blog.bioethics.net
a Nature Top 50 science blog from The American Journal of Bioethics
Entries from blog.bioethics.net tagged with 'neuroscience'
Nonsense. It's Good For You.
Who knew that "The Ministry of Silly Walks" and other such absurdities could actually strengthen our brains? Yes, it's true. Nonsense is good for your noggin. But it isn't just the absurd, but the out of place, the "something that is off" sensor that is tripped in your brain, including... (read the rest)
I Forgot (Sort Of)
As it turns out, many of the things we think we forget are memories actually stored somewhere in our brains as memories we simply cannot access, say neuroscientists who have recently published a paper in Nature. According to Wired, the brain still holds these lost feelings or thoughts, you just... (read the rest)
Latest AJOB Neuroscience Issue is Now Available!
The May issue of The American Journal of Bioethics is now available at bioethics.net. This issue of AJOB-Neuroscience confronts some important issues about the role of animal research in understanding the human brain and clinical studies involving humans and the ethics of that research. To read about why doing research... (read the rest)
January 2009 Issue of AJOB Now Available at Bioethics.net
The first AJOB Neuroscience issue of 2009 is now available at bioethics.net. This issue contains a Target Article by researchers from Dalhousie University who are exploring the ethical issues associated with non-clinical uses of pediatric fMRI, particularly in as it related to the educational system and legal settings. Fenton, Meynell... (read the rest)
Wolpe on "60 Minutes": Reading Minds for Cookies and Car Accidents
If you missed it this Sunday, as our own Dr. Paul Wolpe himself did for being in an airplane, you can catch it again here--the 13-minute segment from this past Sunday's "60 Minutes" where neuroethics is the focus. Leslie Stahl discusses the present and future potential of "mind reading" technologies,... (read the rest)
Thrill Seeking Brains and the People Who Have Them
Researchers from Vanderbilt University have found that some brains process dopamine differently resulting in greater "thrill seeking" behavior, says BBC News. Essentially, these individuals have fewer dopamine "autoreceptors" in their brains, which would normally result in a feedback loop that would stop the release of dopamine when stimulating events occur.... (read the rest)
Coming Soon to a Brain Near You
As reported on Scientific American, researchers in laboratories and universities around the world including at the Wadsworth Laboratories in Albany, NY are moving closer and closer to brain-computer interfaces that are actually able to "unlock" the brains of people suffering from debilitating diseases like Lou Gehrig's disease and others. These... (read the rest)
Want to Go to Neuroscience Boot Camp?
As a neuroscientist turned neuroethicist, I am sure I have made more than my share of bioethical goofs. (How DO you pronounce "nonmaleficence?") But for those of you with the opposite problem - bioethicists who wish they knew more neuroscience - your colleagues at Penn have devised a way to... (read the rest)
Brain Ethics Comes to the Nation's Capital
This Thursday and Friday, November 13th and 14th, the Neuroethics Society will meet in Washington DC at the AAAS Headquarters. According to Martha Farah, Communications and Membership Director of the Society, in 2005 it occurred to a number of ethics and neuroscience types that the occasional meeting or special issue... (read the rest)
Web Searching Better For Brain Than Books
Neuroscience researchers have found that Googling is more stimulating to the brain than reading a book, crosswording, or any other kind of activity for baby-boomers, says the Daily Mail. Even better, the most internet savvy among us get the most out of internet searching. So toss that library card, unless... (read the rest)
Web Searching Better For Brain Than Books
Neuroscience researchers have found that Googling is more stimulating to the brain than reading a book, crosswording, or any other kind of activity for baby-boomers, says the Daily Mail. Even better, the most internet savvy among us get the most out of internet searching. So toss that library card, unless... (read the rest)
Neural Buddhism?
David Brooks has been reading up on neuroscience: The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect... (read the rest)
Addiction through the lens of neuroscience
Newsweek's cover article this week looks at how neuroscience is prompting researchers to develop new medications and vaccines to treat addiction: The emerging paradigm views addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder to be managed with all the tools at medicine's disposal. The addict's brain is malfunctioning, as surely as... (read the rest)
Check out my brain!
The new blog io9 pointed out something recently that was a bit surprising to us -- and maybe it will be to you, too: people seem to be really into posting images of their brains on the photo sharing site Flickr. A lot of the images seem to be... (read the rest)
Is your professor juicing?
Tales of students popping adderall or some other stimulant to study longer or harder are, well, pretty much old news at this point. But what about professors propped up on Provigil (the stay awake drug modafinil)? A recent commentary by Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir in Nature looks at... (read the rest)
Swing voters in the scanner
Maybe you saw that piece in the New York Times this past weekend about using fMRI to gain insight into the minds of swing voters. (Mitt Romney stimulates amygdalas!) And maybe, after reading that piece, you were thinking, "Really?" Well, you're not alone. Over at Adam Kolber's great Neuroethics and... (read the rest)
Does afternoon tea count as 'cognitive enhancement'?
Viewing the rise of cognitive enhancement as "imminent and inevitable," the British Medical Association released a paper this week surveying the ethical challenges prompted by our pursuit of better memory and focus. Said the chairman of the BMA's medical ethics committee in a press release: This is a fascinating area... (read the rest)
Weekend reading and listening: lie detection
This past week NPR's Morning Edition carried a three-part series about lie detection reported by Dina Temple-Raston. (The segments are posted as both audio and text, so they're easy to scan if you can't listen.) The series covers the questionable accuracy of polygraphs, the emerging field of lie detection by... (read the rest)
David Brooks is ready for his outboard brain
The culture's apparent fixation with memory (and its related technology) crossed over some line this past weekend with a column by David Brooks in the New York Times: Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been... (read the rest)
Neuroethics in this week's Science
In an editorial out this week in the journal, Hank Greely calls for greater support of work looking into the social implications of neuroscience. From the piece: For me, the most exciting questions involve how neuroscience might change society. If we could reliably predict that certain adolescents will eventually be... (read the rest)
Mad about memory
As others have pointed out, our culture has a thing for memory right now. Articles about it seem to be everywhere. Here are a few of the most recent: The advantages of amnesia (Boston Globe) As digital-storage capacities reach seemingly boundless proportions, however, some thinkers are becoming nervous about the... (read the rest)
Glenn McGee in The Scientist: What is your brain worth?
In his column for October, Glenn argues that we should be careful about how we spend money on brain research: According to two European epidemiological studies, approximately one-third of disease resources are spent on neurological disorders, including Parkinson's disease, dementia, and stroke. According to the Alzheimer's Association, someone develops the... (read the rest)
Weekend reading
NYT: An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification -- human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are... (read the rest)
Should you have the tools to hack your brain?
The widespread distribution of neurofeedback games has some scientists a little worried, according to Wired: Companies including Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky say they've released [brain-computer interface]-based software-development kits. Gaming companies may release BCI games next year, but many scientists worry that users brains' might be subject to negative effects.... (read the rest)
Reviving injured brains
There's a paper in Nature this week detailing how doctors used an implant to increase the level of brain function in a man in a minimally conscious state. (Coverage from News@Nature, NYT, others). This is exciting news, but it does raise a few questions: -As some of the coverage has... (read the rest)
What are those beady little eyes watching?
Via the Washington Post and the BBC, apparently, comes a story that's just too good to check. The Post cites a BBC translation of an article in the Iranian newspaper Resalat: "A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian]... (read the rest)
Should we all have a spotless mind?
While we often rue our difficulty remembering things, the ability to let memories fade is a feature of our brains, not a bug. Memories of emotionally traumatic events can be debilitating. So it's of great interest to researchers how our brains actually go about forgetting the nasty details of... (read the rest)
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