Self/less and transplanting (ID)entities

by Karen Rommelfanger



I recently sat on a panel discussion for an early screening of the movie Self/less. I'm quoted (mostly correctly) with my name (mostly) spelled correctly here.

In Self/less, an aging business tycoon with a terminal illess (played by Ben Kingsley) pays to "shed" his skin for a new, younger, fitter body (played by Ryan Reynolds). See trailer above.



The film, despite the futuristic theme, revisits mundane themes of the Faustian tradeoff or a deal with a devil, ultimately conveying the message that the costs, even for the rich, are too high when trying to cheat death. The title of the movie implies that for the greater good the selfless thing to do is to just die as nature intended.



While the film would surely be categorized as science fiction, there are entrepreneurs quite dedicated to making such a possibility a reality.



For example, the 2045 Initiative promises, for the starting price tag of $3 million, that your brain can be downloaded and that downloaded information can be used to animate or be “transplanted into" a personalized avatar or robotic copy of a human body remotely controlled by a brain computer interface or, if you fancy, a hologram (just press the immortality button on their site). Among its supporters, the website claims, is the Dalai Lama.

And, for the first time in human history, the neuroengineer Miguel Nicolelis recently connected two brains, rat brains, with one brain able to transfer electrical activity to another to facilitate learning a task. In this experiment, one rat learned through trial and error to press the correct lever for a reward. Electrical activity from one rat brain was sent to another through a wireless connection, allowing the other, untrained rat to choose the correct reward delivering lever without any training. This was followed up by studies connecting a human to a rat brain and then two human brains. Most recently, this month, Nicolelis connected more than two brains, either 3-4 rat brains or 3 monkey brains. In these experiments the animals were able to synchronize their brain activity to complete tasks. In the case of the monkeys, they operated an avatar.

Head transplants are also being touted as a near reality. While not as fancy as downloading electrical activity to an avatar or robot, such a transplant might allow an intact head to receive a new body. In this case one might ask who is receiving the transplant. Is the head receiving a body transplant or is the body receiving a head transplant?



All of these experiments and even the movie Self/less interrogate the question, where does the self originate and exist? And can we have a meaningful existence in any way that might be unfamiliar to ourselves? Is living forever a human right as some transhumanist groups might say? Or are we somehow designed by biology or some greater creator to have our bodies and maybe our minds along with or inside those bodies expire?



What we never learn in Self/less, perhaps because it would be too complex to address, is what *exactly* is transferred from Ben Kingsley to Ryan Reynolds’s body? It seems they simply transferred or transplanted an essence and the essence of Ryan Reynolds was held back through suppressive drugs designed by the entrepreneur-inventor Albright. Self/less leaves the viewers to their own devices to grapple with these issues.



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Rommelfanger, K. (2015). Self/less and transplanting (ID)entities. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2015/07/selfless-and-transplanting-identities.html

Why I teach with an English professor

by Krish Sathian, MD, PhD

Dr. Sathian is Professor of Neurology, Rehabilitation Medicine, and Psychology at Emory University, and directs the Neurorehabilitation Program in the Department of Neurology. The recipient of Emory’s 2001 Albert Levy senior faculty award for excellence in scientific research, he is Executive Director of the Atlanta VAMC Rehabilitation R&D Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation and immediate Past President of the American Society of Neurorehabilitation.

Editor's note: The following post is the second of a pair of essays about interdisciplinary teaching we will feature on the blog. Please see its companion piece from last week, Dr. Laura Otis's "Why I teach with a neurologist." It is often said that academic fields are becoming increasingly siloed as specializations become more and more detailed and jargon-filled with each new peer-reviewed paper. The classes co-taught by Professors Otis and Sathian were unique interdisciplinary spaces where students across traditional disciplinary divides were able to wrestle with topics shared by the humanities and sciences: perception, imagination, and art. Is this kind of interdisciplinary inquiry a necessary counterbalance to the siloing of the disciplines? Or could it even be seen as part of the ethical practice of science? Might having more of such classes improve the science literacy of those in the humanities, and keep scientists in touch with the depth of expertise that other fields can contribute (as I have argued in an earlier post)? Should we begin to find ways to institutionalize more of this type of work into the higher education system, or provide more movement between the disciplines? Or is interdisciplinarity merely a fad? Readers: what do you think? 

I consider myself very fortunate to work both as a clinical neurologist in academia, and as a neuroscientist investigating fundamental questions about the brain that may in time have an impact on how we treat people with neurological disorders. My own research over many years has concentrated on studies of perception, but I recently began to study how the brain handles metaphor.

This may seem like quite a jump, but it turns out that sensory and motor regions of the brain are involved not only in the expected sensory and motor functions, but also serve to “ground” metaphors relating to particular sensory or motor processes. For example, when we hear the sentence “She had a rough day,” the part of our brain that is important for judging roughness by touch actually becomes active. This kind of finding supports the idea that metaphors begin as conceptual abstractions from our experience.

Literature, of course, has an abundance of metaphors, as well of sensory images that are evoked by the words on the page. My background in perception had taught me that the experience of imagery depends on activity in much the same brain areas as are relevant for sensory experience, e.g., when one visualizes, the visual cortex, which is necessary for vision, gets engaged. Thus, one can conceive of literary writers as people who have mastered the ability to trigger the neural processes underlying imagery and metaphor (and other literary devices) in the reader, albeit not necessarily with the neuroscientific facts in mind. And of course, I should emphasize that our study of the underlying neural processes is still inchoate.

The Center for Mind, Brain and Culture (CMBC) at Emory University brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine specific issues from multiple perspectives. One of the ways they do this is a call for interdisciplinary course proposals. With my interests in the neuroscience underlying literary images and metaphors and the expertise of Professor Laura Otis in teaching English in relation to cognitive science, it seemed to us that an ideal course to propose would be one that intertwined literary and neuroscientific readings.

The CMBC agreed to sponsor our course, and I can honestly say that the course we ran in 2012 and its successor in 2014 were the most fun courses I have ever been involved in! In both, we had a good mix of students from various aspects of the humanities and sciences, keenly interested in the material, and the classes saw a host of animated discussions from a range of viewpoints. I went into the first course confident that it would be a good one, especially because Professor Otis, while being an expert in literature and its pedagogy, also has a background in neuroscience. I thought, however, that we would have to work very hard to eke out a few intersections between the language of storytelling and poetry on the one hand, and that of cognitive neuroscience on the other. Boy, was I wrong! I was simply blown away by the profusion of connections between disciplines. Professor Otis had a knack for bringing in just the right creative works, and just the right writer-scholars to talk about them, to match up with the relatively fledgling attempts to tackle how the brain works to enable the glorious acts of literary writing, and the consumption of the products of these acts by readers at large. These pairings really made the courses tick.

Based on my experiences, I highly recommend joint teaching of interdisciplinary courses. It takes some thought and care to select the best topics and generate the appropriate blend of approach and content, and of course the right chemistry between the professors, and a willingness of students to be open and participatory. When all these work out, as they miraculously did in our courses, a splendid time can be guaranteed for all, to paraphrase John Lennon.

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Sathian, K. (2015). Why I teach with an English professor. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2015/08/why-i-teach-with-english-professor.html

Why I teach with a neurologist

by Laura Otis, PhD

Dr. Otis is a Professor of English at Emory University. Although she ultimately obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature and now teaches English literature, she holds a BS in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and an MA in Neuroscience, and she worked in research labs for years. She was awarded a MacArthur fellowship for creativity in 2000 and is currently working as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Editor's note: The following post is the first of a pair of short essays about interdisciplinary teaching that will be featured on the blog. Stay tuned next week for Dr. Krish Sathian's "Why I teach with an English professor." It is often said that academic fields are becoming increasingly segregated as specializations develop more jargon and become more detailed with each new peer-reviewed paper. However, the classes co-taught by Professors Otis and Sathian are unique interdisciplinary spaces where students across traditional disciplinary divides are able to wrestle with topics shared by the humanities and sciences: perception, imagination, and art. Is this kind of interdisciplinary inquiry a necessary counterbalance to the segregation of the disciplines? Or even part of the ethical practice of science? Might having more classes like this improve the scientific literacy of those in the humanities, and keep scientists in touch with the depth of expertise that other fields can contribute (as I have argued in an earlier post)? Should we begin to find ways to institutionalize more of this type of work into the higher education system, or provide more movement between the disciplines? Or is interdisciplinarity merely a fad and a buzzword? Readers: what do you think? 

In teaching, there are few things worse than realizing you’ve told your students something wrong. The jolt may come a year, five years down the line, but you can’t issue a retraction. They’ve dispersed to medical schools, where they’re now propagating your error. It’s been thirty years since I studied Neuroscience at UCSF, and a few things have changed since then. The human genome has been sequenced. Scientists analyze data on computers. I try to keep abreast of what’s happening, but this is hard while teaching Victorian literature. In this climate of near-worship for Neuroscience, I worry that I could say anything about the brain, and people would believe me. With a neurologist in the room, this can’t happen.

At Emory University, Krish Sathian and I have taught two courses together: “Images, Metaphors, and the Brain” (spring 2012) and “Language, Literature, and Mental Simulation” (spring 2014). Both times we were blessed with a mix of bright, open-minded graduate students in Neuroscience, Psychology, English, and Comparative Literature as well as some gifted undergraduate Neuroscience majors. Nothing dissolves stereotypes like familiarity, and it did all of us good to exchange ideas with intelligent, well informed people who saw the world differently. Professor Sathian himself was a vital role model for the students in English, since this high-energy person who healed patients, ran a lab, and wrote grants knew a great deal about literature and was eager to learn more. He saw it as related to his work.

In our two courses, we read scientific and literary works that explored creative metaphors and sensory imagery. We studied Dedre Gentner’s “career of metaphor” theory in parallel with Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities with David Kemmerer’s “The Semantics of Space.” I learned the most from the course when the students disagreed, and I think that they did as well. Behavior was good, but people came head to head over the issue of whether science is a cultural narrative or an all-out effort to learn how the world works. In these situations, it was helpful to be teaching with a colleague who is a doctor as well as a scientist. Before coming to class, he had worked for hours in a place where “aphasia” and “paralysis” aren’t just words. Tell a patient at the VA his seizures are cultural constructions, and he’ll tell you something about your mother. Professor Sathian’s clinical experience, as well as his work as an experimentalist, helped those from other fields to appreciate what scientists do.

When I did make a mistake, my colleague from Neurology corrected me tactfully and unhesitatingly. Our aim was to teach, not perform, and our “hybrid” courses on metaphors and imagery have given me some of the best teaching experiences I’ve ever had. I urge everyone in the humanities to try teaching with a scientific colleague. In my experience, scientists are eager to learn from scholars whose critical eyes scan language and culture. Aren’t all of us trying to figure out how the world works?

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Otis, L. (2015). Why I teach with a neurologist. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2015/08/why-i-teach-with-neurologist.html

Meeting ethological needs: Conflicting data on orca longevity in captivity

by Frans de Waal



Editor's note: Frans de Waal, PhD, is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University and the Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He is also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and a member of the AJOB Neuroscience editorial board. His research focuses on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequality aversion, and food-sharing.



de Waal, a leading primatologist, makes an argument here for thinking seriously about the captivity of certain animals such as orcas. Of course, the orca also has a sophisticated mammalian brain. Is the defining criterion of our responsibility to other animals their ecological needs, as de Waal suggests, or is it their cognitive function? What do you think?



There is so much to-do about orcas (killer whales) in captivity, with a drumbeat of voices against humans keeping this species, that it was about time we got some data on longevity. Not that longevity is the only measure to consider with regards to the ethics of keeping these fascinating animals, but since there is the claim out there that orcas in human care live short, stressful lives, there is a need to know the truth.

Source: flickr.com

I am interested in this issue since I support animal keeping for educational and conservation reasons at zoos and aquariums. There are many facilities at which the care for animals is taken very seriously by a dedicated staff. I am not going to defend substandard zoos, but feel there is a place for good zoos that bring urban human populations closer to the animal kingdom and teach the value of wildlife conservation.



Nevertheless, it is clear that some species fare better at zoos than others. Baboons kept on a large island or rock, for example, may be in excellent health, breed successfully, and be able to express many of their natural social behaviors, from squabbling to grooming. Despite the complaint that these animals are not free, there is actually no evidence that they are any less happy or healthy than their wild counterparts. But what about species that cannot express their natural behavior in captivity, such as large birds of prey and vultures, which are prevented from soaring high up in the sky? Zoos have played an invaluable role in preventing the extinction of the California condor, yet putting such a magnificent bird in an aviary still seems far from ideal. This is known as the “ethological needs” argument, named after “ethology,” the study of natural or naturalistic animal (and human) behavior. It is about the expression of species-typical tendencies. A chicken needs to have a surface in which it can scratch and dust bath, a pig needs mud in which it can wallow, and so on.



As an ethologist myself, I am sensitive to this argument, and always wonder which species are so curtailed by captivity in their natural behavior that it applies. Apart from large birds, it may apply to elephants, orcas, other cetaceans, perhaps large felines. How to provide these animals with the appropriate environment? It is much easier to offer a troop of baboons or an otter family a stimulating enclosure that shows off their natural tendencies than a herd of elephants or a pod of dolphins.



Longevity is one way to look at this question. Many primates, for example, live on average considerably longer in captivity than in the wild. For elephants and orcas, however, the same cannot be said. On the contrary, they die prematurely compared to their wild counterparts. This may be due to inadequate care, inadequate environments, or chronic stress. But how solid is this longevity data?



We now have two studies, both published in 2015, intended to answer this question. Unfortunately, they contradict each other. In the Journal of Mammalogy, a study compared Sea World’s orca record with what we know about the same species in the North Pacific. It was found that calf survival to two years of age was better in captivity than in the wild and that overall survival at Sea World has steadily gotten better, probably owing to improved husbandry and veterinary care. The study claims that survival is presently indistinguishable from that of wild populations. A second study, published in Marine Mammal Science, also notes improvement in captive survival, but claims substantial differences in the upper age range. In captivity, only 7% of females get older than 40 years, whereas in the wild this proportion is said to be between 41 and 75%. If true, captivity still negatively affects health, at least physically, but probably also psychologically.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Even if one day we could extend the lives of large cetaceans in captivity, however, this still doesn’t solve the issue of ethological needs. One could still argue that so long as we are unable to provide these animals with a species-appropriate environment in which they can live in large pods, travel distances, and employ their echolocation capacities, it is unethical to keep them. Despite being a zoo supporter, I could live with such a conclusion.



References



Jett, J., & Ventre, J. (2015). Captive killer whale (Orcinus orca) survival. Marine Mammal Science. doi: 10.1111/mms.12225



Robeck, T. R., Willis, K., Scarpuzzi, M. R., & O’Brien, J. K. (2015). Comparisons of life-history parameters between free-ranging and captive killer whale (Orcinus orca) populations for application toward species management. Journal of Mammalogy. doi:10.1093/jmammal/gyv113



Want to cite this post?



De Waal, Frans. (2015). Meeting ethological needs: Conflicting data on orca longevity in captivity. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2015/08/meeting-ethological-needs-conflicting.html