity, inclusively considered to encompass any sort of intervention effecting the brain, which is a broad category of interventions indeed.
So the question becomes, it would seem to me, and I am only a total novice in this “field”, but a primary question would seem to be “how do we want to delimit what we call “neuroethics”? And it seems that, if we want to keep the topic manageable at all, we might want to place some rather strict limits on the definition of “neuroethics” both in terms of historicity and in terms of content.
For example, if we want to keep our definition of neuroethics associated with the modern science of neurology as we know it, then we might want to set some arbitrary beginning time point on issues we class as neuroethical, saying for example that neuroethics pertains only to issues which arose after (and looking quickly to Wikipedia for this point) … “The neuron doctrine was put forward by Santiago Ramón y Cajal in the late 19th century”. The technique of lobotomy, for example, emerged long before this, so if we wanted to somehow arbitrarily limit the meaning of the term “neuroethics” in a historical sense, then setting as a starting point Ramon and Cajal’s doctrine would accomplish this goal.
Similarly, if we wanted to set a reasonable historical end point in the future on what we would want to call neuroethics, we might want to think about somehow proscribing some practical future limit on issues we would want to include in our definition of neuroethics. In the field of neurology, as with everything else, our scientific knowledge is rapidly changing. I heard this weekend about a futurist named Kurzweil who thinks that in 50 years we could all be immortal, (that is, if we don’t mind also being software, which I think I would rather not enjoy), but at any rate the future is limitless, and so to talk about issues to far out into the future as though they were practical everyday conundrums of ethics, I think, is a bit impractical. So we might also want to think about somehow limiting our definition of neuroethics to the science which is currently present or which at least has a reasonable probability of becoming so in the not too distant future.
Besides historically, we might also want to think about how we might want to limit the use of the term “neuroethics” in terms of its content. Since, as we said, theoretically the term neuroethics could be very broadly defined to mean almost anything, then to retain its usefulness it probably behooves us to set some reasonable limits as to the content of what we mean the term neuroethics to include. For example, when the United States Central Intelligence Agency was conducting experiments on memory alterations using various techniques including LSD, that work could be I guess considered a violation of neuro-ethics. But whether or not a definition so broad could at the same time be practically useful in advancing our collective understanding is, I think, doubtful. So probably it would be more sound to limit our understanding of the term neuroethics to techniques and science which we associate more closely with the modern field of neurology, e.g. brain imaging and a the more modern generations of pharmaceuticals.
But, in the end, maybe any attempt to limit or define the proper boundaries of the term neuroethics is pointless because, after all, any specific usefulness of the term is going to have to obtain in some specific context, and really the more difficult ethical issues are always going to be in some context, so whether or not we have a proper understanding of what we mean by the umbrella term “neuroethics” will, probably to a large extent, be moot, while the more thorny and difficult issues will remain in the specific contexts.
For example, some possible neuroethical issues we might need to consider is in the use of neuroscience in lie-detection or the use of neuroscience in end-of-life decisions. These are the type of discrete root issues which, while presumably falling under the category of neuroethics, have in the end each to be decided on its own merits. And we can’t help observing as well that these are not new or intrinsically neuroethical issues, but rather old, time worn issues for which the advancing science of the brain has merely enabled us to peel one more layer off the onion, so to speak.
So, to wrap up this screed, I think it comes down to this. I really don’t think there is much to be gained by talking overmuch about the general topic of “neuroethics”, as a think unto itself, sui generis, so to speak.
I think, unfortunately, that our system of higher education, (“our” here meaning “my” and not necessarily “yours”), or in other words the United States’ system of higher education, has an unfortunate tendency to direct effort into some rather meaningless byways of inquiry. This was a problem, remarkably, that was predicted long ago by one of our greatest scholars, William James, when he decried the “Ph.D. Octopus”, (1), in 1903. Remarkable as it was that James foresaw this in 1903, the rest of us were not so foresighted and as a result today a scholarly America finds itself more or less being strangled by this metaphorical cephalopod. The result is that unfortunately many ideas of more or less fatuous content are receiving a richly undeserved consideration, I think, while other more important matters go unheeded by academia.
And so, and to maybe try to take a little bit of the sharp edge off that last graf, I don’t think its altogether very important whether or not we talk about a neuroethical age or not, and certainly those who wish to are already indulging in their perogative to do so.
But, and this I do think is important, underneath the umbrella term of “neuroethics”, however so one might wish to define it, there are presenting or bound to be soon presenting some very important questions of right and wrong which will seriously and profoundly effect many peoples’ individual lives, and those questions I think do deserve the fullest attention we can bring to them.
Someone on this board had mentioned Czikszentmihalyi and over the weekend I listened to a short talk he gave which is available on Google Videos, (2). In the video Czikszentmihalyi says that success can be defined as something that one enjoys and which helps people. That later criterion, helping people, I think, is the more useful focal point in assessing what may or may not be the emerging field of neuroethics considered globally. That is, that it matters not how many conference papers or institutes there may be in a particular year, but rather in understanding if and how our emerging knowledge of the brain can lead us to better resolve real human problems in particular contexts which are the real questions with which we ought to be most engaged.
(1) see http://books.google.com/books?id=c2rjtEWeYvwC&pg=PA343&lpg=PA343&dq=william+James+octopus&source=bl&ots=-dhvaMKMg0&sig=ZvJtjCFmZlrNVDx0yAxn38nmg6M&hl=en&ei=U-2uSrvNOZOqtgO7_J25Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=william%20James%20octopus&f=false )
(2) see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs
September 15th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
[...] I posted my response to the week 1 questions here . [...]