1
Q
A US court case – Brian Dugan
A
- Facing death penalty for the kidnapping, raping and murder of a 10-year old girl
- Diagnosed as psychopath (38.5/40 in the Hare psychopathy checklist)
- Psychologist Kent Kiehl scans his brain and finds lower activity in the paralimbic system (a brain network for emotion processing) as in many other previously scanned psychopaths
- Dugan’s lawyers invoke the fMRI evidence to argue that Dugan was a “morally disabled man whose sickness was such that he could not feel right from wrong”.
2
Q
School teacher tumour example
A
- Suddenly develops an appetite for child pornography and makes overt sexual advances on his step daughter
- Due to neurological symptoms, he is examined and a large tumor in his right orbitofrontal cortex is found
- After doctors remove the tumor, his pedophilic urges disappear
- A year later, his pedophilic tendencies re-appear, and a brain scan demonstrates that his tumor has grown back
3
Q
What is neuroethics?
A
- Neuroethics is concerned with ethical, legal and social implications of neuroscience research findings, and with the nature of the research itself
- Farah (2012) Annual Review of Psychology
4
Q
Why is neuroethics relevant?
A
- Studying the brain gets us one step closer to the causes of behaviour
- Single genes account for 2-4% of the variance in personality traits, brain imaging studies account for ~ 36% of variance (Farah et al., 2009
5
Q
Why is neuroimaging important?
A
- “Journalists, courts, and sometimes even scientists seem to believe that a brain scan can be more telling than a profile of an individual’s behaviour.” (Gary Marcus, NYU).
- Satel & Lilienfeld, 2013: A critical view on how brain imaging data is used and misused in areas such as law and marketing. Critical but entertaining!
6
Q
What can we find out about personality and the individual mind from brain imaging? -Phelps et al (2000)
A
- Measures implicit associations and biases that people may have, e.g. associating black people with bad, white people with good.
- 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
7
Q
-Can we use these findings from brain imaging to make predictions about people’s personalities from their brain scan?
A
- 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
8
Q
What did Lockwood, Sebastian et al. (2013) investigate with young boys and antisocial behaviour?
A
- Adolescent boys (10-16 yr old) with conduct problems: aggression, theft, cruelty to others.
- Antisocial behaviour, lack of empathy, diminished guilt and risk at developing adult psychopathy
- Investigation: brain responses to seeing other’s in pain. Questionnaire on callous traits
9
Q
What did Lockwood, Sebastian et al. (2013) find with young boys and antisocial behaviour?
A
- 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.”
10
Q
What would be the consequences of having a diagonostic tool for the prediction of adult psychopathy? – For the individual
A
- Chance of amelioration of condition and better integration in society
- Condemning individuals to a pathology?
- What about false positive results?
- What about personal responsibility?
11
Q
What would be the consequences of having a diagonostic tool for the prediction of adult psychopathy? – For society
A
- Protecting others from becoming victims
- Early intervention may reduce criminality (and costs)
- What are society’s responsibilities for false positives?
12
Q
What can we find out about individual states of mind from brain imaging?
A
- Nishimoto et al. (2011), Current Biology
- 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 model is trained on clips that resemble the viewed clip
13
Q
What did Owen et al. (2006), find with paitents in vegative states?
A
- 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
14
Q
What are the implications of Owen’s technique for communicating with patients in the vegetative state? – for the individual
A
- Possibility to communicate
- Possibility to (partly) take control back over one’s life
- Chances of getting rehabilitative care
15
Q
What are the implications of Owen’s technique for communicating with patients in the vegetative state? – for society/others
A
- Possibility to communicate with patients that are otherwise unresponsive
- Family members: there is still somebody “there”
16
Q
Farah et al., 2014, Nat Rev Neuroscience. The main problems with fMRI based lie detection:
A
- 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
- “…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%.”
17
Q
Attention : The case of Ritalin
A
- Alterations in cognitive abilities, such as attention and memory
- Treatment for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)
- In healthy people -> improves attention, learning and higher cognitive function (planning/problem-solving)
- Many children without ADHD are given Ritalin to enhance their attention, performance etc.
- Growth in sales of Ritalin over a 10-year period, measured in millions of doses per day (from Farah (2005))
18
Q
What’s the problem of ritalin? – for the individual
A
- 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!
19
Q
What’s the problem of ritalin? – for society
A
- 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
20
Q
Socio-affective enhancements Prozac (Fluoxetine)
A
- A selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)
- Used to treat depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, …
- Side effects are tolerable
- In 2005, 10% of US population received a prescription for antidepressants (and drug companies made a lot of profit
21
Q
The role of the pharmaceutical industry
A
- Drug companies want to make money on the long term, thus they have an interest in
- More people being diagnosed with a pathology
- People taking medication for a long period of time
22
Q
Can Prozac affect personality beyond treating depression?
A
- Promotes prosocial and law-abiding behaviour, reduces reoffending in sex offenders.
- Decrease of aggression in individuals prone to violence Berman et al., 2009 (Psychological Science)
- Could they be given to people without their knowledge, or against their will?
- To what extent could we manipulate people?
- Prisoners, people being interrogated, participants in business negotiations, parties in international peace treaties….
Conceptual
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