Neuroethics and International Biolaw

The accuracy of the Brain Imaging tool is still too imprecise and sensationalism as Christopher deCharms looks inside the brain helps to decrease even more it’s credibility. It reminds me of one of the Language and Cognition courses that we attended at graduation; course’s bibliography consisted of all the Oliver Sacks’s books, a great neurologist , but he suffers from the same “sensationalism” problem when it comes to report his clinical cases, he only shows the top of the iceberg. The fact that a man – who was blind basically his whole life – reaches almost insanity when regain his sight is not an extraordinary curiosity when you understand that vision as well as smell, hearing, are not properties of the eyes, nose and ears per se but first and foremost brain’s processes. But it was apparently so extraordinaire that it even reached Hollywood ! * although, I must admit that I’m still impressed by Sacks’s book The man who mistook his wife for a hat (yes, it is exactly what is seems), but I’m sure it’s just because I don’t have the biological knowledge of it’s mechanism * Another example of sensationalism affecting the credibility of a field is the misunderstanding of the neurolinguistics concept (the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methodology and theory from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, neurobiology, communication disorders, neuropsychology, and computer science) turned to the horrid neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)  (a model of interpersonal communication chiefly concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behaviour and the subjective experiences (esp. patterns of thought) underlying them” and “a system of alternative therapy based on this which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication, and to change their patterns of mental and emotional behaviour). Guess this is a case to proceed with ethics when reporting a research’s result and this is really well presented by Poldrack in the article Neuroimaging: Separating the Promise from the Pipe Dreams.

So, I suppose that we should talk about the problem that we are facing NOW – that we should be really careful when given an anatomical correlation to a feeling, a fact, etc for we still have not a single certainty when using this tool e.g.The fact that the amygdala, for example, responds to threat does not mean that activity in this area signifies that a person is feeling threatened. That would be true only if threat were the only thing that activates the amygdala, and we know this is not the case. I understand that all this noise may also come from a Brain-Imaging-for-Dummies effort  but the researchers must have not this attitude of David Copperfield with the naive public/audience. And right now, I’m not preoccupied with the future – Successful Brain Imaging and consequently Privacy – instead, I do get worried with all this colorful functional magnetic resonance imaging hanging by the  hands of precipitant researchers longing for a publication at Nature or Scientific American.

And finally, even if someday a physician could possible identify a killer with this kind of technology, would you think that society should be warned about it? Why? Why a criminal defense attorney knowingly does not warn the society of his guilty client? So yes, I do have a LOT of trouble applying all this law concepts , all this human rights concepts… HEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!!!!!!!!!