Welcome Our Newest Neuroethics Scholar!

It is with great pleasure that the Emory
Neuroethics Program announces its newest neuroethics scholar: Riley Zeller-Townson! The Neuroethics Program invited graduate
students to create and to join collaborative, interdepartmental faculty teams
at Emory and in the Atlanta community to pursue Neuroethics scholarship.  Graduate students were free to propose
projects of interest to them. Proposals included innovative ideas in the arena
of teaching, empirical research, new media, and beyond. By the completion of
their one year appointments, each scholar is expected to co-author a paper and
present his or her work.  The selection
process was quite competitive. The abstract of Riley’s proposed project and a
short bio can be found below.

Riley Zeller-Townson (Neuroethics and Art)

Riley Zeller-Townson

For my Neuroethics Scholars Program Fellowship, I will be studying, as well as participating in, the interaction between Neuroethics and Art.  This includes documenting and analyzing ethical issues highlighted by artwork that incorporates (or focuses) on neural tissue, as well as developing cost-effective tools to enable artists to integrate electrophysiology into their work. I approach this project from the perspective that art can act as a type of “experimental ethics.”  That is, while written academic ethical discourse can suggest scenarios that highlight the gaps or failings in our moral frameworks, art can bring those scenarios to life and allow audience members to confront them at both an instinctive as well as intellectual level.  

Silent Barrage on display at the National Art Museum of China

Biological art is particularly
well-suited to do this, by generating novel living and partially-living systems
that fall in between the points already mapped out on the moral landscape.  'Silent
Barrage,' a bio-art piece that I have assisted with, provides an example of
how the integration of neural tissue into art can raise questions that are of
particular importance to Neuroethics.  In
'Silent Barrage' the claim is made that an in vitro culture of neurons
is actively sensing and responding to its environment.  Does this imply a degree of mental life that
burdens the artists and scientists with responsibility for the piece's well
being?  Or is 'well being' meaningless
when all notions of pain and suffering are impossible to justify?  Are there any 'qualia' at all that the piece could
be said to experience?  Furthermore,
could this bio-art project have been created in an ethical manner if it was not
part of a scientific collaboration, and served some kind of scientific purpose?



To stoke the fires further (and
remove any doubt toward my own biases), I'm going to be building a device that
will allow more artists to create these kinds of artwork- -specifically, a
cost-effective amplifier designed for extracellular electrophysiology of
vertebrate neurons.  The final product
will condition neural signals such that they can be recorded using a standard
laptop headphone jack (inviting the use of artistic tools already available for
manipulation of sound).  This will be
very similar to what the 'Backyard Brains' system does for invertebrate neural
signals. Both the ethics and the engineering sides of my project will be
developed in collaboration with SymbioticA, an internationally renowned center
of excellence in bio-art and bioethics within the School of Anatomy, Physiology
and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia.

The engineer and the two artists who worked on Silent Barrage (Peter Gee, Philip Gamblen, and Guy Ben-Ary) and Riley standing by the installation 

I'm working on my PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Dr. Steve Potter's lab.  My (neuroscience) research interests include the role of the axon in neural computation, applications of basic neuroscience to artificial intelligence, and open-source electrophysiology tools.   

Neurons growing on a multi-electrode array in Steve Potter's lab

As an engineer
whose opinions on bio-art and ethics are heavily influenced by the artists he's
worked with, I would greatly appreciate additional perspectives on these issues
from all of you artists, scientists, and ethicists out there!