Bias in the Academy: From Neural Networks to Social Networks Symposium Video Archive

Did you miss our annual neuroethics symposium?  Now you can watch the video archive of the event! Just click below on the link of the title of the session and then click play.





Neuroethics Symposium December 10, 2013
Bias in the Academy: From Neural Networks to Social Networks.   This neuroethics symposia is designed to discuss the complex influence of stereotype/bias on academia and apply advances in the science of stereotype bias to university policies and practices. Through a pre-symposia seminar series and symposia, a white paper will be produced to highlight challenges and to put forth practical solutions to move toward mitigating the detrimental influence of bias and stereotyping in academia. 



 Part I: 9:15-10:15 am - Elizabeth Phelps The Neuroscience of Race Bias         



Part II: 10:30-11:30 am - Chad Forbes Gaining Insight from a Biased Brain: Implications for the Stigmatized          



Part III: 11:30 am-12:30 pm - Greg Walton Wise Interventions: Engineering Psychology to Raise Achievement     



Part IV: 1:45-2:30 pm - Emory Speaks: The Challenges of Bias and Stereotyping at Emory            



Part V: 2:30*-4:00 pm - Panel Discussion / Are there solutions to bias and stereotyping? *ff to 5:45min

Neuroethics Journal Club Report: "Creating a false memory in the hippocampus" Ramirez et al. Science 2013

Our memory can be unreliable, that comes as no surprise. But beyond forgetting where the car is parked or misremembering a date, a perhaps more interesting phenomenon is that of false memories of events that have never happened, or at least not to us directly. In most cases, the fallibility of memory is benign or occasionally embarrassing, but in the courtroom it can have serious consequences. In the final Neuroethics Journal Club of the semester, Emory University graduate student and AJOB Neuroscience editorial intern, Katie Strong, led a thought-provoking discussion of Ramirez’s 2013 Science paper¹ entitled “Creating a false memory in the hippocampus” with a focus on the potential neuroethical implications of this research on the justice system.

The discussion paper comes from 1987 Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa’s lab and is in some ways a sequel to their 2012 paper published in Nature². In both studies this group utilized an elegantly-designed mouse model with the aim of targeting the cells in the hippocampus constituting the memory engram. The search for the engram, or memory trace in the brain, is not a recent pursuit. Karl Lashley’s seminal mid-20^th century work suggested that memories are dispersed throughout the cortex. Lashley’s lesion studies surprisingly indicated that the amount of cortex damaged mattered far more than the location of the lesions³.



More recently the search has moved toward molecular changes in individual cells and at particular synapses⁴.  It is now thought that Lashley’s findings may have been the result of the complexity of the tasks that his animals performed, which involved multiple brain regions, since emerging evidence suggests that in some circumstances the same particular cells are activated during recall of certain memories⁵. Conversely, fear conditioning is a relatively simple paradigm that has been widely used because animals rapidly learn to pair an innocuous cue such as a light, tone, or an environment with an aversive stimulus such as a foot shock. Moreover, the neural circuitry controlling these behaviors has been extensively studied⁶.



In this paper, Ramirez and colleagues used a very similar approach to that in their 2012 paper in which they employed optogenetics (a technique to genetically target a group of cells that can later be activated by pulses to light) to label and reactivate hippocampal engram neurons². Mice were unilaterally injected into the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus with a virus to drive the expression of a fluorescently-tagged, light-activated protein (channelrhodopsin-2) under the control of a drug-responsive promoter. These mice had been genetically engineered to activate this expression system when the immediate early gene c-fos, a marker of neuronal activity, is induced. The result was that expression of the light-activated channelrhodopsin-2 only occurs when (1) the animals are taken off of the expression-suppressing drug doxycycline and, (2) when neurons are sufficiently activated to induce expression of c-fos. This allowed the experimenters to essentially label the memory engram of a neutral context (context A) by removing doxycycline from the animals’ diet. Then, when doxycycline was replaced and neuronal labeling was halted, they were able to selectively re-activate the neutral context engram-bearing cells with rapid pulses of light.



In order to induce a false memory, the animals were removed from context A and placed in context B where the engram cells that encoded for context A were selectively stimulated with light while a foot shock was delivered. Later, when the animals were placed back in context A they demonstrated a typical fear response for rodents - freezing, even though they had actually experienced the foot shock in context B. The experimental group of mice exhibited a higher level of freezing than those animals that lacked the engram-labeling genetic engineering and were thus nonresponsive to the subsequent artificial light stimulation. As others⁷ have pointed out, this is not the first time that fear conditioning has been achieved with artificial stimulation in place of the conditioned stimulus, but it is the first time that this is been done by directly activating individual neurons in the brain.



These experiments may seem to be far-removed from typical human experience, but they may provide the basis to understand how false memories can be formed. As the authors point out, recall is known to make memories more labile and external information can occasionally be incorporated into existing memories over time. Moreover, they argue that these results may in fact be relevant to humans. In their words,

“we speculate that the formation of at least some false memories in humans may occur in natural settings through the internally driven retrieval of a previously formed memory and its association with concurrent external stimuli of high valence.”

For example, experimental psychologists have often been able to induce false memories in study participants through the use of leading questions and suggestion at a success rate of nearly 1 in 3⁸. Often these paradigms use realistic and traumatic circumstances such as being lost as a small child in a mall. Perhaps the simultaneous recollection of a fear of being lost as a small child and memories of going to the mall at that age is enough to implant a false memory in some individuals.



Beyond the laboratory, false identification is an obvious and persistent problem for the justice system. The Journal Club discussion centered on a recent New Jersey case, State v. Henderson, which led to major reforms being enacted to change how eyewitness testimony is evaluated based on social science and psychology research⁹. This particular case involved the reliability of an eyewitness who encountered the suspect at gunpoint in a dark hallway when he had been drinking alcohol and smoking crack cocaine, and who continued to use crack daily until the police first contacted him more than a week later. Moreover, the witness reportedly struggled with a photo identification procedure and was pressured by the police to make a decision.



This case provides a hopeful example for how scientific research can spur progress improving accuracy and judicial outcomes, but what relevance does the Ramirez article really hold for understanding false memory? In these studies, the experimental group of animals – that which later displayed a false memory – had the memory of a neutral context linked to a foot shock by reactivating specific neurons using artificial means (optogenetics). This ability to activate a memory only by stimulating those (relatively few) neurons that were active during its encoding is strong, direct evidence for the existence and identification of the engram that can then be linked to a situation of high valence, such as a foot shock, to create a false fear memory. In reality, however, this is not how false memories are encoded in humans. It is an important step forward that elegantly demonstrates that the neurons involved in encoding a contextual fear memory are also sufficient for recall, but this technology is certainly not close to being used in humans. However, researchers have already found other ways to experimentally manipulate false memories in humans.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (Source: TIME Magazine)

No one will be having viral injections and fiber optic cables implanted into their hippocampi anytime soon, but transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a safe, non-invasive technology that has already been used to affect false memory acquisition in humans¹⁰. Gallete and colleagues reasoned that since patients with left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) dementia often become very literal and less vulnerable to false memories, perhaps temporary inactivation of this brain area with TMS would reduce the rate of false memory acquisition and indeed it did. These results suggest that localized TMS to the LATL during learning could aid in factual recall so should it be more widely available to students?



Understanding how memories are encoded, consolidated, retrieved – and how this process can go awry – has long been a fundamental aim of neuroscience. New technologies such as optogenetics and TMS are allowing investigators to ask questions that were never possible until now. However, there is still much to learn in terms of how false memories are formed and how they can be minimized. While this aim will require continued work from social scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, neuroethical discussions will also be important in framing how false memories are understood and addressed from the laboratory to the courtroom.





References



1. Ramirez, S. et al. Science 2013.

2. Liu, X. and Ramirez, S. et al. Nature 2012.

3. Lashley, K.S. Physiological mechanisms in animal behavior 1950.

4. Govindarajan, A. et al. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2006.

5. Josselyn, S.A. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience 2010.

6. Kim, J.J. and Jung, S.W. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 2006.

7. Saksida, L.M. Trends in Cognitive Science 2013.

8. Loftus, E.F. American Psychologist 2003.

9. Harvard Law Review 125:1514, 2012.

10. Gallate, J. et al. Neuroscience Letters 2009.





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Purcell, R. (2014). Neuroethics Journal Club Report: "Creating a false memory in the hippocampus" Ramirez et al. Science 2013. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on

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Static and dynamic metaphysics of free will: A pragmatic perspective

By Eric Racine, PhD and Victoria Saigle



Dr. Eric Racine is the director of the Neuroethics Research Unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal and holds academic appointments in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Université de Montréal and in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, the Department of Medicine, and the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board.



Victoria Saigle is a research assistant at the Neuroethics Research Unit at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal.



In the public eye, one of the most striking types of findings neuroscience research claims to unravel concerns how decisions are made and whether these decisions are made “freely”. Unpacking the relationship between what is meant by “freely” and other neighboring notions such as “voluntarily”, “informed”, “conscious”, “undetermined”, “uncoerced”, “autonomous”, “controlled”, “uncaused”, etc., is a matter of serious philosophical debate. Much research, either purely philosophical, neuroscientific, or a mixture of the two in nature, has attempted to tease out the mysteries of free will. In spite of being seemingly committed to addressing these questions scientifically, much of the neuroscientific literature clearly holds presuppositions about the nature of free will that stunts its exploratory power. By this, we mean that many neuroscientific experiments surrounding free will have clung to a static metaphysical notion of its existence and it is only recently that a more dynamic view has emerged. The contrast between these two metaphysical beliefs is the focus of our blog post.



From a pragmatic standpoint, Dewey writes with much despair about free will that “[w]hat men have esteemed and fought for in the name of liberty is varied and complex – but [it] certainly has never been a metaphysical freedom of will”,¹ i.e., free will is a philosophical Holy Grail. Dewey proposes that what matters to free will is the ability to carry out plans, the capacity to change them, and the power of the individual to be an actor in the course of events. Dewey’s critiques are grounded partly in an analysis of the dead ends produced by static philosophical scholasticism as well as an absence of commitment to scientific inquiry as a source of knowledge and progress for ethics. What is interesting about the latter part is that some key neuroscience-derived messages about free will have remained stuck in a static metaphysic that has wrestled with topics framed in dualism such as the existence of an uncaused causer, mental causation and other impressive philosophic-semantic puzzles. For instance, the findings of Libet’s experiments in the 1980s have perplexed many people and since fueled varying interpretations concerning how readiness potentials could precede the conscious intention to act.² Since then, more adventurous researchers have claimed that free will is simply an illusion.³ The metaphysical framework in which free will researchers seem to be working is a static one, whereby any findings that challenge the existence of free will could negate its entire existence. While Libet himself tries to save part of free will by introducing the idea of a “veto” power², most researchers using Libet-type paradigms do not acknowledge this distinction. Instead, conclusions from these experiments are often co-opted in other academic, social, and legal contexts to support, in the most radical interpretations, the notion that humans are not responsible for their actions, lack decisional capacity, and should not be held accountable for consequences of their actions. The problem with this interpretation, again using Libet’s 1983 experiment as an example, is that one’s sense of control over a spontaneous finger movement becomes evidence that one has no free will over more complex, premeditated actions.



Fortunately, a new line of inquiry has begun moving away from the static metaphysical and semantic boxing of free will to actually experimenting with the implications of a dynamic view of the self. A good example of this approach is a study conducted by Rigoni and colleagues who have shown that undermining one’s belief in free will affects brain correlates of voluntary motor control of actions. Their results suggest that “the readiness potential was reduced in individuals induced to disbelieve in free will,” thereby indicating that “abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental effect than previously thought”.⁴ The authors underscore the synergetic relationship between beliefs about free will and behavior: “[p]utting less effort into an action might weaken our sense of agency for these actions and lead to a reduced feeling of responsibility. This reduced feeling of responsibility would very likely result in more careless and irresponsible behaviour. The basic assumption of this explanation is that disbelief in free will influences people’s sense of agency.”⁴

From SMBC Comics

Interestingly, this research, and that of others,^{5 6} is consistent with a much more dynamic view of free will in which concepts describing the self are fluid self-interpretations influenced by factors such as social contexts, knowledge acquisition, experience, and culture. Dewey’s work captures this interpretative and “instrumental” slant of self well. In fact, he states that, “the meanings of such words as soul, mind, self, unity, even body, are hardly more than condensed epitomes of mankind’s agelong efforts at interpretation of its experience.”⁷ It seems likely that fluidity in self-understanding also implicates differing ways in which free will can manifest itself. So long to the dream of a static metaphysics and essences and hello to the complexity of social psychology! Interestingly, this view is consistent with recent research,^4-6 which, similarly to the pragmatists, argues for the importance of experience within ethics and the recognition that ethical thinking is itself contrived by concepts about the self. Therefore, a key task of philosophy and science is to deconstruct the implied assumptions found in “common-sense” concepts through criticism and experimental research to refurnish them with enriched meaning based on inquiry. However, as Dewey warns, contrary to sweeping reductionist neurophilosophy, “it will be a long time before anything of this sort will be accomplished for human beings. To expel traditional meanings and replace them by ideas that are products of controlled inquiries is a slow and painful process.”⁴ (Dewey is, in this case, comparing research on human nature to the physical sciences in which technical language is vested with new insights and power because of the research supporting them).



In a sense, the whole-packaged fallacy of static and essentialist metaphysics applied to free will has previously been considered benign because of its lack of impact on daily life and human affairs. However, the cost could be better captured as an “opportunity cost”. By being stuck in philosophical scholasticism and focusing on outdated metaphysical and semantic debates, neuroscience research (and philosophical reflection on it) has not delivered large amounts of usable knowledge to inform ethics. With the increasing use of neuroscientific findings to support healthcare innovation, policy implementation, and decisions within legal contexts, the problem of a static metaphysical vision of free will could translate to these realms as well. If research based on this static view informs decisions in the public sphere, these decisions could themselves become less fluid and potentially incapable of responding to nuance. Neuroscientific research has the ability to inform ethics, but to do so would likely require a few nudges and budges to (1) resist the “philosophical fallacy”, i.e., of speculating on “essences” and semantics and then luring oneself into thinking that this speculation (in itself) becomes universal knowledge; and to (2) reach out to other disciplines, such as social psychology and qualitative research, to bring experiential perspectives to the endeavor of uncovering self-concepts such as will and voluntary action. However, a continued focus on narrowly defined philosophical puzzles will offset possible dialogues and contributions because of the disciplinary buy-in they entail.



Acknowledgements: Writing of this article was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada held by Eric Racine as well as a career award from the Fonds de recherché du Québec – Santé.





References



1. Dewey J. Human nature and conduct: An introduction to social psychology. New York: Holt, 1922.

2. Libet B, Gleason CA, Wright EW, Pearl DK. Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain 1983;106 (Pt 3):623-42.

3. Wegner D. The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002

4. Rigoni D, Kuhn S, Sartori G, Brass M. Inducing disbelief in free will alters brain correlates of preconscious motor preparation: The brain minds whether we believe in free will or not. Psychol. Sci. 2011;22(5):613-8.

5. Baumeister RF, Masicampo EJ, DeWall CN. Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will Increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 2009;35(2):260-68.

6. Vohs KD, Schooler JW. The value of believing in free will - Encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychol. Sci. 2008;19(1):49-54.

7. An address delivered before the College of Physicians in St. Louis, April 21, 1937. Published in Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy, edited with an introduction by Joseph Ratner, New York, The Modern Library, 1939, p. 817-34 and republished in Gouintlock J, editor. The moral writings of John Dewey. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002.

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Racine, E. and Victoria Saigle (2014). Static and dynamic metaphysics of free will: A pragmatic perspective. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2014/01/static-and-dynamic-metaphysics-of-free.html

Autism and Well-Being

By Richard Ashcroft, MA, PhD



Professor Richard Ashcroft teaches medical law and ethics at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level in the Department of Law at Queen Mary, University of London. Previously, he was Professor of Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and before that he worked at Imperial College London, Bristol University and Liverpool University. Professor Ashcroft is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health, funded by the Wellcome Trust, with partners at Kings College London and the London School of Economics.  He is also working on the role of human rights theory, law and practice in bioethics policy, and on ethical challenges in public health. He has a longstanding interest in biomedical research ethics. 



I am both someone who writes and teaches on bioethics, and father of a son with autism.  He’s a delightful and happy child and he and I have good lives. But like most parents of children with autism I do worry about his future. I worry about social exclusion. I worry about mistreatment by others. I worry about education, employment, housing. I worry about how he’ll manage when I’m gone. I worry about whether he’ll meet someone to love, who will treat him right and value him for who he is. In other words, I worry about him the same way any parent worries about his or her child. His autism just gives me a hook to hang the worries on.



Nonetheless, there is something about autism which challenges our dominant accounts of well-being. There is a common and long-running debate about “stims”, which can crudely be described as repetitive, socially unusual behaviours which autistic people sometimes engage in. Common stims include humming, or spinning, or bouncing on one’s feet or certain kinds of hand gesture. The psychology of stims is related to “sensory issues” which often form part of autism, whereby the autistic person is more or less than usually sensitive to certain kinds of sensory input (light or sound or motion, for instance). Stims can be understood as a sort of self-regulatory behaviour to deal with under- or overstimulation of some sensory mechanism. Stims are just one example of visible autistic difference, in a condition which is sometimes described as an “invisible disability”: a disability where there is no obvious physical impairment which a third party would see with the untutored eye. Most autistic people who stim, if they are able to use verbal communication, say that stims are important to them, either as a coping mechanism, or as something which gives them pleasure – or both. Yet many parents, teachers, and passersby find stims bothersome, irritating, or worse. This is the case even when the stim has no direct impact on them.



As for stims, so for many other common behaviours in autism: for instance echolalic speech, perserveration, meltdowns, dietary intolerances or strong preferences may all be experienced as natural and authentic emotional and behavioural responses by the person with autism, and yet be experienced as problematic by the parent, friend, teacher or bystander. It should be noted that autism is very diverse in its presentation, both in the degree of impairment or disability experienced and the forms it may take or the behavioural traits seen.



One important debate about behavioural traits common in autism concerns whether these are signs and symptoms of disability, and whether in turn this disability is an inherent impairment or a social construct.  But the debate about well-being is just as interesting. Taking stims as our example again, is stimming a sign of well-being? A prejudiced bystander or an exhausted parent might well say no. The person who is stimming might say yes. Who has the authority to settle the question? One subtlety is that stimming may be calming, and being calm is a mark of well-being; but as a response to stress or distress it is a mark of relative lack of well-being. We have to work out whether stimming is a sign of enjoyment or stress.   This question of understanding is of enormous practical importance. Equally, however, we have to ask questions about the standard of evaluation. Should we assume that well-being and flourishing are entirely personal, or that there is some objective standard or list of features which is common to all people, or that there is such a thing as “autistic wellbeing” or “autistic flourishing” which is different in nature and scope from “neurotypical” variants of wellbeing and flourishing? Now, in the short run this is fairly easily settled pragmatically: I can usually tell you with some reliability whether my son is happy or not. More to the point, so can he. And we usually agree; and when we don’t I try to find out why not, and his view is probably more trustworthy than mine. It’s his life, after all. But in the long run, this is not such a helpful guide. No parent ever took for granted that moment-by-moment happiness over the course of a childhood is a recipe for, or predictive of, happiness in independent adulthood. The very idea of education militates against that notion too. So the problem is, if we don’t really know what flourishing or well-being is for autistic people in the here and now, how can we sensibly shape education and parenting, which aim at such flourishing as a long term goal? Is educating or training people with autism to “pass for normal” desirable, even if it is achievable?

Source

Various philosophers have struggled with this problem, most notably Martha Nussbaum in her recent Frontiers of Justice and Eva Feder Kittay in many of her writings. Importantly, much of the best writing has been by philosophers with direct experience in raising a child or caring for a relative with a disability or impairment. But philosophers have still been too slow to take the experience and voice of people with autism seriously enough as giving reliable accounts of their own well-being and flourishing. And even when we do take these experiences seriously, we may be listening to too narrow a range of voices.



Recently (October 2013) I took part in a fascinating workshop on autism and wellbeing organised by a Danish philosopher, Raffaele Rodogno, at the University of Aarhus. In the morning I read a paper on the topic, as did Raffaele himself and Ingrid Robeyns (Erasmus University of Rotterdam) and Eva Billstedt (University of Gøteborg). But in the afternoon we had a roundtable discussion led by autistic young adults from a local self-help group. Two things became clear: first, that this was a very articulate and insightful group of young people who had a lot to say about well-being which certainly humbled me in light of my rather inchoate ramblings earlier in the day. Second, that what they had most to say about was not well-being but its lack. And this was not to do with “the miseries of autism”; far from it. They were proud of their interests and their achievements and this was very apparent. Rather it was to do with the mistreatment, discrimination, intolerance and lack of understanding they met on a daily basis: exclusion from school, ridicule of their differences, intolerance of their sensory needs, low expectations on the part of their teachers about what they might achieve in life.



What do I conclude from these reflections: first, we need to think harder about well-being and its diversity; second we need to listen to people’s own accounts of their well-being and flourishing; and third, we need to pay close attention to the ways in which our societies positively destroy well-being.

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Ashcroft, R. (2013). Autism and Well-Being. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2014/01/autism-and-well-being.html