Live Neurons in Art: Components or Collaborators?

In his opening chapter of the biological art compendium “Signs of Life,” Eduardo Kac makes a particularly suggestive comment about the biological sciences in general.  I think this quote has even more significance to neuroscience specifically:



“The extreme difficulty in dealing with very complex biological interactions leads to the simplified treatment of life processes as quantified data that exhibit statistical patterns.  In turn, this can lead to an objectification of life and a disregard for the subjects and their rights.”[1]

From Zachary Weinersmith's

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This claim seems to echo Tom Wolfe's sentiment that scientific progress will lead to the death of the soul [2]: by reducing biological systems down to so many quantities and equations (all accurate within some statistical bounds), have we lost an important intuition about their intrinsic worth?  Is biology really just physical laws, with the same degree of moral importance as the law of gravity?  This reduction of the universe down to scientific law is called “naturalism,” and usually gets brought up during the discussion of free will or in religious contexts.  Here, though, I'd like to discuss naturalism in the context of what it means for the notion of “interests” in general- and consequentially, for ethical systems that are based on “interests.”



Fortunately, my favorite new-media artwork works as a stellar example of this issue.  In the Silent Barrage, a culture of rat neurons is used as part of an interactive robotic art installation.  Audience members walk among the robotic components (which are constantly drawing on sheets of paper), and are observed by overhead cameras.  The video feed from the cameras is translated into a pattern of electrical pulses which stimulate the culture, and the neurons within the culture respond by creating their own electrical activity.  This usually consists of bursts of activity that recruit the entire neural network (similar to epileptic seizures) which can be quieted through certain types of electrical stimulation.  Through the construction of this hybrid mixture of robotics and living neural tissue, the artists and scientists behind Silent Barrage give the audience the impression of walking through the mind of an artist suffering from epileptic seizures, in such a way that the interaction between the audience and the piece itself has the potential to silence these barrages of electrical activity.



The interaction between the artists and the biological tissue in Silent Barrage could potentially be evaluated as a sort of co-authorship: the human artists design the bulk of the piece, and the culture 'designs' (or perhaps 'performs' would be more appropriate) some of the details [3].  However, there are several differences between Silent Barrage and a traditional artistic collaboration.  First, the neural culture is without any sort of (forgive me) “cultural” understanding of the goals of the piece, lacking both the experience and capacity to understand the effect of it's actions in the hearts and minds of the audience.  Secondly, the neural component of Silent Barrage has no existence outside of the piece to pursue it's own interests - it is trapped inside the artwork, more similar to a raw material than a collaborator.

Left: Culture of rat neurons growing on top of a microelectrode array. Photo by Guy Ben-Ary.  Middle: Robotic drawing carriage used by Silent Barrage. Photo by Soyo Lee. Right: Drawing created by Silent Barrage- should the culture itself receive credit for this work?  Photo by Phil Gamblen.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, any interests that the neurons of Silent Barrage have are being engineered to fill a particular need of the piece.  The electrical stimulation protocols used in the first showings of Silent Barrage were designed based on a simple relationship that had been previously observed [4]- the faster stimulation is applied, the less network wide bursting occurs. While living tissue (and the interests that such tissue might be said to have [5]) has been manipulated in several biological artworks [6] that preceded and followed Silent Barrage, unlike bacteria or osteoblasts, neurons are believed to make up the machinery that underlie the interests of morally (or at least legally) important beings- the rats who we aren't allowed to torture, the dogs we aren't allowed to neglect, and the humans that we aren't allowed to deny equality to.



The real issue here is that a system that looks suspiciously like your brain is being engineered to act as part of an artwork.  If we can engineer the interests of a neural system to match our own, does that mean that those interests can be considered our own tools?  And if a neural systems' interests are not just coincidentally equivalent to our own, but designed to be equivalent to our own, are they anything more than tools?  Does it still make sense to call them separate interests, or just extensions of our own? And lastly, if we can somehow convince ourselves that the 'interests' of a biological system are simply extensions of our own interests, what possible moral repercussions could come of our using biological systems in any way we please?



Want to cite this post?



 Zeller-Townson, RT. (2013). Live Neurons in Art: Components or Collaborators? The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on


-->, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2013/02/live-neurons-in-art-components-or.html

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[1] Kac, Eduardo. "Art that Looks You in the Eye: Hybrids, Clones, Mutants, Synthetics, and Transgenics." Signs of Life. Bio Art and beyond (2007): 275-286.

[2]Wolfe, Tom. "Sorry, but your soul just died." Hooking up (1996): 89-109.

[3] Hughes, R. "The semi-living author: post-human creative agency." Architecture and Authorship, T. Anstey, K. Grillner, and R. Hughes, eds.(London, Black Dog Publishing) (2007).

[4] Wagenaar, Daniel A., et al. "Controlling bursting in cortical cultures with closed-loop multi-electrode stimulation." The Journal of neuroscience 25.3 (2005): 680-688.

[5] Varner, Gary E. In nature's interests?: interests, animal rights, and environmental ethics. Oxford University Press, USA, 2002.

[6] Catts, Oron and Zurr, Ionat. Tissue Culture and Art Project. Web 27 Feb 2013  <http://tcaproject.org/>

Uncovering the Neurocognitive Systems for 'Help This Child'

In their article, “Socioeconomic status and the brain: mechanistic insights from human and animal research,” Daniel A. Hackman, Martha J. Farah, and Michael J. Meaney explore how low socioeconomic status (SES) affects underlying cognitive and affective neural systems. They identify and focus on two sets of factors that determine the relationship between SES and cognitive development: (1) the environmental factors or ‘mechanisms’ that demonstrably mediate SES and brain development; and (2) those neurocognitive systems that are most strongly affected by low SES, including language processing and executive function.  They argue that “these findings provide a unique opportunity for understanding how environmental factors can lead to individual differences in brain development, and for improving the programmes and policies that are designed to alleviate SES-related disparities in mental health and academic achievement” [1].

Neuroscience can tell us how SES may affect her brain.

Can it move us to do something about it?

Theoretically, I have no doubt that neuroscience can make a powerful contribution to early childhood development by determining whether and which neurocognitive systems appear to be more extensively affected by low socioeconomic status.

This is, as the authors themselves point out, important work, because understanding which systems are affected can help educators and policy-makers develop programs to target them more directly and successfully. For example, the work of D’Anguilli et. al. demonstrates that low-SES children pay more attention to unattended  stimuli, and are thereby more susceptible to becoming distracted and having a harder time focusing on a given task. [2] A corresponding, corrective strategy would consist in introducing games, lessons and computer-based strategies which explicitly target executive functions – and indeed, just such a set of measures is being used by the Tools of the Mind curriculum, which as of this year is being implemented in 18,000 pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms, in Head Start programs, public schools, and childcare centers across the nation.

Fig. 1: The yellow 'brain development' box represents those neurocognitive systems that are most affected by low SES, and could include 'language processing' and 'executive function'

So far, so good. So what am I worried about?



What do you think? 



I’m not ‘worried’ so much as left wondering about one issue in Hackman et. al.’s review that I would now like to explore, and that I would welcome further discussion about.



My concern relates to the broader relationship between scientific knowledge and our individual and collective moral motivation to do something about an ongoing injustice. Allow me illustrate what I mean using two diagrams adapted from the Hackman et. al. article. The first represents the state of our knowledge regarding the relationship between SES and development, without any concrete neuroscientific understanding of the neurocognitive systems that mediate between them:

Fig. 2: We know that SES affects developmental outcomes,

even if we don't understand the neurocognitive systems that mediate the relationship

The second represents the state of our knowledge regarding the relationship between SES and development, now including our emerging neuroscientific understanding of the neurocognitive systems that mediate between them, outlined in the paper:

Fig. 3: Neuroscience is beginning to elucidate which neurocognitive systems are

most strongly affected by SES, and thereby influence children's developmental outcomes

My question is this: if sociologists and psychologists have already firmly established the relationship between SES, specific environmental mediators, and resulting developmental outcomes, as in Figure 1, (and they have, as the evidence cited by Hackman’s et. al. attests to), then can the addition of a scientific understanding of the intermediary mechanisms in any way enhance or strengthen our practical commitment to improving children’s SES and the corresponding environmental mediators that affect their development?  In other words, if I already know that SES, and specifically prenatal influences, directly affect elements of children’s cognitive and emotional development, do I need to know anything before doing something about it? And will knowing more about it, including understanding the causal sequence mediating the relationship, prompt me to do anything more about it than I was doing before?



Again, as mentioned, I fully recognize and appreciate the potential of neuroscientists and their collaborators to “design of more specific and powerful interventions to prevent and remediate the effects of low childhood SES.” [1] A second, equally essential neuroscientific question to explore is whether certain brain propensities increase the likelihood of individuals' living in low-SES circumstances. Could we say that certain brain propensities correspond to developmental diseases, or to a kind of physical handicap - one that traps people in poverty and decreases their likelihood of attaining a better quality of life?  If so, would this oblige us to take action? These are fundamental questions that need to be explored further. For my part, I'm not sure I agree with the statement that neuroscience can “highlight the importance of policies that shape the broader environments to which families are exposed” with any more clarity or motivational force than our existing knowledge already does. [1]



I am a neurophile, but…

Here’s why I’m slightly skeptical.  To borrow an example from the philosopher Peter Singer, imagine that you’re driving down the street and see a person bleeding profusely from his leg. [3] You could rush in and help this man, but you’re wearing your brand new, $375 J.Crew Ludlow suit jacket, so you think to yourself, ‘Ok, do I leave him there? I mean, it’s terrible, but I guess so, because I don’t want to get blood all over my beautiful jacket.’ If you responded to the situation in this way, we would probably call you a moral monster.

One of these is not like the other. Or...?

Now consider a different case. Imagine that you’re watching your favorite episode of the Walking Dead when a commercial from Care comes on and reminds you that for $375, you could pay for and facilitate 8 healthy births, and thereby help save the lives of several mothers and their babies. Now you think to yourself "Well, I guess it would be good to save those people, but I really just want that jacket." In this case, our general consensus would be that while you're no Mother Theresa, we probably wouldn't want to condemn for being a moral monster. (After all, that jacket is made from 'world class wool'!) So what gives? As Singer pointed out in a series of influential articles, our rational obligation towards the mothers and their newborns should be the same as towards the bleeding man. [3] So how and why do our intuitions differ?

In his article, “From neural ‘is’ to moral ‘ought’: what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology?,” the philosopher Joshua Greene suggests that an evolutionary perspective may help explain the differences in our responses. He proposes, “consider that our ancestors did not evolve in an environment in which total strangers on opposite sides of the world could save each others’ lives by making relatively modest material sacrifices. Consider also that our ancestors did evolve in an environment in which individuals standing face-to-face could save each others’ lives, sometimes only through considerable personal sacrifice. Given all of this, it makes sense that we would have evolved altruistic instincts that direct us to help others in dire need, but mostly when the ones in need are presented in an ‘up-close-and-personal’ way.” [4] According to Greene, this makes a sense of why human beings can be extraordinarily altruistic in their immediate, interpersonal interactions, but still gobsmackingly selfish in their transnational relations.



Unfortunately, our relationship to children in lower-SES environments is closer to the distant pregnant mothers in Singer's analogy than it is to the bleeding stranger right in front us. Few of us interact with low-SES children on a daily basis, and so many of us worry about how they get on in more abstract, theoretical terms. But if this is right, then more information, or even more scientific understanding, will not be enough to move us toward addressing their developmental issues. Rather, we will need to use other kinds of knowledge, such as our emerging understanding of biased moral motivation, to reflectively increase the probability of translating our moral principles into actions. That is, examples like Singer's bleeding stranger tell us something about how our moral motivation works, and we need to use this type of knowledge to try and make low-SES children seem more like the man with the leg wound in our moral imaginations. This would increase the likelihood of our doing something to improve low-SES children's circumstances. One way of achieving this would be to ensure that we interact with low-SES parents and their children on a more regular basis, e.g., by doing something as simple as taking public transportation. This would make us more likely to put our hard-won neuroscience research to use.

____



[1] Hackman, D. A., Farah, M.J., Meaney, M. J., 2010, 'Socioeconomic status and the brain: mechanistic insights from human and animal research,' in Nature 11, Available at https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=bb31177d51&view=att&th=13ad223ce6979971&attid=0.4&disp=inline&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P9-g3MEKF3MHUpOaKNL2td1&sadet=1355272405884&sads=-iGOQ0R2Qyb4_aHrUapR1YuvG1g



[2] D’Angiulli A, Herdman A, Stapells D, Hertzman C. 2002, 'Children’s event-related potentials of auditory selective attention vary with their socioeconomic status.' Neuropsychology 22:293–300.



[3] Singer, P., 1972. 'Famine, affluence, and morality.' Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, 229–243.



[4] Greene, J. 2003. ''From neural 'is' to moral 'ought': what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology?' Nature. Available at: http://www.overcominghateportal.org/uploads/5/4/1/5/5415260/from_neural_is_to_moral_ought.pdf







Want to cite this post? 

Haas, J. Uncovering the Neurocognitive Systems for 'Help This Child'. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/12/uncovering-neurocognitive-systems-for.html