Camila. Week 1:questions.
Sunday, September 13th, 20091) Is it appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age?
- Yes, for nowadays we are finally convinced to study the functioning of the brain as this would be a way to better understand the human condition.
2) How the emergence of new neuroscientific techniques has provoked bioethical issues?
- On the threshold of the individual’s personal life. We have access to tones of information when using neuroscientific techniques, we are literally inside the individual’s brain and he certainly want his privacy on some issues. We also have access to modern medication and devices that increase some aspects of the cognition or even alter the individual’s personality and this kind of technology provoke several ethical issues.
3) Are we our brains? Are all bioethical issues nothing but neuroethical issues?
- I don’t think so. I guess that our brains makes us more inclined to behave in a certain way but we are endowed with free-will, human consciousness, human agency enough to pick up a good fight with this supposed brain’s tyranny. When studying molecular neuropsychiatry for example, we try to verify if a determined combination of genes are more prone to cause a psychiatry disorder but the environment in which that individual is inserted has an extremely important role to trigger that disorder. Even drug abuse might be a triggering factor. So how would that be possible for us to be strictly biological machines?!
4) How do cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging contribute to neuroethics field?
- In the way that it both causes a lot more trouble for neuroethics to solve! Kidding. I mean, as long as cognitive neuroscience is concerned on how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain and brain imaging helps elucidate it neuroethics will always have to regulate these activities concerning mind and behaviour.