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Neuroethics (Brain Imaging (Personality and individual mind (Phelps et al…

- - - - IAT
      - White Americans tend to respond faster to black + bad and white + good pairings then for black + good and white + bad pairing -> implicit race bias
      - Significant correlation between amygdala activation during viewing black vs. white faces, and the degree of implicit race bias (IAT score).
      - However: this result tells about the group, NOT about the individual
    - - Identified parts of the brain where grey matter volume (measure of brain structure) correlated with the extent to which participants held particular moral views e.g. fairness, in-group loyalty.
      - Again, these are group results, reverse inference about individuals are not justified.
    - - Farah et al. (2009) tested this statistically
      - Predictive ability of brain measures was minimal and variable across experiments
      - From a correlation on the group level it is unjustified to make reverse inferences to personality and mindset of an individual
  - - - Adolescent boys (10-16 yr old) with conduct problems: aggression, theft, cruelty to others
      - brain responses to seeing other’s in pain
      - Questionnaire on callous traits
      - Boys with conduct problems: lower response in the anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to seeing others in pain
      - In healthy controls, this is the network for responding to other’s pain
      - The decrease of activity was correlated with callous trait scores
      - The negative association between callous traits and AI/ACC response could reflect an early neurobiological marker indexing risk for empathic deficits seen in adult psychopathy
      - However, correlation not causation
    - - For individual
        
        Chance of amelioration of condition and better integration in society
        
        Condemning individuals to a pathology?
        
        What about false positive results?
        
        What about personal responsibility?
      - For society
        
        Protecting others from becoming victims
        
        Early intervention may reduce criminality (and costs)
        
        What are society’s responsibilities for false positives?
    - - A patient in a vegetative state could follow instructions – to imagine playing tennis vs. walking round her house
      - These tasks activated distinct brain systems in the control group... And in the patient
      - Owen has since gone on to use this task to ask ‘Yes/No’ questions of patients, with some promising results
      - However – how do we know this patient is really conscious?
      - What are the implications of Owen’s technique for communicating with patients in the vegetative state? For the individual? For society/others? • Possibility to communicate with patients that are otherwise unresponsive • Family members: there is still somebody “there” • Possibility to communicate • Possibility to (partly) take control back over one’s life • Chances of getting rehabilitative care How much is the patient conscious and able to make decisions about his/her life?
  - - - …the probability of the test accurately indicating someone as lying is 1 in 68, or less than 1.5%, and the likelihood of incorrectly indicating deception when it is not present is over 98%.”
    - - In most laboratory studies, subjects are instructed to explicitly lie or to tell the truth – how close is that to a real-world scenario?
      - Brain activity for truth telling or lying is easily confounded with effects of attention, memory, cognitive load and emotional arousal
      - Psychopathy changes brain responses related to deception
      - Low sensitivity and low specificity of the test
  - - - Mapped reponses of the early visual cortex during movie watching
      - Showed new movies to the participants
      - Used the neural responses only to reconstruct images from the movies
      - However: Computational reconstruction model is trained a-priori on a variety of movies
      - Reconstructions only work well if the clips the model is trained on resemble the viewed clip
- - - - Are we talking about ameliorating deficits, or enhancing normal function?
      - What are the long-term risks? Do they outweigh the benefits?
      - Evolutionary considerations
      - some cognitive 'limitations’might be there for a good reason!
    - - Enhancement will not be fairly distributed
      - Exacerbation of inequalities due to socio-economic status
      - Coercion in the workplace / school / university?
      - Widespread enhancement will raise our standards of normality
      - People who opt out are disadvantaged, in effect a form of indirect coercion
  - - - Knutson et al. (1998) •Experiment with non-depressed volunteers
      - 4 weeks on SSRI or placebo
      - Subjects taking SSRI had reduced negative affect/neuroticism and increased affiliative behaviour (shown in a puzzle-solving task)
      - No change in positive affect
      - Coud these results allow governments/others to manipulate people into being more prosocial/given unknowingly?
      - eg prisoners, business negotiations etc