Neuroscience, Prediction, and Free Will: Or, Ripping off The Adjustment Bureau

Imagine a world that is exactly like ours, except for one difference: There exist supernatural beings that have the ability to compute the outcomes of human decision making well in advance of any given decision being made. As matter of fact, they are able to predict with 100 percent accuracy what any given individual will do at any given moment for up to six months into the future. They are not super-psychics, per se. Rather these beings have complete access to information about an individual’s history and complete access to the physical state of the world (including the physical states of the individual’s nervous system). These beings can use this information to conduct computations that allow them to predict human decision making.


Not only can these beings predict human decision making with pin-point accuracy, but they know exactly how to rearrange things so that you will end up making some decision x at some time t. In other words, if these beings felt so inclined, they could intervene on you or your world, and by intervening could get you to do what they wanted you to do.


But they don’t feel so inclined. They are perfectly content with being able to simply watch and to know. They never actually intervene in the world; they never actually do anything to change the course of a single human decision.


Question: In a world in which these supernatural beings exist (but never intervene), do people have free will?

Now imagine a world in which these supernatural beings exist, and they do intervene from time to time. They sometimes nudge the course of history; they like to keep people “on track.”


Same question: In this world, do people have free will?


By now, you have probably realized that the world so-described is a rip off of the book and movie The Adjustment Bureau. And, if you are anything like David Norris (Matt Damon’s character in the movie), the fact that these beings can use in physical information to predict human decision making does not rock your belief in free will so much. For Norris, it is only when it is made known that these beings intervene on the world in order to manipulate human decision making does Norris ponder: “What about free will?” To which the beings respond roughly: The last time we tried free will, two world wars and nuclear conflict transpired. The time prior to that, something called the Dark Ages happened. 

But wait?! If some neuroscientists, biologists, and psychologists are correct, then in this Adjustment Bureau world, the super-natural beings’ response would be utterly nonsensical to us. Why? Well, these scientists claim that our everyday notion of free will is completely and fully incompatible with a world in which physical facts can be used to predict human decision making.


[Don’t believe me? Well, some scientists (see here and here for just two examples ) are convinced that being able to use physical information from the brain to predict with 60 percent accuracy the outcome of a simple dichotomous choice 7 seconds prior to conscious awareness of the decision effectively undermines the existence of free will. 

From Fried et al (2011) Neuron

Why do they think that this undermines free will? 



Well, many scientists in this debate seem to think our everyday notion of free will requires non-physical causation or contra-causal agency or often both. These scientists take it that results like the one mentioned above undermine non-physical causation and contra-causal agency.]


Of course, in the Adjustment Bureau-like world described above, supernatural beings can use physical facts to perfectly predict human decision making up until six months in advance (which would be impossible if there was non-physical causation or contra-causal agency). As such, if these scientists are right, then we should uncontrollably cringe at the suggestion that any person at any point in time in this Adjustment Bureau-like world ever even had an ounce of free will. But most of us don’t cringe at this suggestion; for most of us, the existence of free will in the Adjustment Bureau-like world is only fully challenged when it is discovered that these supernatural beings are using the available information to manipulate human decision making. 

So, what does this fantastic story tell us about neuroscience, prediction, and free will? Well, maybe nothing, but I think that the story at least suggest that prediction alone (even perfect prediction based on physical facts) does not undermine our everyday notion of free will. If this is right, if neuroscience is going to undermine our everyday notions of free will, neuroscience is not going achieve this feat simply by demonstrating that our minds are physical and that we can use physical information to predict what our minds will do.


 



--Jason Shepard

Psychology Graduate Student, Neuroethics Scholars Program Fellow

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Shepard, J. (2012). Neuroscience, Prediction, and Free Will: Or, Ripping off The Adjustment Bureau. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
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Sex/Gender, Sexuality, and Neuroscience

In preparation for this week’s Neuroethics Journal club meeting, where we are discussing Deboleena Roy’s article “Neuroethics, Gender and the Response to Difference,” I wanted to give a short primer on some of the issues that are discussed in that article, most notably, sex, gender and feminist science studies and their relationship to neuroscience. I close with a short discussion of the complications these introduce to the study of sexuality. 



One of the fundamental things we teach in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies is the difference between biological sex and the cultural construction of gender. “Sex” refers to a measurable, biological, or innate difference - such as the presence or absence of a Y chromosome or a functioning uterus.[1] “Gender” refers to all of the cultural and social meanings that are layered on top of sex and which may or may not be innately attached to one sex or another. The majority of people alive today have clearly delineated sex and gender, and although what constitutes the proper performance of gender varies both culturally and historically, the majority of people also find that their gender matches their sex.  For others, these categories are more complex - and often in our field we use the categories of intersex and transgender to demonstrate this complexity.[2] Although sometimes when studying gender and women's lives it is proper to focus on either sex or gender, most people move between the two categories. In 1975 Gayle Rubin introduced a concept she called the sex/gender system to help describe how these concepts work together. This continues to be widely proliferated.[3] The parameters of the sex/gender system are debated even to this day, but generally it is meant to be inclusive of both biological sex and the cultural meanings of gender.[4]

Feminist science studies has always been vitally important to emerging feminist discourse on sex and gender, both as a source of information and as a mode of critique. One area of feminist science studies focuses on the inclusion of women in science both as research subjects and as scientists.[5] Another area critiques the lack of distinction between sex and gender differences in science. Often, these feminist theorists would point out that researchers were assuming that social gender attributes were necessarily linked to sex, or noting where sex-based research was used to validate sexist gender norms.[6] Recently, feminist science scholars have advocated a richer engagement of feminism with science. This move is often called a return to materialism, and invovles a systems-theory based reimagining of the sex/gender system as not simply gender laid over top of sex, but rather as two concepts so inextricably linked as to be inseparable.[7]

Elizabeth Grosz uses the möbius strip to illustrate the melding of sex/gender.

The treatment of the sex/gender system in neuroscience is complicated due to the fact that it is not always possible to know if differences in brain function are due to innate or learned characteristics. Unlike the study of X-chromosome linked color-blindness or uterine cancer, sex difference in the brain is a scientific study which requires referencing sex/gender as a total system, which is, honestly, to me, kind of wonderful. That is not to say that treatment of sex/gender differences in neuroscience is always ethical or feminist, or that neuroscientists utilize the actual language of sex/gender in a way that is intelligible to feminist and gender theorists.[8] One of the major problems that feminist critics continue to find with neuroscientific research about sex and gender is the fact that the sex/gender system is collapsed into sex, either by the researchers themselves or by outside interpretations of their results.  Kristina Gupta’s blog post last month covered one specific problematic assumption about sex difference that proliferates, and Deboleena Roy’s article, which we are discussing next week, covers much of the problems that are contained in (and often obliterated by) the slash we put between sex and gender, and the relevance of the feminist return to materialism.[9]

The scientific study of sexuality is also critiqued within feminist theory, although in a different way from the study of sex/gender difference. Unlike sex, sexuality is cultural and behavioral and thus largely identified through self-reporting or self-identification. Critics, both from inside and outside of feminist theory, have noted many problems with categorizing “homosexuality” in particular, as sexual object choice is not necessarily static over someone’s lifetime, and many people exhibit some level of attraction or interest in people of both sexes.[10] Additionally, some studies of homosexuality utilize sexual dimorphism when searching for difference, often relying on something called “inversion theory” where it is presumed that homosexual men must be “feminized,” or similar to heterosexual women, because of a shared interest in dating men. This mode of categorization means that the study of homosexuality is subject to many of the same feminist criticisms that are levied at studies of sexual difference.

Rejecting the gender binary.

The study of sexuality, particularly of sexual orientation, is further complicated once sexuality is combined with the sex/gender system. Assuming that sexual orientation is always reducible to sex someone’s sexual preferences may map nicely onto a male/female sex system, but this does not take into account gender preferences, nor does it take into account gender performance. Most people do not choose their sexual partners based solely on factors we would consider to be unassailable markers of sex. Generally, people choose sexual partners through the lens of gender, because that is how we encounter people in everyday life. Feminists, queer theorists and scholars of sexuality studies have commented on the complexities of this system, arguing for a multiplicity of categories to accommodate all possible variations of sexual orientations, the obliteration of the gay/straight dichotomy, and pointing out that the continued use of terms like “homosexual” only reinforce sexual dimorphism, in no small part due to the proliferation of “inversion” theory.[11]

I would argue that, even further than this, the fact that sexual orientation is located not in a sex system but in a sex/gender system poses unique opportunities for neuroscientific studies of sexuality. Critically, it means that studies that examine neurostructures of sexuality have to be more attentive to the role of gender in sexual preference in order to avoid being overly reductive and to retain relevance to the lives of all queer-identified people. However, thinking generatively, perhaps it is possible, if researchers are aware of the distinctions they are making, that new research could complicate our understandings of sexual orientation and sexuality, by, for example, looking at sexual orientation as a function of gender preference as distinct from sexual preference.

I can only cover so many aspects of this topic in a blog post, so this introduction has been necessarily short. Do you have favorite studies of gender or feminist theorists I have overlooked? Want to give an example of the use of sex/gender in neuroscience?  Put it in the comments! I look forward to seeing many of you this week at the journal club.   

Want to cite this post?


Cipolla, C. (2012). Sex/Gender, Sexuality, and Neuroscience. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/03/sexgender-sexuality-and-neuroscience.html

---

[1] For an excellent and humorous discussion of when it might be necessary to focus on chromosomes rather than gender, even in an online survey, see the "blag" at XKCD. 

[2] Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body : Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000).

[3] Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women : Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1975).. For an example of sex/gender in neuroscience, see Rebecca Jordan-Young and Raffaella Rumiati, "Hardwired for Sexism? Approaches to Sex/Gender in Neuroscience," Neuroethics..

[4] One of the most significant complications to Rubin’s system was introduced by Judith Butler in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics (New York: Routledge, 1990 (2006))..

[5] Londa L. Schiebinger, Nature's Body : Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

[6] Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender : Biological Theories About Women and Men, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1985/ 1992).

[7] E. A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies : Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Vicki Kirby, "Natural Convers(at)Ions: Or What If Culture Was Really Nature All Along?," in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic : Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham [N.C.] ; London: Duke University Press, 2004).

[8] See Katrin Nikoleyczik, "Towards Diffractive Transdisciplinarity: Integrating Gender Knowledge into the Practice of Neuroscientific Research," Neuroethics. for a discussion of how sex, gender and sex/gender have been used in neuroscience.

[9] Deboleena Roy, "Neuroethics, Gender and the Response to Difference," Neuroethics (2011).

[10] Edward Stein, The Mismeasure of Desire : The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation, Ideologies of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Paul R. Wolpe, "Ethics and Social Policy in Research on the Neuroscience of Human Sexuality," 7, no. 10 (2004).

[11]  The following immediately come to mind: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Axiomatic," in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Stein, The Mismeasure of Desire : The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation; Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC ; London: Duke University Press, 1998); Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter : On the Discursive Limits Of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Raging Hormones, Promiscuous Men, and Choosy Women: What Does the Research Say?

A number of potentially problematic themes run throughout public discussions about sexuality in this country. One such potentially problematic theme revolves around innate sex/gender differences in sexuality. I see stories in the media almost every week about how men and women are almost diametric opposites when it comes to sexuality as a result of evolutionary pressures. In these articles, which are often reporting on scientific studies, the men are invariably sex-hungry and desperate to procreate with any available woman, while the women are invariably choosy and determined to find a “good provider” (for examples, see here, here, and here). I suspect these articles (and the studies they draw from) suffer from confirmation bias, developing elaborate evolutionary rationales to justify what seem like outdated stereotypes.

Another such theme revolves around the determinative role of hormones in sexual desire and activity. In a fascinating (although now somewhat out-of-date) study, sociologist Amy Schalet interviewed parents in the U.S. and the Netherlands about adolescent sexuality. She found that American parents were much more likely than Dutch parents to view adolescent sexuality as driven by hormones. In addition (perhaps as a result) American parents, unlike Dutch parents, viewed adolescent desire as potentially dangerous, and they were more likely to adopt an attitude of willful ignorance about the sexual activity engaged in by their children.

Frontiers in Neuroscience talk: “Response to Sexual Images: Neural Activation and Hormonal Influences”

  A recent talk I attended reconfirmed my belief that both of these views (about hormones and about innate sex/gender differences in sexuality) are, at best, overly simplistic. The talk, titled “Response to Sexual Images: Neural Activation and Hormonal Influences” was by Dr. Kim Wallen, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroendocrinology at Emory University. Dr. Wallen is an international leader in the study of hormonal influences on the sexual behavior of rhesus monkeys. About a decade ago, he turned his attention to humans, and since then he has been involved in a series of studies investigating the connection between hormones and gender differences in sexual functioning in humans (Hamann et al 2004; Rupp and Wallen 2007; Wallen and Rupp 2010; some studies not yet published). I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of Dr. Wallen’s undergraduate courses, the Behavioral Neuroendocrinology of Sex, last year, and I was constantly impressed by the careful attention he paid to the confluence of social and biological influences on sexual behavior.

While listening to his talk, I was struck by two things. First, I was struck by the “messiness” of the data and the difficulty I had in drawing meaningful conclusions from the different studies. Second, I was struck by what the studies do seem to reveal: There are certainly both hormonal influences on sexuality and sex/gender differences in sexuality. However, the relationship between hormones and sexuality is extremely complex. In addition, sex/gender differences in sexuality sometimes run counter to common stereotypes and these differences are clearly neither innate nor learned but are produced through an ongoing intra-action of biological and social factors. If you will bear with me, I would like to undertake a somewhat detailed review of the studies Dr. Wallen discussed in his talk in order to illustrate these points.

Study I: Differences between heterosexual women and men in neural activation when viewing erotic stimuli

In the first study (Hamann et al 2004), the investigators sought to determine whether there are differences in neural activation between young heterosexual men and women when viewing erotic stimuli, even when they report similarly high levels of subjective sexual arousal in response to the stimuli. The study found that neural activation was largely similar in young men and women in response to erotic images. However, even though the men and women reported similar levels of arousal, the men showed greater neural activation in the amygdala and the hypothalamus than the women.

I am impressed by this study for a number of reasons, including the care the investigators took to select images that the women would find arousing, their focus on gender similarities as well as differences, and their insistence that no claims about causality (i.e., that the differences are the result of socialization or hormones) can be made on the basis of the data. However, what struck me in reading the study was the difficulty I had in drawing meaningful conclusions from the data. Part of the problem comes from the fact that the investigators used four sets of stimuli (erotic couples, opposite sex nudes, non-erotic couples, and a fixation baseline), and the results are widely divergent depending on what you compare to what. For example, the women showed activation in the left amygdala when comparing the opposite sex nudes to the fixation baseline, but not when comparing the erotic-couples or the non-erotic couples to the fixation baseline. What could this activation in response to the opposite sex nudes mean? And, as Canli and Gabrieli point out, the women in this study did not show any greater relative activation in the amygdala or the hypothalamus for the erotic-couples stimuli compared to the non-erotic couples stimuli, even though they reported finding the erotic couples more arousing. As Canli and Gabrieli state, “It is unclear, therefore, which neural system mediates the sexual arousal reported by the women in this study.” In addition, we still know so little about the functions of the left and right amygdala (or, to be more precise, we know that the amygdala is involved in so many different things, including emotional arousal and appetitive incentive motivation) that it is difficult to say what it means that the male subjects showed greater activation in this area in response to sexual stimuli.

Study II: Differences in neural activation in women with androgen insensitivity syndrome

 In the second study (which has not yet been published), the team looked at differences in neural activation between heterosexual men, heterosexual control women, and (presumably) heterosexual women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) when viewing sexual stimuli. According to Dr. Wallen, the control women and the women with CAIS did not differ in amygdala activation. The men differed from both the control women and the women with CAIS in amygdala activation, and, in fact, the difference between men and women with CAIS was greater than the difference between men and control women. According to Dr. Wallen, although cultural influences cannot be ruled out, the results “suggest a role for prenatal androgen exposure in determining neural activation to sexual stimuli.” Yet, using observations of adults who were exposed to unusual levels of hormones in utero to draw conclusions about the role of prenatal hormones in determining behavior can be difficult. In a recent article, Rebecca Jordan-Young and Raffaella I. Rumiati critique the conclusions that have been drawn based on studies of women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Women with CAH and women with CAIS have very different conditions. However, studies of women with CAIS may suffer from similar problems as studies of women with CAH: women with CAIS may be subject to greater than average levels of medical intervention; they may experience sex differently because they do not have a uterus or ovaries (thus they are infertile and do not menstruate); they may behave differently as a result of knowing their own CAIS condition; they may be treated differently by others who have knowledge of their CAIS condition; and/or they may be treated differently by others as a result of subtle physical characteristics (i.e. women with CAIS often look very “feminine”). Any of these factors could produce differences in the sexuality of women with CAIS.

Study III: What do women and men look for in erotic images?

In the third study, Dr. Wallen and Heather Rupp set out to test whether men and women are looking at the same thing when they look at erotic images. In order to test this, they tracked the eye movements of heterosexual men and women (half of the women were using hormonal contraceptives) while they looked at erotic images of heterosexual couples on three different occasions (Rupp and Wallen 2007; Wallen and Rupp 2010). Overall looking patterns were similar. However, to their surprise, the men on average spent more time than the women looking at female faces. The “non-contracepting” women spent more time on average looking at genitals than either the men or the “contracepting” women. The contracepting women spent more time looking at “contextual” regions of the pictures (clothing or background) than the other two groups. All three groups spent about the same amount of time looking at female bodies (not counting the genitals). None of the groups spent as much time looking at male faces or male bodies (not counting the genitals), although the men spent the least amount of time of any group looking at male faces and bodies. Rupp and Wallen conclude that men and women don’t necessarily look at erotic images the same way (which perhaps leads to the observed differences in neural activation patterns), and that taking hormonal contraceptives influences how women look at erotic images. Again, however, I found it difficult to make meaning out of these results: why, for instance, does no one seem particularly interested in male faces or male bodies, apart from their genitals? Why did the men spend more time looking at female faces? Why did everyone spend the same amount of time looking at female bodies? Dr. Wallen has offered some thoughts about why this might be the case, but his explanations are speculative.

 Wallen and Rupp further analyzed the data obtained from the women in order to assess the relationship between the phase the woman was at in her menstrual cycle and the time she spent looking at erotic images (Wallen and Rupp 2010). They found that the average time a woman spent looking at the images during the first test depended on what phase she was at in her menstrual cycle: the women at the stage in their cycle with the highest relative levels of endogenous estrogen (during menstruation for contracepting women and during ovulation for non-contracepting women) spent the longest time looking at the images. In addition, the women who spent the longest amount of time looking at the images during the first test also spent the longest amount of time looking at the images during the second and third tests. According to Wallen and Rupp, greater looking time reflects greater sexual interest. This suggests that a woman’s level of interest in erotic images may be related to her hormonal state during the first test. Yet, this study also suggests that the relationship between hormonal levels and interest in erotic images is a complex one. Interest in erotic images wasn’t related to absolute levels of circulating estrogen: interest was related to hormone levels at initial cycle phase only, and the group of contracepting women with the longest looking time (those who were menstruating during the first test) actually spent more time looking at the images than the group of non-contracepting women with the longest looking time (those who were ovulating during the first test), but it is unlikely that the contracepting women had higher absolute levels of estrogen during menstruation than the non-contracepting women had during ovulation (and how does any of this relate to the finding that contracepting and non-contracepting women look at erotic images differently?). In addition, the authors also found that women's viewing times and subjective ratings were significantly correlated with their previous viewing experience, which suggests that social factors (including access to erotic images, stigma attached to women viewing erotic images, etc.) can have a significant influence on women’s interest in viewing erotic images.

Take home message?

What lessons, if any, can be drawn from this slog through the data? I think this analysis shows that when your studies are designed by a careful researcher who is attentive to the interplay between social and biological influences on sexual behavior, you don’t end up with results that are easy to boil down into catchy sounds bites about the determinative role of hormones or the innateness of sex differences in sexuality. Instead, you end up with results that present a complicated, and sometimes difficult to interpret, picture about the relationship between hormones, sex/gender, mind/brain, and sexuality.

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Gupta, K. (2012). Raging Hormones, Promiscuous Men, and Choosy Women: What Does the Research Say? The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/03/raging-hormones-promiscuous-men-and.html

Daubert and Frye: Neuroscience in the Courtroom?

I recently found myself thinking about how we would allow evidence dealing with neuroscience into the courtroom. The question interested me because I wanted to know how our judicial system would differentiate between real and useful evidence versus what may seem no better than allowing a Shaman enter to argue a point based on "evidentiary mysticism".  What I found was that there are two different legal rules for allowing use of neuroscience evidence. The first is the Frye rule and the second is the Daubert rule. Daubert applies in Federal Courts and in States that have adopted it, while the Frye rule applies in all other courts.

The difference between the texts of the standards can seem nuanced but presents two different outcomes judicially. Joseph T. Walsh has a great primer on the two rules if you would like to explore them more, but the issue that I would like to deal with here is simple and does not require a complete knowledge of both rules. Basically you just have to understand the common interpretation of both rules.



For our purposes Frye states that: “Where novel scientific evidence is at issue, the Frye inquiry allows the judiciary to defer to scientific expertise precisely as to whether or not it has gained “general acceptance” in the relevant field. The trial court’s gatekeeper role in this respect is conservative, thus helping to keep “pseudoscience” out of the court”.



On the other hand Daubert states that: “General acceptance is an austere standard absent from and incompatible with the Rules of Evidence. “Scientific knowledge” must be derived from scientific method supported by “good grounds” in validating the expert’s testimony, establishing a standard of “evidentiary reliability”.



What we are concerned with is that under the latter rule the trial judge acts more as a gatekeeper. In this role s/he acts to keep evidence out of the courtroom, regardless of whether society has deemed it generally acceptable, because lay jurors should not consider neuroscience evidence unless it is deemed relevant and reliable by the judge. At first glance the change in rules stands against the beliefs that I hold. This is because, like most people, I believe that every American citizen is supposed to be guaranteed a right to a jury trial, but with our newer rule a judge can simply toss evidence out based on his subjective valuation of the evidence presented before him. This in effect denies someone a trial on that evidence.

Political beliefs aside we should still evaluate the rules objectively and neuroscience is but one method of looking at them. So what does neuroscience tell us about the two rules? Is a judge better suited to deal with judging neuroscientific evidence than a jury? To me the answer is a clear “yes”. The evidence I have found points to a jury being susceptible to being fooled by such evidence. For example, Weisberg et al. found that non-experts who are given the task to choose between two explanations for a problem view explanations with irrelevant neuroscience information as more satisfying than explanations without (1). McCabe and Castel published similar findings when looking at the effect that actual brain images had on our reasoning. They found that, when presenting articles summarizing cognitive neuroscience, articles featuring brain images received higher ratings with regards to scientific reasoning "as compared to articles accompanied by bar graphs, a topographical map of brain activation, or no image." (2)



This effect is explained by Jonathan Marks who issued a warning against what J.D. Trout has termed "explanatory neurophilia." (3) In coining this term Trout warns us that when faced with evidence, of any kind, "the promise of cognitive tractability enhances fluency, but not necessarily accuracy."(4) Marks uses Troudt's view to criticize the use of neuroscience in the national security apparatus and issues a warning against the fact that brain images are partly open to interpretation by experts and are ripe for misuse by government officials as a tool of interrogation (5).



Although I find Mark’s and Troudt’s arguments interesting I do not believe that we should be completely dissuade from using neuroscientific evidence in a court of law. This is because as Weisberg et al. found there is a limit to the impact that superfluous neuroscientific information can have on our judgments, and there is also a noticeable benefit to be gained from extended and specific training on the judgment of such explanations (6).  It is clear that neuroscience provides us with a clear-cut case in which the Frye rule as a standard is not as efficient as that of Daubert. This is because Daubert allows the judge to play a greater gate-keeping roll when allowing evidence into the courtroom. The judge, who we hope is an expert in dealing with such evidence, is less likely to face the same explanatory neurophilia which jurors and laymen are victim to. The Supreme Court agreed with this assessment in Allison v. McGhan Med. Corp., 184 F.3d 1300 (1999) when it stated that:

"While meticulous Daubert inquiries may bring judges under criticism for donning white coats and making determinations that are outside their field of expertise, the Supreme Court has obviously deemed this less objectionable than dumping a barrage of questionable scientific evidence on a jury, who would likely be even less equipped than the judge to make reliability and relevance determinations and more likely than the judge to be awestruck by the expert's mystique."

Even though giving the judge ultimate deciding authority supports the centralization of decision making in our court system, I wholeheartedly agree with the decision made in the Allison vs. McGhan Med. Corp. case. While as an individual, I typically advocate for a more democratic court system I believe this is a clear-cut situation in which my philosophical beliefs stand against reality.



With that said, however, I am curious. Faced with my arguments above, what do you, the reader, make of it all? Was moving away from Frye a good idea based on what we know of how our brains work? Can you suggest a more efficient way of evaluating scientific evidence?



--Jamie Witter (Guest Writer)

Law Student, Georgia State University






Want to cite this post?


Witter, J. (2012). Daubert and Frye: Neuroscience in the Courtroom? The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from
http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/03/daubert-and-frye-neuroscience-in.htm





1. Weisberg, D. S., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. R. (2008). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 20(3), 470-7. doi:10.1162/jocn.2008.20040

2. McCabe, D. P., & Castel, A. D. (2008). Seeing is believing: the effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition, 107(1), 343-52. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.017

3. Marks, J. H. (2010). A Neuroskeptic ’ s Guide to Neuroethics and National Security. Defense, 1(2), 4-12.

4. Trout, J. D. (2008). Seduction without cause: uncovering explanatory neurophilia. Trends in cognitive sciences, 12(8), 281-2. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.05.004

5. Marks, J. H. (2010). A Neuroskeptic’s Guide to Neuroethics and National Security. Defense, 1(2), 4-12.

6. Weisberg, D. S., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., & Gray, J. R. (2008). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 20(3), 470-7. doi:10.1162/jocn.2008.20040

Editor's note: For more information on the McCabe & Castel article, please see our post here.  

Also, the Emory Neuroscience Graduate Students in partnership with Emory's Neuroethics Program will be hosting a symposium on this topic on May 25th: The Truth About Lies: the Neuroscience, Law, and Ethics of Lie Detection Technologies featuring  Drs. Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and Biosciences at Stanford Law School, Daniel Langleben, a professor of Psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania and pioneer of using fMRI to detect lies, and Steven Laken, founder, president, and CEO of Cephos; a company that markets the use of fMRI for courtroom lie detection. Stay tuned for more information.

Neuroimaging in the Courtroom: Video by Neuroethics Creative Team

The undergraduate Neuroethics Program Creative Team embarked on making one of their first videos featuring Dr. Paul Root Wolpe.  This short 3 minute video discusses the ethical implications of using neuroimaging as evidence in the courtroom. This video is a teaser for our upcoming event on May 25th at Emory (see below for more information). 

Thanks to our Neuroethics Creative Team!

• Giacomo Waller


• Sabrina Bernstein


• Lauren Ladov

The Truth About Lies: the Neuroscience, Law, and Ethics of Lie Detection Technologies

You Can’t Handle the Truth! The Neuroscience Program, Center for Ethics Neuroethics Program, and the Scholars Program in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research (SPINR) are combining forces to hold a symposium on the intersection of neuroscience and law pertaining to the use of fMRI and other lie detection technologies in the courtroom. Drs. Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and Biosciences at Stanford Law School, Daniel Langleben, a professor of Psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania and pioneer of using fMRI to detect lies, and Steven Laken, founder, president, and CEO of Cephos; a company that markets the use of fMRI for courtroom lie detection will be providing their expertise through a series of talks. Following the talks, Emory’s Carolyn Meltzer, Chair of the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, will join the speakers answering questions from the audience during a panel discussion moderated by Julie Seaman from Emory Law School. Mark your calendars for 1pm-5pm, May 25^th, 2012 for this thought-provoking event. More information to come.

Save the date! Neuroscience and Ethics Award on April 9th goes to Dr. Steven Hyman

You won't want to miss the Second Annual Neuroscience and Ethics Award!  We are proud to announce this year's award will go to Dr. Steven Hyman.

THE NEUROETHICS PROGRAM OF THE CENTER FOR ETHICS

YERKES NATIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER

THE NEUROSCIENCE INITIATIVE

PRESENT THE

Second Annual Neuroscience

and Ethics Award

TO

Steven Hyman, M.D.

Former Provost of Harvard and Director of NIMH

SPEAKING ON:

Addiction as a Window on Volitional Control

Date: April, 9, 2012

Time: 4pm (followed by a reception)

Location: Woodruff Health Sciences Administration Building Auditorium

Dr. Steven Hyman is a renowned leader in neuroscience and  psychiatry, and has championed ethical inquiry in those fields. Dr.  Hyman is former director of the National Institute of Mental  Health and former Harvard University provost, where he is currently the Distinguished Service Professor of Stem Cell and  Regenerative Biology and Professor of Neurobiology. He is also  the Director of the Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric  Research, and President of the International Neuroethics Society as well as a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the United States National Academies and serves on the IOM council.

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

Let me preface this by saying that Incomplete Nature is probably one of the most daring and original published scientific monographs I’ve ever read. Of course, it could also be one of the worst, it's actually impossible to tell. That said, I’ve had Terrence Deacon’s first book, The Symbolic Species, sitting on a shelf at my house for about five years now. I picked it up when I was a sophomore in college, at the second link of a five-year chain that went evolutionary biology → evolutionary psychology → cognitive neuroscience → philosophy of mind → consciousness → causality and information theory → oh-my-God-nothing-is-real. At the time I clearly wasn’t ready for the book, as I read about the first ten pages before putting it down.

This was for two reasons. The first is that his books are long, dense, and convoluted, and his sentences tend to loop-the-loop back on themselves and self-cannibalize. This is certainly true for Incomplete Nature, which clocks in at over 600 pages, and has entire sections that are interesting and informative but completely unnecessary for the main point/plot (see also Melville 1851).

The second reason is that Terrence is a little bit, well, verbose. And by verbose I mean logorrheic, prolix, pedantic, etc etc. He also makes up his own words - a lot. Like Shakespeare, or Sarah Palin. This habit is clearly on full-throttle in Incomplete Nature, but mostly that’s because what he’s trying to talk about is something that is so mind-bendingly different from the corpuscular metaphysics of Descartes that most scientists and lay-people take for granted. So for example, in Incomplete Nature, he makes up the word “morphodynamics” before discovering it’s been in use for about eighty years in embryology and geology (cue five page digression into the history of the nominally similar term that’s not quite the same as the term he had in mind but is still kind of the same, or same enough to devote five pages to, followed by how his definition is different. Just give up the word, Terrence - let them take it). Other made-up words include “absential”, “autogen”, "autogenesis”, “constitutive absence”, “contragrade”, “ententional”, “entropy ratchet” and I’m nowhere near the end of the glossary so I’ll stop. So why all the neologisms? Just what point is Terrence trying to get across that requires forging new words just to get our attention?

Terrence Deacon sees a problem in our sciences, and that problem is this: how can information, meaning, representation, function, consciousness, have causal powers? As human beings we naively use these terms all the time, and our causal explanations of the world work so incredibly well! Let me put it in an example (as Terrence would approve of). So I know that tomorrow my morning latte will have a little snowman made of milk on the surface because my barista and I have been flirting for weeks and I’m pretty sure she likes me. That high-level pattern of flirtatious behavior is incredibly predictive of the future complicated design of the snowman, but the predominant (if ill-defined) position is that causality is all “happening” down at the atomic level. Therefore such higher-level patterns are meaningless - good for compression in stupid human brains, but not *real*. Terrence disagrees, and he disagrees in a number of ways. He wants to say that not only did consciousness cause the snowman to assume complex shapes, but that further past events cause the snowman, events that no longer even exist (and thus are “absential”). He wants to bring back teleology, show how life can beat entropy, show how evolution creates function, show how... well, okay, it’s a lot. If these problems seem so wide-ranging as to be almost all encompassing, it's because they are. Terrence goes from the problem of the origin of life (how do anti-entropic traveling waves of complexity get constructed?) to the origin of consciousness (what is the simplest form of a self?). Due to the size of the book itself, I will only be a describing it as abstractly as possible - a difficult task, as each portion builds on the last, incorporating the necessitated vocabulary. Or, to paraphrase David Foster Wallace in an interview I once saw: “If I could sum up the theme of the book I wouldn’t have had to write it.”

So I’ll just tell you the conclusion of the book, and then I can get on to more interesting things, such as why an anthropologist is writing a book about how to beat entropy. The conclusion: consciousness and the self are teleodynamic processes defined by the informational constraints they place on the dynamical phase-space of the organism by their anti-entropic (and thus function-creating) nature. Being anti-entropic means being fundamentally incomplete (kept from resting level). That's fine, as long as you've defined all your terms, equations, shown how it operates in simple example systems, etc, but Terrence seems to operate in the style of "intellectual jazz" - reading Deacon is like reading Sartre: "the being of the being of the becoming... of the being." The problem is that this all flirts so close to complete semantic vacuity. Mathematical descriptions are sparse, just a handful of them, and strict definitions are nowhere to be found. For example, the Belsousov-Zhabotinsky reaction is a chemical reaction in a shallow dish that demonstrates self-organization far from resting state. Is it conscious? Teleological? What level of the "entropy ratchet" is it on�? I doubt Terrence has any answers. I can make out his primary interest, which is that the notion of information (which is connected to entropy), which Terrence believes needs to change in order to incorporate consciousness, and with it meaning, semantics, and function. That's what I'll address from now on.

Information theory as a key to consciousness has a pedigree - David Chalmers (1996) admits thinking that such a theory could be constructed, and Giulio Tononi (2010) actually did construct one: an info-theoretic measure of consciousness that is fully formalized in discrete systems. But why is Terrence Deacon, an anthropologist, and Tononi, a psychiatrist, the only ones following this up? One dismissive reason would be that they’re crackpots, who don’t really understand either information theory or physics. The other, more interesting reason, lies in how scientists have performed reduction. This is most well put by John Searle (1992), where he points out that, throughout history, reduction has involved confinement of various properties of the phenomenon under study to the subjective. For example, the redness of red is said to be ‘in the perspective’ and not out in the world - this allows us to comfortably come up with a scientific definition of red (photon emissions at 600 nanometers). I think that this kind of reduction (a push back into the head) occurred in Claude Shannon’s work on information theory, and that, when we use information theory to look at the brain, we notice a troubling paradox.

Information, in the Shannon sense, is not really an ‘intrinsic’ quality - rather instead it is observer-defined, based off of a vocabulary agreed upon before hand. Shannon's Entropy function is a measure of how surprised one observer is, given that another observer sent a signal. But then we look in the brain and see... the same kind of observer-defined information. Shannon’s separation of information from meaning and consciousness has lead to an elimination of meaning from science. This is fine for those whose jobs involve building better telephone wires and computers, they don’t care that what they’re doing is based off of prior agreement on vocabulary between observers. Even mathematicians and physicists aren’t bothered. But it is neuroscientists (in broad definition), the people who actually have to hold a brain in their hand, or listen to the pop-pop of in vivo neurons, that are really struck by the paradox. Terrence’s book is, at its heart, an attempt to solve this paradox, and bring the ineffable back in the game. Of course he fails in the sense that the majority of the ideas in the book are descriptive and not formalized, at worst incoherent, at best incomplete.

Neuroethics journal club: jobbing on the sleep

Feeling tired? You’re not the only one. According to a 2009 poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, 20% of Americans sleep less than six hours a night. How can people even do their jobs with less than six hours of sleep?

Oh.

Before you get too impressed by my ability to cite statistics, I should tell you I’m quoting directly from the article we read for the most recent meeting of the Neuroethics program’s journal club: “Examining the Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Workplace Deviance: a self-regulatory perspective” by Michael Christian and Aleksander Ellis.



Dr. Gillian Hue presented the article. Not only did Gillian study sleep and circadian rhythms as a graduate student, she also has extensive experience with sleep deprivation thanks to her young son, Lucas (hey, she made that joke, not me). One of the first things Gillian asked was how many of us had gotten seven hours or more of sleep the night before. Only two people raised their hands: Kristina Gupta and Cyd Cipolla, both Ph.D. candidates in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory (They are also teaching the class “Feminism, Sexuality, and Neuroethics” this semester that they developed as part of their winning Neuroethics Scholar applications). Two people out of roughly twenty had slept the bare minimum seven hours. I would make a joke here about how I should’ve gone into Women’s Studies, but I’m too tired to think of way to phrase it that doesn’t sound vaguely smarmy. Gillian asked us whether we’d gotten seven hours of sleep because that’s the criterion that Christian and Ellis use in their paper to decide whether subjects in their studies were sleep deprived. Why do they care if people are sleep deprived? Here’s the main hypothesis, taken from the abstract:
“Utilizing self-regulatory resource theories, we argue that sleep deprivation decreases individuals’ self-control while increasing hostility, resulting in increased workplace deviance.”

Christian and Ellis then proceed to test their hypothesis on two groups: nurses and undergraduates. Surprisingly, “results from both samples largely converge in supporting [their] hypotheses.” I say “surprisingly” because I would have predicted that sleep deprivation would increase self-control and lower hostility. Like all great science, their results run against our intuitions, yet allow us to explain the world more simply. If you think you detect a note of sarcasm, let me confirm that. If you also think you detect some jealousy on my part because I wasn’t smart enough to come up with a “no duh” hypothesis that would let me sail through grad school and land a cushy job as an Industrial/Occupational psychologist, let me also confirm that.

I mainly want to comment on the theory behind the experiments in this paper. If Christian and Ellis have chosen a “no duh” hypothesis, then it’s no surprise that I can’t find much to argue with in their approach. They’re working within the framework of self-control as a limited resource—as if self-control were a muscle that can tire. They cite multiple articles from the psychologist who has done the most work around the idea that people have a limited reserve of self-control, Baumeister (and I have to point out that most of the articles they cite from Baumeister’s group are reviews, not studies). Christian and Ellis argue that self-control can also be depleted by sleep deprivation. To support that idea, they cite a couple of papers that talk about lack of sleep and poor glucose metabolism in the pre-frontal cortex, of which one is a review (aargh! why don't they cite some primary literature?!) of healthy adolescent sleep (there’s no adolescents in Christian and Ellis’ paper! double-aargh!) and the other is a meta-analysis (see first “aargh!”). Not coincidentally, Baumeister’s group is now pushing the idea that self-control depends on glucose. I can hardly find fault, again, with a hypothesis like “if you use up all your glucose, then your brain will go out of control”. However, just because Christian and Ellis can point to that hypothesis doesn’t mean that they have “[integrated] research from the social psychological, sleep, and neurocognitive literatures” as they claim in their introduction. Similarly, citing a random review and a meta-analysis of sleep deprivation studies barely qualifies as “integrating evidence from neuroscience with organizational behavioral research” as they state in their discussion.

Lest you should think I’m just taking potshots at this paper, I’ll admit that it does make an important contribution. While I might think their results are a bit, well, obvious, it’s also true that their results might not be obvious to everyone. Recall that Christian and Ellis carried out the first part of their study on nurses. I don’t know how sleep-deprived nurses are, in general, but I do know that doctors in residency are definitely asked to work long hours all the time. Why hasn’t this practice changed if neuroscience shows how dangerous sleep deprivation is? Because, as our in-house medical ethics expert Dr. John Banja pointed out at journal club meeting, “the old guard” in charge of organized medicine and the professional medical societies are “very opposed to change”.

In this sense, Christian and Ellis provide some cold hard evidence that might open at least one pair of eyes. Maybe. During journal club Cyd Cipolla asked, “If we all know sleep deprivation is bad, why are Kristina and I the only ones getting enough sleep?” Kristina then wondered if, “in economic terms, the gains would outweigh the losses if people worked less and slept more”. Banja replied that, as far as hospitals are concerned, if residents work less, then attending physicians have to work more, which is more expensive.

So the cost of residents per hour might matter more to people running hospitals than the amount of deviance in whatever hospital they’re running. Christian and Ellis have asked with their study what the neuroscience of sleep can tell us about our ethics. They might not have done much for the ethics of neuroscience, though. I mean, our society still seems pretty bent on running a giant sleep deprivation experiment. That reminds me—I’d better post this and get to bed.

Be sure to RSVP for next month's meeting, on March 28th form 1230-130pm. We'll talk about Deboleena Roy's article, "Neuroethics, Gender, and the Response to Difference". The discussion will be facilitated by Neuroscience graduate student Laura Mariani (chief whistler of the Caspary lab and sitting duck exec prez of the Graduate Student Council).





Want to cite this post?


Nicholson, D. (2012). Neuroethics journal club: jobbing on the sleep. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
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http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/03/neuroethics-journal-club-jobbing-on.html