When Neuroethicists Become Labmates

By Timothy Brown and Margaret Thompson

Timothy Brown is a doctoral student and research assistant at the University of Washington (UW). He works with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering's (CSNE) Neuroethics Trust, where he explores the broader moral and societal implications of neural engineering and neural technology use. Through the CSNE’s support, he is also embedded in the UW's BioRobotics Lab, where he investigates issues of autonomy and agency that arise for people with motor disorders who use next-generation, neurally-controlled deep-brain stimulators to manage their symptoms. 

Margaret Thompson is a doctoral student in the BioRobotics Laboratory in the Electrical Engineering department at University of Washington, Seattle; she is also president of the Student Leadership Council at the CSNE. She received her Master’s in Electrical Engineering from University of Washington in 2016 and her Bachelor’s in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College in 2014. She researches side-effect mitigation methods for deep brain stimulation, as well as how human subjects learn to use brain-computer interfaces over months to years at a time. 

Maggie Thompson and Tim Brown are graduate students at the University of Washington—Maggie studies electrical engineering, and Tim studies philosophy (in particular, neuroethics). They are both members of the Biorobotics Laboratory—a multidisciplinary lab investigating the interface between human bodies and machines. Tim serves as the lab’s “embedded ethicist” through the support of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE).




Together, Maggie and Tim work on projects related to deep brain stimulators (or DBS, where electrodes implanted in key areas of the brain apply enough current to treat various disorders) and brain computer interfaces (or BCI, where changes in the brain are read by sensors and used to control a computer system). Their current study collects patient perspectives in “real-time” while they test the next-generation of deep brain stimulators. Their goal is to see how patients relate to their implant and how this relationship changes with different kinds of control over the implant and its parameters. 

At conferences and meetings, people are almost more interested in how Maggie and Tim collaborate than what they collaborate on. After all, there are calls for scientists and engineers to work with humanists but it’s not clear how to get started or what that collaboration looks like. In this post, Maggie and Tim continue their work (i) in a conversation answering some of the common questions people have asked about what it’s like to have an ethicist in the lab, and how to collaborate with one.

1. What were your hopes for the collaboration before you started? What concerns did you have beforehand? 

Tim Brown (TEB): When I started working with the lab, several students were working on the security of brain-computer interfaces (ii) and adaptive control of deep-brain stimulators (iii). I hoped that I would be able to contribute to one of these projects, but I would have considered myself lucky just to be able to sit in lab meetings. I was concerned at first that everyone in the lab would consider me too much of an outsider to understand their high-level discussions. I was also worried that I wouldn’t be able to explain why my work was relevant or why I should be allowed to attend lab meetings.  

Maggie Thompson (MCT): These were the same concerns that I had in joining the team despite my shared background in engineering. It's always a little daunting to join a new team. When I joined, I was excited to look at questions like "how can the philosophy and ethics work strengthen the engineering work?" and vice versa.  

One concern has been balancing my engineering research interests with this collaboration. Doctoral programs will consume all of your work, social, and personal time if given the chance, and so to carve out time for a project like this was a challenge. Another concern I had was that adding an ethics collaboration made me seem too "touchy-feely," or somehow softened my engineering in a detrimental way. This was a heightened concern since I'm a woman in a male-dominated field, so I already felt pressure to validate my technical skills without adding a humanities focus into the mix. I tried to remind myself that this collaboration would help me produce a higher quality system; if other researchers can't appreciate the merit in that, then they are the ones who need recalibrating.  

TEB: My experience is the converse of Maggie’s. Some philosophers discourage taking an empirical approach to philosophical problems—they prefer to leave data collection and analysis to the scientists. Some philosophers, then, worry that our work is not philosophy. As a person of color, this is particularly damning: many philosophers of color worry about being perceived as “real” philosophers, and some struggle to find a place in the academy (iv). But if our work is “too touchy-feely” to be engineering and “too empirical” to be philosophy, where does that leave us?   

Tim and Maggie working together in the BioRobotics lab.

2. How does your collaboration work on a daily basis? What are your main "modes of operation," or features that you think keep the collaboration running smoothly? 

MCT: Tim and I work as Ph.D. students under the program requirements of our respective departments. We each have unique research goals and our own dissertations to write. But there is overlap in our research questions, and some of Tim's research requires asking questions during experimental testing of our neural devices. Similarly, I have questions that can't be answered without tools from Tim's domain. So periodically, we meet to discuss this crossover and identify a plan of attack to answer these questions that rely on one-another's research. Between these meetings, we share papers, design and execute experiments, review data, and write articles together.  

There's no magic; Tim and I are just willing to peel time away from our individual research interests and lend it to this collaborative work. Since I'm not as familiar with some subfields that Tim works in, when he sends me a paper to read, I have to recognize that it will take some time for me to fully appreciate it, and there's no way around that. But by lending each other time for reading and discussion, we build this shared understanding for each other's work that ultimately enriches the quality of work that we produce together (v). It's definitely a process of growing your collaboration together, so it's good to start simple with a couple of shared questions and build from there.  

TEB: This is extremely important, I think. There is no a magic formula that makes this kind of collaboration work. We both have our own interests and areas of expertise and we both contribute what we can when we can. I don’t think this is any different from how labs work in general. In our case, I contribute skills and knowledge from the humanities, but I also contribute skills I picked up as a kid tinkering with computers.  

MCT: Tim also has a desk in our lab, which is important for a few reasons. First, being able to turn around and brainstorm with each other when we’re working is much more spontaneous and convenient than drafting an email every time we individually think of something. More information gets communicated and in a more organic way.  

Second, regardless of which department we are coming from, it’s important that we are mutually concerned with things like desk space issues, lab website management, how meetings are scheduled, etc. These unglamorous tasks are a place to connect in terms of shared effort. You probably all want a similar outcome such as more desk space, a clean lab environment, an effective website, etc., but some amount of time and effort has to be put in to get there. When you all work on those things, you can't help but become more of a team. Practicing shared effort is where your collaboration grows.



TEB: Yes. Unfortunately, folks in the humanities worry that they don’t have anything to contribute to a laboratory, or that they will not become a part of the community. Conversely, folks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields say that they don’t know how to navigate ethical issues, or that ethics is best left to “experts.” But Maggie has personal experience thinking about the social justice implications of how people use technology at large. So, it only makes sense that she can recognize the ethical problems with the technology that she works on. And so another important part of keeping the collaboration alive is pushing through imposter syndrome and just contributing whatever we can to it.  

Close contact is the most important feature of my collaboration with my labmates. I try to meet with my labmates regularly, maintain a presence in the lab, and stay as engaged as possible. I also try make myself accountable to my labmates, and I encourage them to do the same for me. We do this by working on projects together—where I hold Maggie accountable to recent neuroethical concerns, she holds me accountable to real-world uses of BCIs.  

Some argue that when ethicists collaborate with scientists or engineers, they ought to maintain a “critical distance” from them to avoid being co-opted and used to “rubber stamp” the lab’s activities (vi). I think co-optation, however, is just the sign of a one-sided, distant relationship. After all, good colleagues don't just use one another as tokens, they take each other’s interests, projects, and methods seriously. I think we try to do that for one another, and that’s a large part of why our collaboration works. 

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

3. What do you think shows success in your collaboration? What outcomes have been good for you individually, the continuing collaboration, or both? 

TEB: I think our success can be described in terms of the unique skills and ideas we’ve developed as researchers. I find it easier to write and talk about neural technology now that I’ve seen so many people using and investigating it first-hand. Maggie is great at describing the technologies we use and the design of our experiments using them—so I’ve learned a great deal from her.  

I now feel confident doing empirical research in a multidisciplinary setting. Philosophers generally don’t pick up any of these skills in graduate school: we just learn to read texts closely and develop arguments. This collaboration has made my philosophical work better in that I don’t just work from thought-experiments. These empirical research skills also put me in a better place to “pull my weight” in the lab.  

MCT: A lot of researchers are interested in what we're doing and want to know recommendations for starting similar collaborations with their own teams. I think a lot of people recognize our type of work and collaboration as valuable even if they haven't participated in it themselves. It also gets cited as a positive aspect of our work by grant reviewers, and their opinions carry a lot of weight.  

This collaboration has helped me personally in a couple of ways. I've been able to better motivate our pursuit for neural technology. Having ethical considerations in the mix means more than just saying "this is a technical improvement," it means considering richer aspects of improvement that might be different from my preconceptions as an able-bodied engineer. I'm also gaining skills for working on multidisciplinary teams—and this isn't just the type of multidisciplinary teams where engineers talk to scientists, it's bridging larger gaps that a lot of engineers or scientists haven't had the opportunity to work across before. 

Tim and Maggie will continue this conversation later this year in a paper where they will offer concrete recommendations for successful embedded ethics efforts. By reflecting on their collaborative experience, they aim to inspire and embolden other researchers to implement similar embedded ethics approaches within their own area of study. They will also continue their research on Brain Computer Interfaces and Deep Brain Stimulators in their respective dissertations. While Maggie’s dissertation will develop methods for side-effect mitigation in closed-loop deep–brain stimulation, Tim’s dissertation will explore how different methods of controlling a deep brain stimulator effect the user’s feelings of identity, autonomy, and agency. They both anticipate graduating from their doctoral programs (Electrical Engineering and Philosophy, respectively) in 2018. 

References 

i) T Brown, M C Thompson, “When Neuroethicists Become Labmates: Obstacles, Recommendations, and (Non-)Metrics for Success,” International Neuroethics Society Annual Meeting, 2016. 

ii) Bonaci, T, J Herron, C Matlack, and H J Chizeck. “Securing the Exocortex: a Twenty-First Century Cybernetics Challenge.” 2014 IEEE Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century (21CW), 2014. 

iii) Herron, J, and H J Chizeck. “Prototype Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation Systems Inspired by Norbert Wiener,” 2014 IEEE Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century (21CW), 2014 

iv) Dotson, Kristie. “How Is the Paper Philosophy?.” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (December 30, 2011). 

v) Campo-Englestein, Lisa, and Sarah B Rodriguez. “Two Chicks in a Lab with Eggs.” The Hastings Center Report 41, no. 3 (May 1, 2011): 21–23. 

vi) Barnard, D. “Reflections of a Reluctant Clinical Ethicist: Ethics Consultation and the Collapse of Critical Distance.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 1992.

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Brown, T and Thompson, M. (2017). When Neuroethicists Become Labmates. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2017/02/when-neuroethicists-become-labmates.html

The 2016 Kavli Futures Symposium: Ethical foundations of Novel Neurotechnologies: Identity, Agency and Normality

By Sean Batir (1), Rafael Yuste (1), Sara Goering (2), and Laura Specker Sullivan (2)

Image from Kavli Futures Symposium

(1) Neurotechnology Center, Kavli Institute of Brain Science, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027

(2) Department of Philosophy, and Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195

Detailed biographies for each author are located at the end of this post

Often described as the “two cultures,” few would deny the divide between the humanities and the sciences. This divide must be broken down if humanistic progress is to be made in the future of transformative technologies. The 2016 Kavli Futures Symposium held by Dr. Rafael Yuste and Dr. Sara Goering at the Neurotechnology Center of Columbia University addressed the divide between the humanities and sciences by curating an interdisciplinary dialogue between leading neuroscientists, neural engineers, and bioethicists across three broad topics of conversation. These three topics include conversations on identity and mind reading, agency and brain stimulation, and definitions of normality in the context of brain enhancement. The message of such an event is clear: dialogue between neurotechnology and ethics is necessary because the novel neurotechnologies are poised to generate a profound transformation in our society.

With the emergence of technology that can read the brain’s patterns at an intimate level, questions arose about the implications for how these methods could reveal the core of human identity – the mind. Jack Gallant, from UC Berkeley, reported on a neural decoder that can identify the visual imagery used by human subjects (1). As subjects in Gallant’s studies watched videos, the decoder determined how to identify which videos they were watching based on fMRI data. Gallant is convinced that “technologically, ubiquitous non-invasive brain decoding will happen. The only way that’s not going to happen is if society stops funding science and technology.”

Other panelists at the symposium shared Gallant’s confidence in the advent of technology that can decode the content of mental activity, and discussed how motor intentions can be decoded and used to control external objects, like a computer cursor or robotic arm. For instance, Miguel Nicolelis from Duke University discussed a Brain Net that merged neural commands from the brains of three monkeys “into a collective effort responsible for moving a virtual arm.” As the leader of one of the laboratories at the forefront of improving brain computer interfaces for prosthetic control, Nicolelis raised the question of whether such technologies “should be used for military applications.” Beyond specialized use, Nicolelis expressed concern that access to new technologies could be limited – who will be using brain decoders or multiple brain machine interfaces, and why?

Neural technologies that access our internal mental processes may have the potential to shift our understanding of human identity and our sense of ourselves as individual agents. In thinking about identity, philosopher Francoise Baylis of Dalhousie University discussed neuromodulation devices, invoking deep brain stimulation treatments (DBS) as an example. She stated, “DBS is not a challenge or threat to identity. I think people are conflating changes in personality with changes in personal identity. I do not think these are the same… at the end of the day, identity rests in memory, belonging, and recognition.” Baylis argued that our identities are always dynamic and relational, and neural technologies are another way that our relational identities can shift, without threatening who we are. Still, some felt that neural devices may call into question our sense of agency and responsibility for our actions. In considering the issues raised during this panel, Patricia Churchland, from UCSD, emphasized that in 15 sensational accounts of the limits that new technologies will impose on free choice and responsibility for action, she stated that a key question about new neurotechnologies is: “What will it do for us?” There is a need for a balanced approach between speculation about future possibilities, reflection about what science and technology are already doing, and how this will affect society in the short term.

Since sophisticated brain stimulation technologies are already capable of eliciting complex behaviors in lower mammals, ethicists discussed an array of concerns related to agency: how we can know whether our actions and behaviors actually result from our own intentions when adaptive neural devices interact with our brains? Pim Haselager of Radboud University explored our “sense of agency” in experiments designed to separate our belief in our agency from our actual causal efficacy in acting (2). His work suggests that “the harder you work, the more agency you feel,” and he notes that maintaining a strong sense of agency while using a BCI may be linked to a relatively high level of effort on the part of user. Haselager described the sense of agency as multi-faceted – while we are learning more about the dimensions of agency, interpersonal and psychosocial issues are still emerging with neurotechnological research. Ed Boyden from MIT, whose laboratory is developing tools for mapping and controlling the brain through optogenetics, continued the discourse surrounding the multifaceted nature of agency, by questioning, “Can detailed models of an individual’s [mental] traits be reconstructed to the point in which simulation could be possible?” He suggested that as the ability to probe neural circuits expands, we will face increasingly complex questions about ourselves and our priorities. If a human-like simulation could be developed, would it possess the same internal dilemma of agency that persists in any decision-making human?

Leigh Hochberg, from Brown University, whose laboratory focuses on brain computer interfaces for paraplegic patients and the clinical trials of BrainGate technology, suggested that how and why privacy of neural data is ascertained depends on what we think is in the data – what does it tell us? This affects how he assesses risk and benefit in his own work – in a trial with a small number of participants, clinical data might be easily identifiable. This requires what Hochberg described as an “extraordinary consent process.” With evidence of the safety and efficacy of BCIs, increasing numbers of participants in BCI clinical trials and changes to consent requirements, more thinking is needed about how neural data and security are handled. Finally, Martha Farah, from the University of Pennsylvania, raised important conceptual questions about agency. She proposed that agency is ethically significant because it is necessary for freedom and autonomy, which underlie commonsense notions of moral responsibility. The concern with neurotechnology and agency is not whether an intervention is “in the head,” but whether it is quantitatively different from preceding technologies, like pharmaceuticals – does it allow for drastically more control over individuals and their agency? Farah suggested that new neural technology might allow for more fine-grained control of human thoughts and behavior, a possibility that raises economic and regulatory issues in the short term, equality and opportunity questions in the medium term, and existential questions about humanity in the long term.

The sheer existence of mind and brain enhancing technologies belies a tenuous and fundamental assumption that both ethicists and neuroscientists believe should be addressed: What exactly does it mean to be normal, and is achieving normality a reasonable aim? Blaise Aguera from Google opened the floor, starting a discussion about gender as an instance of the social tendency to impose a structure of normality (e.g., binary genders) when a much wider array of gendered possibilities is available – not even just on a spectrum, but across a “a multidimensional vectorial space.” Neural technologies should not inadvertently be designed in ways that exacerbate existing biases such as gender or limited appreciation for the diversity of modes of being in the world. Rather, Aguera asserted that “those of us who create these systems” of human enhancement should “explore a deontology” with “something like science, wellbeing, equity, freedom, and progress” as initial guiding principles. Polina Anikeeva at MIT then shared her work on new devices that match the flexible material properties of the brain, explaining her motivation to make devices less invasive because an “ethical implication is that when we introduce a rigid device, then we destroy the surrounding tissue,” creating glial scars that “don’t interact the same way as neurons do.” Her work shows how even upstream material design of electrodes for neural technology may have a significant impact on the end-user’s experience of the technology

Gregor Wolbring from the University of Calgary expanded the conversation on normality and enhancement to address “ability privilege,” which is the idea that “individuals who enjoy the advantages are unwilling to give up their advantages,” because for many people the judgment of abilities is intrinsic to one’s self-identity and security. He posed questions regarding how we determine ability expectations, and how those expectations alter the treatment of people whose bodies are not typical. Will disabled people want neurotechnologies? Perhaps, if they are understood as tools to achieve well-being, rather than as ways to “fix” people. When asked about the role of neuroprosthetics in the disability world, Wolbring expressed “Tool, yes. Identity, no.” David Wasserman from NIH turned the conversation to neurodiversity, and the movement to reframe some neuroatypical forms of processing as forms of valuable diversity. Such individuals may not need medical technology, but better social accommodation. Thus, Wasserman argued for a more pecuniary focus, emphasizing “more funding ought to be given to…biomedical research that would increase the flourishing” of people living with various neuroatypical conditions. Wasserman suggests that such research should be less focused on medical “fixes”, even though the public tends to be moved by research justifications focused on medical advancement. This latter point was confirmed by Gallant, who noted that “while scientists do a bad job of explaining how science works, the public knows they get sick, and they go to the hospital. This is why the NIH budget is 10 times greater than NSF….medicalizing research has the good effect of attracting funding to biomedical research.” Equipped with this knowledge, a slightly clearer picture begins to emerge, where research at the frontiers of neurotechnology may be forced to address normalization in a medical context for the sake of funding further research, unless funding structures change.

An open discussion held at the end of the Kavli Futures Symposium with all speakers and members of the NIH BRAIN Neuroethics Workgroup synthesized separate kernels of knowledge shared throughout the event. This included a sense of urgency for funding ethical and legal work in order to guide the development of new technologies that have the capacity to radically transform the human experience. There is a need to ensure that multiple stakeholders, including scientists, disabled people, members of the general public, and ethicists work together to consider the ethical aspects of scientific and technological developments. These ethical aspects are clearest in the short term, such as issues about funding priorities, institutional space for ethics, translational goals, and social support for individuals using novel technologies. Long-term questions can also be raised, including the value of preserving the separateness of individuals with private mental space, the potential for combining consciousness toward shared tasks, and the significance of potential enhancements that radically alter what we can directly control with our brains.

By exploring the collective web of thought that connects the humanities and the sciences, several profound issues were identified. Attending to these issues should galvanize the relevant public and private entities to attend more fully to the integration of neurotechnological research with human values.

Author Biographies

Rafael Yuste is a professor of biological sciences and neuroscience at Columbia University. Yuste is interested in understanding the function and pathology of the cerebral cortex, using calcium imaging and optogenetics to “break the code” and decipher the communication between groups of neurons. Yuste has obtained many awards for his work, including those from the New York City Mayor, the Society for Neuroscience and the National Institutes of Health’s Director. He is a member of Spain’s Royal Academies of Science and Medicine. Yuste also led the researchers who proposed the Brain Activity Map, precursor to the BRAIN initiative, and is currently involved in helping to launch a global BRAIN project and a Neuroethical Guidelines Commission.  He was born in Madrid, where he obtained his medical degree at the Universidad Autónoma. He then joined Sydney Brenner's laboratory in Cambridge, UK. He engaged in Ph.D. study with Larry Katz in Torsten Wiesel’s laboratory at Rockefeller University and was a postdoctoral student of David Tank at Bell Labs. In 2005, he became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Circuits. Since 2014, he serves as director of the Neurotechnology Center at Columbia.

Sean Batir is currently a PhD candidate rotating the Dr. Rafael Yuste's laboratory. Previously, he helped co-found two companies in the Bay Area and Boston that developed inconspicuous wearable devices and augmented reality. He also worked as a software developer at Oracle Corporation, creating unified archives that could deploy cloud-enabled databases in a virtual zone and web-based applications that enabled user-friendly visualization of Oracle Supercluster system features. Academically, he earned his M.Res in Bioengineering at the Imperial College of London, in Dr. Simon Schultz's Neural Coding lab.  He developed a new method for complex spike classification in the cerebellum. Prior to his Master's work, Sean studied optogenetic interrogation of the amygdala-hippocampal circuit and  contributed to the automated patch clamping device developed in Dr. Ed Boyden's Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT. As a SENS Summer Research Fellow at the Buck Institute of Aging, Sean also characterized therapeutic effects of lithium as a tentative treatment to Parkinson's disease. Sean is driven to develop transformative technologies that redefine what it means to be human. He believes that innovation occurs through interdisciplinary dialogue, both within academia and outside of it, and seeks to facilitate interactions that drive creation.

Laura Specker Sullivan is a postdoctoral fellow in neuroethics at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, University of Washington. Her position is jointly held with the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. She conducts conceptual research on issues in practical ethics relating to the justification and goals of biomedical practices as well as empirical research on stakeholder attitudes and perceptions towards emerging technologies such as brain-computer interfaces. Her work often takes a cross-cultural approach, focusing on Japanese and Buddhist perspectives. She received her PhD from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2015.

Sara Goering is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle, and affiliated with the Program on Values and the Disability Studies Program. She leads the ethics thrust at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.

References



1. Naselaris et al. 2015. A voxel-wise encoding model for early visual areas decodes mental images of remembered scenes. Neuroimage 105(15): 215-228.



2. Haselager, W.F.G. 2013. Did I do that? Brain-Computer Interfacing and the sense of agency. Minds and Machines 23(3): 405-418.



Want to cite this post?



Batir S, Yuste R, Goering S, and Specker Sullivan L. (2016). The 2016 Kavli Futures Symposium: Ethical foundations of Novel Neurotechnologies: Identity, Agency and Normality. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2016/11/the-2016-kavli-futures-symposium_14.htm