I have received an e-mail from MBB informing about upcoming events. So, I would like to share them with you:

“The Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative is planning several events this year that we hope you will find appealing. Some of our events are still in the planning stages, but we have confirmed the dates for two of our events, so please mark your calendars.

The Translational Implications of Cognitive Neuroscience
Monday, November 2 from 4pm to 6pm
Yenching Auditorium, 2 Divinity Avenue

Join us as Harvard Medical School Professors Albert Galaburda, Charles Nelson, and Alavaro Pascual-Leone discuss how theories and evidence in cognitive neuroscience have led to important translational findings. Hosted by Professors Alfonso Caramazza and Marc Hauser, co-directors of MBB.

MBB Distinguished Lecture Series
Three Evening Lectures with Professor Michael Gazzaniga
April 20, 21, and 22

Michael Gazzaniga is a Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara.  He oversees an extensive and broad research program investigating how the brain enables the mind.  Over the course of several decades, a major focus of his research has been an extensive study of patients that have undergone split-brain surgery that have revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres. In addition to his position in Santa Barbara, Professor Gazzaniga is also the Director of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, and is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.”

Hello everyone!

                                     Just a simple question: is it Ok if I link our posts (using tweet feed) to my twitter account? In my opinion, you can do the same, if you would like to.

Ana Rosa Amorim.

Is neuroethics a field?

In my opinion, neuroethics is a new field. I am aware that in academic world sometimes fields are just a deliberated attempt to create a “space of my own”, a comfortable setting from where scholars can demonstrate expertise. However, I don’t think this is the case when talking about neuroethics.

Neuroethics, as a field, is focusing on the analysis of ethical issues generated by neuroscientific research and trials. It has been discussing social, legal and cultural aspects of neuroscientific agenda, topics with a considerable burden of specialized knowledge. It is necessary to concentrate and establish an entire field, mainly because dealing with cerebral aspects of human behavior is, to some extent, dealing to human nature itself.

One can argue, wittily, that we also have ethical issues involving other medical situations, like liver transplants and organ donations, but it wasn’t necessary to create a liver-ethics. Very few would dare to say that we are our livers or that we have seem something like a liver-decade.

Why creating a neuro-ethics?

Neuroethics, along with genetics, for adding another variable in out debate, involves our idea of identity and that’s why it can consider itself a field. Probably, a bioethics sub-field, but still a field.

What about international biolaw? International Biolaw is part of international legal discussing focusing on biological issues. We must be careful, otherwise we would be calling international environmental law as international biolaw, and don’t think this is the best use for term biolaw. Maybe it would be more appropriate to talk about international bioethics law…

                   Focus, focus, focus. I keep repeating that word over and over again, just like a mantra, trying to refrain myself from the temptations of adding so many other topics to our discussion. Hope told us she was a hedgehog; I am definitively a fox. For the good and the worst. I feel provoked and delighted by all the insights and opinions presented so far. I’ll try to make some comments (not necessarily answers) right to the point and keep focused.

                   #1: Ethical theory: I agree with Hope when she said she didn’t know what theoretical approach neuroethics was using. She’s definitively in favor of Aristotelian ethics, but what about other neuroethicists?

                   Well, this is a very pertinent question and opens, in fact, an entire new branch (I’m a bit afraid of using the word field, after Ken’s assignment.

                  As far as I know, neuroethics has developed in a bifold way: firstly, as an attempt to cope with ethical questions involving neuroscientific research and neurological treatments; secondly, analysis of ethical theory (see, for example, articles by Joshua Greene, Jorge Moll or John Mikhail). The second approach adopts a descriptive position: it tries to present how moral decisions are processed in our brains and, especially in Greene’s work, tries to empirically test some ethical positions, like utilitarian and Kantian views, using recent imaging techniques. Let’s call that second approach neuroethics-broad sense.

                    One can argue that the first approach is a prescriptive one, though. It is prescriptive, indeed, but in a soft sense. Neuroethics-narrow sense – let’s paraphrase Chomsky’s linguistic terminology (just the terms, not the sense) – does worry about ethical issues but, in spite of focusing on which theoretical background better explains its solutions, it concentrates on the solutions themselves, showing a more pragmatic attitude.

                    Lawyers and ethical philosophers are prone to concentrate on prescriptive analysis of behavior because both Law and Morality prescribe conducts.

                   So, what scenario do we have? On one hand, an empirically based collection of studies describing moral behavior and looking for evidences capable of proving (or denying) ethical theories assumptions and, on the other hand, an eager search for establishing moral boundaries to neurosciences. This search not necessarily lies on a conscious choice of an ethical theory and ethical parameters, but rather on immediate needs to control behavior and protect human rights. Clearly, neuroethics-narrow sense lacks a deeper ethical theoretical background. However, by the time neuroethics finally affiliates with an ethical school, neuroethics –narrow sense approach will be tested for empirical evidences.

Hello everyone!

                                I’m writing  just to apologize for my delay in posting my comments. I’ve been traveling for the last four or five days, and it’s been a bit crazy . I’m in Oslo, while my luggage (still in Brazil) is trying to come to my hotel before I take another plane to Helsinki.  A real mess.

                               I’m sorry!

                               I’ll post my comments in a few minutes.

Ana Rosa Amorim.

I had to think about this question a little longer, so here it is: late, sorry

I am my brain.

Now, doesn’t that sound strange? The relationship expressed in this sentence is  that of identity and that of ownership in the same instance. How can I own a brain and be a brain at the same time? More annoyingly, who is it then that owns the brain? If I am my brain, the relationship between me and brain is that of identity and thus, according to ‘Leibniz’s law’, me and my brain must share all properties.

Imagine you’re calling a friend on the phone and ask her to bring your pen to the rendezvous later. You tell her that it’s a blue pen with a red cap that has been chewed on. If she found a pen that was blue and had a red cap but lacked the bite-marks you remember, it could not be your pen. Unless you have really bad memory, but that isn’t the point. Leibniz’s law states that only indiscernible objects can be identical to themselves. That sounds trivial enough, although many philosophers like to argue about how true this principle is. And apparently it does not apply in the realm of quantum physics. Anyway, lets look at the properties of my brain. It is probably greyish-pink, wrinkled and feels like a hardboiled egg. We run into a problem here. Since you have probably never met me in person you obviously wouldn’t know, but please take my word for it: I am not greyish-pink, wrinkled and feel like a hardboiled egg. I just look like any young woman. But that is not ‘me’ either, is it? That would be my body. So apparently, if we follow old Leibniz’s lead, I’m neither my brain, nor my body. For that matter, I’m not even body and brain combined.

If it’s so easy to see that I can’t be my brain, where does this ‘new’ intuition come from? Philosophers love thought experiments to probe their intuitions. Imagine I were to damage an organ, for instance my heart,  in a car accident and a new heart were transplanted into my chest. In this scenario I receive a new organ, no doubt about it. If I were to damage my brain and a donor brain were transplanted into may head, as absurd as this my sound, the intuition is quite different, though. Obviously, this time we think it is the brain donor who receives a new body and we don’t consider me to be the recipient of a new brain. Michael Gazzaniga wrote about what he concluded from a more abstract form of this thought experiment that “this simple fact makes it clear that you are your brain” ( as cited by Vidal. p. 6).

Now, I’m always really careful when things are too obvious. The thought experiment might truly illustrate our intuitions, or those of caucasian male scientists, as experimental philosophers rightly point out, but we don’t know why we have these intuitions. One could hold that our intuitions are the connections we have to some kind of spirit realm or disembodied ideas that reveal the truth in its purity. But I thought the same of ads for anti-acne face scrub as a teen, so lets ditch the unsexy naivety and get down and dirty. Here we’ll meet Fernando Vidal, who in is paper on brainhood presents the idea, that it is not science that has tought us the identity between me and my brain. Vidal coined the term brainhood to describe the “quality of being, rather than having a brain” (p.6). This he claims to be the main feature of the anthropological figure of modernity, the cerebral subject. Plainly stated, we are cerebral subjects because we exhibit brainhood. In the paper I draw from Vidal explains how the property denoted by his neologism is historically rooted and which role it plays in the ‘neurocultural discours’. To get down to the nitty-gritty of his paper already: He claims, that the ideology of brainhood, the idea that we are our brains, “has impelled neuroscientific investigation much more than it resulted from it” (p. 5). Aha, so? Well, scientific investigation does not occur in a conceptual vacuum. In his paper Vidal explains how philosophical Ideas about us and our minds have influenced how research is conducted, financed and interpreted. If you are interested in the historical account in Vidal’s paper and would like to read a great critical response by a fellow blogger, please head on to Stephen T. Caspers’ Blog The Neuro Times. He beautifully illustrates the shortcomings of Vidal’s argumentation without belittling the central claim or  Vidal’s person. Still, I find Vidal’s concept of us as cerebral subjects and the notion of brainhood pertinent and his fear we might be talking about our brains (and ourselves)  in the wrong way valid. I hope for some interesting discussions about this, maybe with Stephen? Anyhow, if the ideology of brainhood influenced how we ask the questions about our selves instead being an answer to our questioning, stronger scepticism is called for. That is just what Paolo Fusar-Poli pointed out in a letter to the editor of Psychiatry Research Neuroimaging, the official publication of the International Society for Neuroimaging in Psychiatry.

He worries that the public does not understand how neuroimaging technology really contributes to research of the mind and is misinformed by journalists and medical opinion leaders. The way the results of studies employing fMRI are presented to the public invite misconceptions about our brains and what neuroscientists really concludes from such studies and result in theories the autor describes as “folk-neuroimaging”. It is commonly believed that fMR images are proof for represented neural activity. However, neuroimaging involves an inference process utilizing statistical calculations and interpretative functions. The image is not a picture of the brain, but a representation and interpretation of the collected data. This common notion amongst people the author calls “neuro-realism”:

Neuro-realism reflects the uncritical way in which a fMRI investigation can be taken as validation or invalidation of our ordinary view of the world. Neuro-realism is, therefore, grounded in the belief that fMRI enables us to capture a ‘visual proof’ of brain activity, despite the enormous complexities of data acquisition and image processing.

Related to this conception is “neuro-essentialism”. The way we talk about the brain implies that we ascribe it properties that persons have.

The concept of ‘neuro-essentialism’ reflects how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain. In this sense, the brain is used implicitly as a shortcut for more global concepts such as the person, the individual or the self.

A CNN article on a study by famous love-scientist Helen Fisher illustrates this well; the title “Loving with all your… brain”. Another example would be the New York Times article Watching New Love as it Sears the Brain. Though the title is obviously inviting to neuro-essentialism, the author at least mentions the fact that neuroimaging is not a form of mindreading. But also self-help literature like The Brain in Love by Daniel G. Amen M.D. (yes, M.D. as in medical doctor) contribute to public misconceptions. Let me quote from a Los Angeles Times article called Brains in Love- When you’re attracted to someone, is your gray matter talking sense — or just hooked? Scientists take a rational look. Notice how the title implies scientific accuracy… very sad. Here goes:

HER front brain is telling her he’s trouble. Look at the facts, it says. He’s never made a commitment, he drinks too much, he can’t hold down a job. But her middle brain won’t listen. Man, it swoons, he looks great in those jeans, his black hair curls onto his forehead so adorably, and when he drags on a cigarette, he’s so bad he’s good.

Describing experimental setups to laypeople is hard and giving an accurate account of what a specific study implies is even harder. However, it is clear from the following account that the journalist does not even understand what functional magnetic resonance images are herself and does not understand how they figure in the work of scientists.

It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science’s first pictures of the brain in love.

The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.

The brain is playing tricks? Even if this is just rhetoric, the goal of such an article should be to educate, which it plainly fails to do. I think this quotation illustrates neuro-essentialism and neuro-realism in the media. But why is that a problem? Why can’t the brain fall in love or trick us into love? The brain does not have intentions or goals. Ti does not have feelings and therefore can not fall in love. People fall in love. The brain is an organ and is only part of a human being.

Attributing properties  of a whole to one of its parts is called a mereological fallacy. This term, introduced by Bennett and Hacker in 2003, should disclose a grave conceptual problem in the way neuroscientists talk about the brain. Taken literally, brainlove doesn’t make any sense. I am not my brain, my brain is a part of me.

Now, since I’ve discussed what we are not, let me broach the issue of what we are. Intuitively I would ask myself whether I can tell what I am by looking at how it feels to be. Or even how it feels to be me. Well, I wouldn’t be the first person to do so, though maybe the first female of mixed race to do so in the world wide web. But, who knows, the net’s been around However, I think Descartes cognito-Argument “I think therefore I am” in an oven was more earthshaking. I’ve mentioned my reservation towards Intuition and I might dedicate a future post to explaining why this is so, however, I want to be introspective for now and see where it goes. Well, it feels like I have a soul. (Again, am I a soul or do I own a soul, tricky.) But since no philosopher or scientist seriously claims to be a cartesian dualist and really thinks of himself as consisting of res extensa (body stuff) and res cogitans (soul stuff) we’ll have to drop that notion. Interestingly though, everyone reading this probably understands what is meant by soul. Not in the cognitive sense of understanding but in the way you can introspect how it feels to be. Somehow, it seems to us as if were souls. If you would like to read a scientifically informed, philosophical account about why we have this naive realistic phenomenology (why we feel like being souls) I  recommend ‘The Ego Tunnel’ by Thomas Metzinger [find the twitter feed in here]. I’ll post a review at the latest end of next week… gotta do some homework at P2P University

References:

Fusar-Poli P., & Broome MR (2007). Love and brain: from mereological fallacy to “folk” neuroimaging. Psychiatry research, 154 (3), 285-6 PMID: 17350234

Vidal, F. (2009). Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity History of the Human Sciences, 22 (1), 5-36 DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099133

I was expecting our web chat to happen before I posted, however as i have heard no more about it and it is nearly week 3, i am assuming that the logistics are somewhat impossible ( i noticed at least a 7 hour TZ spread with our participants!)  – I will do a single blog post covering the week 2 and 3 topics on thursday. ( I also have some more comments on week 1 but who knows when i will get around to those!!)

In thinking about how to approach this week’s topic on the Universal Declaration on Bioethics, I was reminded of several items I had read previously, one from Adam Smith and the other from Dostoevsky, each of whom had presented an extreme and idealized view of the nature of human relationship. It occurred to me that Smith’s and Dostoevsky’s views on this subject, being nearly opposite from one another, might be used to frame a conceptual space into which we might posit the Universal Declaration of Bioethics, and by so doing better illustrate the aspirational goals and practical difficulties inherent in any attempt to implement such an ambitious document.

Smith’s view on the nature of human relationship, a very sober one, I take from a hypothetical vignette he presented in his book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759). in which he wrote

“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened.”.

Smith used this hypothetical example to underscore the all too common and natural tendency to assign increasingly diminished importance to the problems of people who are socially removed from ourselves.

In stark contrast to the pragmatic view of human nature presented in Smith’s vignette, (which we should also note in passing is not at all representative of Smith’s moral philosophy overall), Dostoyevsky at several points in “The Brothers Karamozov” presents an idealized conception of human relationship in its fullness, when each individual is

“responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual. . . that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man”

Being near conceptual opposites, and for the sake of discussion, we might conceptualize the Smith and Dostoevsky presentation of human relationship as representing opposite ends of a continuum on views of human relationship. At one end of this continuum we would have Smith’s hard-boiled, every-man-is-an-island, pragmatic view of human nature. At the opposite end of this continuum we could place Dostoevsky’s idealistic view of human relationship, in it’s ideal state.

Pushing this conceptual model further, we might also want to take our Smith-Dostoevsky continuum of human relationship and think of this line as being the X-axis of a cartesian space. To form the two-dimensional cartesian space, we could add a Y-axis corresponding to cost in some way.

With this 2-dimensional space thus defined, we might think of plotting a cost-curve for the implemention of a document like the Universal Declaration on Bioethics across varying settings, varying with respect to which the social capital in the setting most closely represented the Smith or Dostoevsky characterization of the nature of human relationship. In settings closer to Smith’s view, the cost would be higher and conversely in settings more typified by Dostoevsky’s ideal view, where everyone already felt responsible for everyone else, the cost or difficulty of implementing something like the Universal Declaration on Bioethics would be much lower.

These costs would have to vary due to the many obstacles which would have to be overcome for a meaningful implementation of the Declaration, where by “meaningful implementation” we mean one in which the Declaration really provided effective transnational human rights protections.

These costs would have to vary because, to meaningfully implement this document, a number of problems would need to be solved, each of which would be more or less difficult to solve depending on the local context and the extent to which the process participants were receptive to the document’s intent.

Perhaps the most difficult implementational issue is the question of enforcement. Implying as it does supranational standards of conduct, a meaningful implementation of the Declaration, (as opposed to a nominal implementation) would imply some sort of concession of sovereignty, it would seem, in agreeing to be subject to the document.

Another major cost or difficulty of implementing the Declaration are the problems of coming up with mutually agreed upon and well defined description of the ethical standards to be codified in the Declaration. I found in Google Scholar today a description of how the current declaration was developed, (1) and to put it mildly the process left much to be desired.

And also of course implicit in a meaningful implementation of something like the Universal Declaration on Bioethics is the overcoming of myriad political, organizational and administrative barriers – the types of problems for example which have historically plagued UNESCO in the past.

And so, to close, I will declare my personal bias on the Smith-Dostoevsky continuum, and say that unfortunately I think Smith’s vignette presents the more realistic depiction of the way the world really is, however enchanting Dostoevsky’s elysian vision might seem.

Consequently I think a meaningful, as opposed to a nominal, implementation of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics will not be easy and will not happen anytime soon.

(1) Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Advance Access published online on April 23, 2009
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, doi:10.1093/jmp/jhp024

What we’ve been writing about

Since no one seemed to mind me reorganizing tags and categories, I just did. I hope this will make it easier to maneuver the site. With so many people writing we should agree to some rules to keep things clearly arranged.

I’m in the U.S., Central Daylight Time.