Neuroscience

At the Mail Online, Allan Hall reports (November 23, 2009) on the case of a man who was conscious for 23 years, but no one knew because he was paralyzed.

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.

Read more here.

I think doctors should be much more careful with the “persistent vegetative state” (PVS) diagnoses than they sometimes are – if consequences follow. Some people – like Rom Houben, above – can be conscious without being mobile. We aren’t even sure what consciousness is , after all, so why be definitive about who has it?

Here are some more articles about persistent vegetative state: Read More ›

Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose draws my attention to her post on David Brooks’s column, “The Young and the Neuro” (New York Times, October 12, 2009), extolling the eager young neuroscientists who – in my view – know just enough to get it all wrong, as follows: Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.    The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. … Read More ›

I found this chilling:

Abstract:
This paper questions criminal law’s strong presumption of free will. Part I assesses the ways in which environment, nurture, and society influence human action. Part II briefly surveys studies from the fields of genetics and neuroscience which call into question strong assumptions of free will and suggest explanations for propensities toward criminal activity. Part III discusses other “causes” of criminal activity including addiction, economic deprivation, gender, and culture. In light of Parts I through III, Part IV assesses criminal responsibility and the legitimacy of punishment. Part V considers the the possibility of determining propensity from criminal activity based on assessing causal factors and their effects on certain people. In this context, the concept of dangerous individuals and possible justifications for preventative detention of such individuals in order to protect society is assessed. The concluding section suggests that the law should take a broader view of factors that could have determinant effects on agents’ actions.

The part that bugs me is “possible justifications for preventative detention”.

That’s what always happens when free will is denied. Somehow or other, the idea gets started that we can detect in advance who will commit a crime. Then you needn’t do anything to get arrested and put away. Someone just needs to have a theory about you.

But no one can truly predict the future in any kind of detail.

What about the Fort Hood massacre, you ask? Well, according to a number of reports, that guy had been advertising his grievances for some months. You sure wouldn’t need a brain scan or materialist theories about free will to figure out that he wasn’t happy in the Army and should just have been discharged – which is what he wanted. You’d just need to listen to what he actually said.

Also just up at my neuroscience blog, The Mindful Hack: Read More ›

Neuroscience is, unfortunately, increasingly taken over by what I often describe as neurobullshipping. You know, neuroeconomics,, neurolaw … It basically amounts to determining which regions of the brains of carefully chosen subjects light up when certain propositions are introduced.

Relief at last!

Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics (“Neurotrash”, Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). ‘Bout time someone did, I’d say. What’s really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.

He writes,

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix “neuro-”. Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers – who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism – have entered the field with the discipline of “Exp-phi” or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced “neuro-ethics”, in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people’s moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet’s experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like “evolutionary” psychology all the time.

Responding to Tallis’s article’s title, “Neurotrash”, I wrote to friends to say, more or less, Read More ›

Here’s a great reason for rejecting pop neuroscience, titled “We are neuroscientists and we come in peace”: Peace? Hmmm. Just try coming to war here and see what happens. Just when it seemed things could get no worse, Hank Greely of Stanford Law School pointed to several areas of potential friction between neuroscience research and widely held religious beliefs (findings that point to consciousness, or a form of it, in nonhuman animals, for example, might undermine the notion that humans occupy a unique position in the world) and asked whether neuroscientists might get dragged into the type of culture war waged by evolutionary biologists and creationists. … “What Makes The Human Brain Unique”? What makes the human brain unique?: Has Read More ›

Forget all those technical treatises on the evolution of neuronal topology. Here’s all you need to know: “Well you see, Norm, it’s like this… A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it Read More ›

Sigmund Freud had immeasurable impact on modern culture.  Along with Marx and Darwin, he was one of the great modern thinkers, whose “science” of psychology and treatment, psychoanalysis, defined modern concepts of human nature for generations.  His theories (based largely on Darwinism) brought new words into popular vocabulary–id, ego, super-ego, the unconscious.  His ideas influenced education, law, religion and medicine.  People began to think about their actions being determined by dreams, sexual repression and mysterious forces deep in their unconscious minds.  They worried about Oedipus complexes, anal retention, penis envy and all kinds of causal concepts Freud introduced.  They spent fortunes lying on couches undergoing psychoanalysis by their shrinks, under the impression they were getting “scientific” treatment because, after all, Read More ›

I am sure glad someone is writing about this, though glad it isn’t my own job.

The problem is that judges and jurors will mistakenly assume that technologies that are demonstrably valid medical diagnostic tools yield equally valid conclusions when they are used to map the neural correlates of deception and other forms of cognition.

I think what this person is trying to say is this (though he sure can’t just come right out and say it): Neuroscience can tell you if an elderly person’s brain problems are the likely cause of serious cognitive deficits. That’s very useful; one can make better decisions for that person’s care, decisions that respect his dignity too.

If neuroscience claims to tell us whether Jimmy “the jimslamm” is lying, well, yes of course he is. If his lips are moving and intelligible sounds are coming out of his mouth, he is lying. I’ve dealt with lots of people like him so I can tell you for free and save you trouble.

But what is he lying about this time? I don’t like this new neurolaw craze for a number of reasons. I think Jimmy should just take his chances with a skilled Crown*. A fair fight.

*In Canada, a prosecution attorney

[The abstract] Read More ›

In this Newsweek blog article, author Rita Carter informs us,

Oh, totally. I think we are our brains. When we change the brain, we change the person. The more you look at brains . . . it becomes unavoidable that essentially everything you are is determined by the way that organ is working. And people who, for example, have a serious accident where a bit of their brain is knocked out, there is no doubt that a bit of them goes with it. Of course, [on the other hand] it does allow one to change and to learn. And yet there is still a very instinctive sense that we are more than our brains—and I can kind of sympathize with that because it’s common to us all, but I do think that if you really look at neuroscience you are forced to admit that all we are is this particular pattern of electrical activity in an organ, really.

Uh, no. Even a materialist atheist will normally concede that we have bodies too.

Speaking for myself, essentially everything I am is not “determined by the way that organ is working.” I have a number of other organs to think of, and many of their malfunctions are not “this particular pattern of electrical activity in an organ.”

Indeed, there are times I wish I could be the brain in a vat this author describes, just to shut off the bodily feedback I can’t do anything about. But it has never happened and never will.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience and spirituality, which supports The Spiritual Brain: Read More ›