neuroethics « Berman Institute Bioethics Bulletin

Features

News roundups

Announcements

In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

May 30, 2019

Just north of Medellín, the discovery of a disease-causing mutation in a previously unstudied family is rewriting history and upending racial myths

Quick Read

In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

Thursday, May 30th, 2019

PIEDAD’S HOUSE sits above the cemetery in Girardota, Colombia, just north of Medellín. From her front porch, the view gives way to green hills, each home to hamlets with sugarcane plots and tile-roofed houses tucked in among the trees. One of these hillside hamlets is where Piedad and her 11 siblings grew up. Their father, Horacio, worked in cane fields and sugar mills, and their mother sold fruit from her orchard; their grandmother made pots from clay she dug across the river. When earthquakes destroyed their home in 1979, the family moved into town and left rural life behind.

Horacio showed the first symptoms of dementia soon afterward. He ignored the food he was served and got lost returning from church. He grew aggressive and delusional, and Piedad would return from her job at a sugar-packing plant to help bathe him, holding back tears as he kicked and punched. Horacio died in 1984 from what his doctors called senile dementia, the same disease that killed his father and three of his siblings.

By the early 2000s, four of Piedad’s own siblings, then in their 40s and 50s, were showing signs of dementia. A local doctor referred them to a group of investigators in Medellín who studied families with a unique genetic mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Nicknamed the Paisa mutation after the people of Colombia’s Antioquia region, who call themselves paisas, it occurred on a gene, called presenilin-1, implicated in familial Alzheimer’s. The families affected tended to be white farmers living in remote mountain towns that felt untouched by time.

…continue reading ‘In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History’

Thumb image via undark

Be the first to like.

Unlike

Undark

People with Traumatic Brain Injury, Who Often Lose Empathy, Can Regain It with Treatment

May 24, 2019

Most people can easily determine when a loved one is feeling sad or anxious. But, imagine waking up one morning and your loved one lost the ability to recognize and empathize with your feelings

Quick Read

Millions Take Gabapentin for Pain. But There’s Scant Evidence It Works.

May 20, 2019

“There is very little data to justify how these drugs are being used and why they should be in the top 10 in sales,” a researcher said

Quick Read

The Night The Lights Went Out

May 17, 2019

Quick Read

The Night The Lights Went Out

Friday, May 17th, 2019

Drew Magary

“Pieces were stolen from me
Or dare I say… given away?”

I am the least reliable narrator when it comes to the story of my brain exploding. This is because, from the time right before I suffered a freakish brain hemorrhage last year to the time I regained full consciousness roughly two weeks later, I remember nothing. My mind is an absolute blank. It’s like the fabled pause in the Nixon Tapes. I was not here. That time of my life may as well not exist. Oh, but it did.

I remember hosting the Deadspin Awards in New York the night of Dec. 5 and then heading over to a karaoke bar for a staff after-party, where I ate some pizza, drank a beer, sang one song (Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky,” which would soon prove either fitting or ironic, depending upon your perspective), and that’s it. After that comes a great void. I don’t remember inexplicably collapsing in a hallway, fracturing my skull because I had no way to brace myself for the impact. I don’t remember sitting up after that, my co-workers alarmed at the sight of blood trickling out of the back of my head. I don’t remember puking all over Barry Petchesky’s pants, vomit being one of many fun side effects of your brain exploding, as he held my head upright to keep me from choking on my own barf. I don’t remember Kiran Chitanvis quickly calling 911 to get me help. I don’t remember getting into an ambulance with Victor Jeffreys and riding to an uptown hospital, with Victor begging me for the passcode to my phone so that he could call my wife. He says I made an honest effort to help, but my circuits had already shorted out and I ended up giving him sequences of four digits that had NOTHING to do with the code. Flustered, he asked me for my wife’s phone number outright. Instead, I unwittingly gave him a series of 10 digits unrelated to the number he sought.

…continue reading ‘The Night The Lights Went Out’

Be the first to like.

Unlike

The Concourse

AI Evolved These Creepy Images to Please a Monkey’s Brain

May 3, 2019

What happens when an algorithm can ask neurons what they want to see?

Quick Read

Rejection Kills

April 30, 2019

The brain makes no distinction between a broken bone and an aching heart. That’s why social exclusion needs a health warning

Quick Read

Rejection Kills

Tuesday, April 30th, 2019

The psychologist Naomi Eisenberger describes herself as a mutt of a scientist. Never quite fitting the mould of the fields she studied – psychobiology, health psychology, neuroscience – she took an unusual early interest in what you might call the emotional life of the brain. As a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Eisenberger found it curious that we often describe being rejected in terms of physical pain: ‘My heart was broken’, ‘I felt crushed’, ‘He hurt my feelings’, ‘It was like a slap in the face’. More than metaphors, these expressions seem to capture something essential about how we feel in a way that we can’t convey directly. And you’ll find similar ones not just in English but in languages all over the world. Eisenberger wondered why. Could there be a deeper connection between physical and emotional pain?

In a landmark experiment in 2003, Eisenberger and her colleagues had test subjects strapped with virtual-reality headsets. Peering through goggles, the participants could see their own hand and a ball, plus two cartoon characters – the avatars of fellow participants in another room. With the press of a button, each player could toss the ball to another player while the researchers measured their brain activity through fMRI scans. In the first round of CyberBall – as the game became known – the ball flew back and forth just as you’d expect, but pretty soon the players in the second room started making passes only to each other, completely ignoring the player in the first room. In reality, there were no other players: just a computer programmed to ‘reject’ each participant so that the scientists could see how exclusion – what they called ‘social pain’ – affects the brain.

…continue reading ‘Rejection Kills’

image via flickr Some rights reserved by Simon Matzinger

Be the first to like.

Unlike

aeon

Virtual Vocal Tract Creates Speech From Brain Signals

April 25, 2019

A potential aid for ALS and stroke patients. “Speaking one’s mind” is getting literal: A device that detects electrical signals in the brain’s speech-producing regions created synthetic speech good enough for listeners to mostly understand complex sentences

Quick Read

Neuroethics and Social Justice

April 23, 2019

Neil Levy writes, “Neuroethics is exciting. It is fascinating to consider the deep issues it raises and the future possibilities it explores. I worry, however, that the focus on the exciting possibilities of present and future neuroscience obscures more pressing ethical issues.”

Quick Read

Neuroethics and Social Justice

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2019

…I worry, however, that the focus on the exciting possibilities of present and future neuroscience obscures more pressing ethical issues. These more important issues should count as neuroethical issues.

Neuroethics has been especially concerned with cognitive and affective enhancement. A number of enhancement technologies are either in development or already available, including psychopharmaceuticals like methylphenidate (Elliott et al. 1997; Mehta et al. 2000) and modafinil (Turner et al. 2003), and also transcranial direct current stimulation (Kadosh et al. 2010), to name only the most prominent. Many ethicists are deeply worried about these developments. A range of arguments have been advanced purporting to show that the use of cognitive enhancements is impermissible or at least inadvisable.

Some ethicists have attempted to show that alterations produced by psychopharmaceuticals or electrical stimulation of the brain would be inauthentic (e.g. Elliott 1998). Others have focused not on the traits and capacities produced but on the means whereby they are produced: because these means are technological, they risk mechanizing our self-conceptions (Freedman 1998). Yet others have worried that cognitive enhancement might constitute cheating (Schermer 2008). Perhaps most pervasively, ethicists have worried about the social justice implications of cognitive enhancement (Sandel 2009); cognitive enhancement may well prove expensive, limiting access to those who are better off than average. Even if they are relatively cheap, they will almost certainly be out of reach of the roughly 10% of the world’s population living on less than US$2 a day, adjusted for purchasing power (World Bank 2015). Given that these enhancements are likely to be much more available to those who are already better off, they are likely to increase inequality, within and between countries.

…continue reading ‘Neuroethics and Social Justice’

Be the first to like.

Unlike

Neuroethics Blog

In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

People with Traumatic Brain Injury, Who Often Lose Empathy, Can Regain It with Treatment

People with Traumatic Brain Injury, Who Often Lose Empathy, Can Regain It with Treatment

Millions Take Gabapentin for Pain. But There’s Scant Evidence It Works.

Millions Take Gabapentin for Pain. But There’s Scant Evidence It Works.

The Night The Lights Went Out

The Night The Lights Went Out

AI Evolved These Creepy Images to Please a Monkey’s Brain

AI Evolved These Creepy Images to Please a Monkey’s Brain

Rejection Kills

Virtual Vocal Tract Creates Speech From Brain Signals

Virtual Vocal Tract Creates Speech From Brain Signals

Neuroethics and Social Justice

Follow Us

Twitter Feed

Twitter Feed