Neuroscience

“Are we all travelling “incognito“, my latest at MercatorNet June 21, 2011), looks at Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman’s book Incognito, focusing on his proposed neuroscience fix for criminal law:

“Those who break the social contracts need to be warehoused, but in this case the future is of more importance than the past.”

“Warehoused”? How, exactly, is that a reform? We are also told that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of a brain abnormality, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.” Yes, but one may as well say that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of infestation by Square Circle Disease, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.”

More. Also:

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From David DiSalvo’s “NeuropPsyched” at Forbes’blog, we learn about “Five Big Developments in Neuroscience to Watch” (June 17, 2011), such as: Read More ›

In Incognito, Baylor College of Medicine’s “rock star” neuroscientist David Eagleman argues for  neuroscience to determine prison sentences, using the term:

Not everyone with a brain tumour undertakes a mass shooting, and not all males commit crimes. Why not? As we will see in the next chapter, it is because genes and environment interact in unimaginably complex patterns. This irreducible complexity has consequences: Read More ›

At ScienceDaily, we learn that while “the brains of all vertebrates display gender-related differences,”

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen have now demonstrated for the first time in the white-browed sparrow weaver, an African songbird, that the extent of these sex differences in the brain varies according to social status, and cannot be explained by singing behaviour as previously thought.

Essentially, only the dominant male in the small flock mates, and during the breeding season, “sings a long and complex solo song that it only performs at dawn.”

According to the hitherto accepted hypothesis, Read More ›

Recently, we noted Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman’s new “neurolaw” book, Incognito. The basic idea, driven by evolutionary psychology, is that criminal law would improve if we dropped the illusion that people are responsible for their behaviour. Perhaps social justice minded supporters hope it will bring about prison reform, an end to capital punishment, or such.

They hope in vain. Here’s my MercatorNet article in which a defense lawyer who specializes in capital punishment explains why that probably won’t happen:

This is not a controversy between the String ‘Em Up Gang and the Prison Reform Society. All parties want a just and humane system; they differ fundamentally as to whether they think that personal responsibility is an illusion. Read More ›

Here, we meet Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman, described by a dean as ““a rock star in so many ways,” who wants to do for neuroscience “what Carl Sagan did for astrophysics.”

Which is what?

A fan of “possibilianism” (which writer Lewis describes as “a kind of anything-goes agnosticism”), Eagleman has focused on neurolaw, the idea that people are not responsible for their actions, but are the victims of their brain processes. For such a man he is oddly deficient in normal intuitions,as Lewis notes:

He thinks a lot, and he thinks hard, but for a man whose father was a New York psychiatrist (his mother was a high school biology teacher), he’s surprisingly unreflective. When the family moved to New Mexico, his father kept busy by dealing guns, serving in the Army Reserve, and volunteering in the police force mounted patrol. Musing out loud that such a man presumably had a law-and-order mentality, I asked Eagleman how his dad felt about his son’s latest research, which encourages the justice system to focus more on rehabilitation and less on punishing criminals. “You’re right,” he said. “I think he’s closer to the retributivist side of the argument.” Then he stopped, nonplussed, as if I’d made an uncannily accurate conjecture. “How did you guess that? That’s interesting . . .” Which left me, in turn, nonplussed that he thought it was a guess.- Jim Lewis, “Mind Games,” Texas Monthly (June 2011).

Which has left many people, of all persuasions, wondering why Read More ›

In “Mind Reading: Technology Turns Thought Into Action,” Jon Hamilton (National Public Radio, May 12, 2011) explains:

the experiment shows how the technology could help a very different sort of patient — someone paralyzed by a spinal injury or Lou Gehrig’s disease. ECoG could allow someone like that to operate a robotic arm with just their thoughts. The experiment also shows how many different areas of the brain get involved in things we take for granted, Schalk says. “Even for simple functions such as opening and closing the hand, there are many, many areas that contribute to the movement,” he says.

But some researchers are more enterprising than that: Read More ›

Non-materialist neuroscientists like Jeffrey Schwartz and Mario Beauregard are usually at least sympathetic to ID, just as their materialist counterparts are not. At issue is whether the mind is real or simply an illusion created by the activities of neurons. One argument for the mind’s reality is neuroplasticity, as this recent CBC documentary shows: For centuries the human adult brain has been thought to be incapable of fundamental change. Now the discovery and growing awareness of neuroplasticity has revolutionized our understanding of the brain – and has opened the door to new treatments and potential cures for many diseases and disorders once thought incurable.Neuroscience is past viewing the human brain as a machine, as it once did, where, if one Read More ›

That’s the latest, as Kate Kelland (May 5, 2011) reports, in “Scientist seeks to banish evil, boost empathy”:

Baron-Cohen, who is also director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, has just written a book in which he calls for a kind of rebranding of evil to offer a more scientific explanation for why people kill and torture, or have such great difficulty understanding the feelings of others.His proposal is that evil be understood as a lack of empathy — a condition he argues can be measured and monitored and is susceptible to education and treatment. Read More ›

Neuron tangle 1: Okay then, if I don’t have a self, do you have a self? If so, why are you talking to me?

Neuron tangle 2: No, I don’t have a self either. This here prof is quoted in New Scientist (Liz Else, “Your brain creates your sense of self, incognito”, 19 April 2011), and he knows more than the two of us put together: Read More ›

New Scientist aims to prove it with this animation. You need the illusion of free ill but that’s all it is. Any idea why so many people need you and me to believe that? What follows? Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Holly Bailey tells us, courtesy Yahoo News, (Apr 11, 11:41) “Will President Obama and the House GOP ever agree? Science suggests no”: Using data from MRI scans, researchers at the University College London found that self-described liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex–a gray matter of the brain associated with understanding complexity. Meanwhile, self-described conservatives are more likely to have a larger amygdala, an almond-shaped area that is associated with fear and anxiety. “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” lead researcher Ryota Kanai writes of the study in the latest issue of Current Biology. “Our study now links personality traits with specific brain structure.” A caution is offered: While the London study Read More ›

In “First Comprehensive Gene Map of the Human Brain: More Than 90 Percent Similarity Among Humans” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 13, 2011), we learn: In developing the Allen Human Brain Atlas, the Allen Institute has now thoroughly characterized and mapped the biochemistry of two normal adult human brains, providing opportunities for scientists to study the brain with new detail and accuracy. The data reveal a striking 94 percent similarity between human brains, establishing strong patterns as a critical foundation for translational and clinical research. In addition, data analysis from the two human brains indicate that at least 82 percent of all human genes are expressed in the brain, highlighting its tremendous complexity while also providing an essential genetic blueprint to understand brain Read More ›

In “Scientific solutions to sin?”, Suzanne Morrison (April 08, 2011) of Canada’s Mcmaster University asks,

Most people are familiar with the seven deadly sins – pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed and sloth – but could there be molecular solutions for this daily struggle between good and evil?That’s what first year bachelor of health sciences students in the undergraduate biology course at McMaster University were asked to find out: their assignment required that they explore the molecular underpinnings of human misbehaviour.

At the Physiological Society’s DC annual meeting, they are to be feted for their project in which Read More ›

The debate: Does Good Come From God II by Sam Harris vs William Lane Harris 7 April 2011 at Notre Dame is now on YouTube.

Part 1 of 9 – Harris vs Craig – Does Good Come From God Read More ›