In the current issue of Science Translational Medicine, Oxford neuroscientists in Irene Tracy’s lab have published a new study of the placebo effect with dramatic results. In their experiment, test subjects were subjected to pain in the form of heat, while inside an fMRI brain imaging machine, and asked to rate their subjective feelings of… Read More »In Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain
The growing relevance of neurosciences within Bioethics leads to the appearance of new Centres dedicated to the study of neuroethics around the world. This is the case of a new group just appeared at my home University, the University of Valencia. I would like to dedicate my first contribution to this blog to introduce this group, and specifically the first contributions that they are beginning to produce. I do this because these first contributions are being published in Hispanic journals and for that reason they would not be accessible to the English audience.Read More »New work on neuroethics in Spain.
Amphetamines and major league baseball are in the news again, with a number of busts made for the prescription drug Adderall, which contains several amphetamine stimulants in its list of active ingredients.
Read More »The quixotic prohibition of attention-enhancing drugs in sport.
By Charles Foster
I took my son to school this morning. And I’m wondering if that was evil.
Proponents of human cognitive enhancement are fond of saying that there is nothing very novel about their suggestions. There is no difference in principle, they say, between improving someone’s neural processing power by (for example) manipulation of the genome, and improving that power by education. It is a potent argument. Brains are very plastic things. Education increases the number of neuronal connections. You can see the effect of education with an electron microscope. Education produces change every bit as physical as the bruises produced by a violently abusive parent.
by Julian Savulescu
Update: The same misunderstandings are still in evidence, 2 years on (May 2012), for example: ‘Brain circuitry different for women with anorexia, obesity’
Having started to work in the field of neuroethics a couple of years ago, I have become staggered by the misunderstanding of what neuroscience can tell us. The best example is a recent BBC story which goes by the wonderful title “Libido problems: ‘brain not mind‘” .
A new study from the Mayo clinic in the United States points to a frequent problem in certain types of medical research. When healthy volunteers or patients with a given condition take part in research studies they may have brain scans, CAT scans, blood tests or genetic tests that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. These tests are not done for the benefit of the individual, they are designed to answer a research question. But sometimes, quite often according to the authors of this new study, researchers may spot something on the scan that shouldn’t be there, and that could indicate a previously undiagnosed health condition. These ‘incidental findings’ generate an ethical dilemma for researchers. Should they tell the research participant about the shadow seen on their scan? Do they have an obligation to reveal to a research participant that they have found them to carry a gene increasing their risk for breast cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease? There is much agonising by ethics committees, ethicists and researchers about the problem of incidental findings, but there is a simple way of avoiding the problem. Anonymise research databases and tests so that there is no possibility of determining which participant has the breast cancer gene, or the lump in their kidney.
Read More »Incidentally… avoiding the problem of incidental findings
A fascinating study in the Lancet this week has suggested that a very commonly used and simple analgesic in newborn infants may not actually be preventing them from experiencing pain. The study’s authors suggest that this medicine should no longer be used routinely in newborn infants. A headline in the Guardian reads “Newborn babies should not be given sugar as pain relief”. But there are scientific, philosophical and ethical reasons why this conclusion, though possibly correct, is premature.
Judy is an intelligent, articulate woman with a great sense of humor. She is also completely paralyzed on her left side. Trouble is, she doesn’t know she is. On the contrary, she knows that she isn’t.
What’s going on? Self-deception? Denial? Puzzling examples like this are scattered throughout a recent series in the NY Times, which explores what it means to know, not know, know what you don’t know and not know what you know. Follow? Me neither.
An interesting case is reported in the most recent issue of the Hastings Center Report. Mrs Z, is a 29 year-old woman who was released into her husband’s carefollowing a traumatic brain injury. She is in a minimally conscious state (MCI), a state of severely impaired consciousness. MCI cases cover a range of cognitive deficits; Mrs Z seems to be at the lower end of cognitive functioning. She is unable to speak and requires 24 hour care, provided by her husband (who is also the guardian of their 4 year-old twins).
by Nick Shackel
I think it would be fair to say that, insofar as people think about it at all, most people think that being an addict is a property some people have. Just like people can be tall or friendly or wealthy, people can be addicts. Some people even think that being an addict is an essential property of some people— that is to say, it is a property that they cannot lose without ceasing to be. This seems to be the view of Alcoholics Anonymous, who hold that even though an alcoholic can cease drinking, they can never cease being an alcoholic.
Read More »Are addicts addicts?
