Neurosexism and Single-Sex Education (or support your local ACLU)

"N" is for Neurosexism

Twenty or thirty years ago, single-sex education for girls was a feminist clause célèbre. However, beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people began to worry that boys were “underperforming” in school and in life (an idea nicknamed “the boys’ crisis” by the popular press). The media framing of the boys’ crisis has been critiqued on a number of fronts – specifically, critics have pointed out that both girls and boys are performing better in school than in the past and that the difference in educational achievement between white and middle-class students and low-income and minority students is far more pronounced than the difference between female and male students (see a 2008 report from the American Association of University Women).

However, despite these critiques, cultural commentators began to advocate for single-sex education in public schools as a solution to the boys’ crisis. Commentators like Michael Gurian (author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently!) and Leonard Sax (founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and author of Why Gender Matters) argued that boys’ and girls’ brains develop differently, so boys and girls should be separated in school and should receive education targeted to their specific neuro-developmental patterns and mental strengths.

The Growth of Single-Sex Education

Apparently, Gurian and Sax were very convincing (and they were peddling what people wanted to hear). In 2006, the U.S. Department of Education relaxed restrictions against single-sex education in public schools. According to estimates, in 2002, only about a dozen public schools were offering single-sex classes. Today, an estimated 500 public schools in the U.S. now offer at least some single-sex classes (public schools are required to allow parents to opt-out of single-sex classes) (AP).

An estimated 500 public schools

now offer single-sex classes

For a recent article, two AP reporters visited classrooms at Middleton Heights Elementary, a public school in Idaho that offers single-sex classes. According to the reporters, “In the single-sex classes, teachers use microphones that allow them to electronically adjust the tone of their voice to match the level that research suggests is best for boys. When preparing for a test, the boys may go for a run, or engage in some other activity, while the girls are more likely to do calming exercises, such as yoga…They learn the same curriculum, they still lunch and play at recess together, but the differences in their learning environments are apparent, from the blue chalkboards in the boy classrooms, to the red paper hearts that decorated the wall of one of the girl's classrooms.”

Neurosexism and Single-Sex Education

Despite the claims of Gurian and Sax, the neuroscience research simply doesn’t support the idea that boys have one type of brain and neuro-developmental pattern and girls have another type of brain and neuro-developmental pattern and that these two types are so different from each other that it makes sense to segregate boys and girls into different classes.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

In her excellent book, Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine deconstructs the neuroscience claims made by Gurian, Sax and others in support of single-sex education (see especially Chapter 14). To give just one example from Fine: according to Fine, Sax claims that in boys and young children, emotion is processed in the amygdala with few connections to the cerebral cortex, while in older girls, the amygdala is richly connected to the cerebral cortex. As a result, Sax suggests two different strategies for English teachers: teachers are encouraged to ask older girls to reflect on the feelings and motivations of a story’s protagonist; while Sax writes approvingly of a “boy-friendly” class in which the boys were encouraged to read The Lord of the Flies not with an eye for plot or character development, but so as to be able to construct a map of the island. Yet, according to Fine, Sax’s claims about the lack of connections between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex in boys is based on one small neuro-imaging study in which children started passively at fearful faces (they weren’t asked to talk about what they were feeling and brain activity was not even measured in many of the brain areas involved in emotion and language processing) (Fine 2010 pages 163-164).

Linguistics professor Mark Liberman has also deconstructed a number of Sax’s claims in detail on his blog. Summarizing Sax’s arguments, Liberman writes: “Science is sometimes on his side, sometimes neutral or equivocal, and sometimes against him. He picks the results that fit his agenda, ignoring those that don't; and all too often, he misunderstands, exaggerates or misrepresents the results that he presents.”

Pushing Back: the American Council for CoEducational Schooling and the American Civil Liberties Union

Become a card-carrying member

of the ACLU

Photo by Vociferous

Recently, a number of academics have begun to push back against the campaign for single-sex education. A group (of mostly psychologists) founded an organization, the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, to advocate for coeducation. In 2011, a number of those involved in the group also published an extensive report on single-sex education in Science (“The Pseudoscienceof Single-Sex Schooling” by Halpern et al.) Recently, two of the co-authors, Rebecca Bigler and Lise Eliot, summarized some of the main points of the report for a blog on the Washington Post. They make five main points: 1) the neuroscience research doesn’t support the claim that boys and girls learn differently; 2) decades of national and international education research has found that single-sex education doesn’t improve educational outcomes; 3) gender segregation increases gender stereotyping and prejudice; 4) children in gender-segregated environments develop increasingly narrow skill sets and interests; and, 5) gender segregation reduces the opportunities for boys and girls to learn from each other. They conclude by stating, “Rather than segregating boys and girls during this important developmental time, schools should take better advantage of coeducation to model the truly egalitarian society that we hope for their future.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been pushing back against single-sex education for years. In May they launched a campaign called “Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes,” and sent demand letters to school districts in six states insisting that the districts takes steps to end single-sex programs that rely on and promote harmful sex stereotypes.

Call to Action: Neuroscientists and Ethical Responsibility

Co-educational cuteness: school children

at the Wilmington Fire Department, DE

Picture by Timothy Wildey

Some neuroscientists are involved with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling – Lise Eliot is a neuroscientist and author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps – and What We Can Do About It. But she is the only neuroscientist on the eight member board (the rest are psychologists). I also noticed that there are no neuroscientists on their list of members (again, most appear to be psychologists). No doubt this is because the organization was started by psychologists who naturally reached out to their friends and colleagues. However, I strongly encourage neuroscientists to think about becoming members and getting involved in the organization – on their website, they state, “for information on becoming a member of the American Council of CoEducational Schooling, please e-mail us at membership@coedschools.org.”

Because the push for single-sex education has relied so heavily on the use (and misuse) of neuroscience data, I think neuroscientists have a particular power (and perhaps ethical responsibility?) to influence this debate. In regards to research about the brains of boys and girls, policymakers, the media, and members of the general public are more likely to listen to neuroscientists than to women’s studies scholars (or even psychologists).

In general, I would encourage neuroscientists to consider responsibly engaging with the public and the media about this issue. Or, at least donate to the ACLU.

Want to cite this
post?

Gupta, K. (2012). Neurosexism and Single-Sex Education (or support your local ACLU). The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from

http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/07/neurosexism-and-single-sex-education-or.html

Kathinka Evers: On 'Responsible Neuroethics' and Neuro-rubbish

In March 2012, Roger Scruton published an article in The Spectator entitled ‘Brain Drain,’ in which he lamented the fact that traditionally humanistic disciplines are increasingly taking neuroscientific findings into account. He characterized the phenomenon as one of “neuroenvy,” - with humanists simply jumping onto the neuroscience bandwagon - and argued that when scholars in the humanities “add the prefix ‘neuro’ to their studies, we should expect their researches to be nonsense.” [1] My first thought was, ‘Oh, for the love of…’

Actually, we prefer the term 'neuro-rubbish.'

Fortunately, just as I was shaking my head over Scruton’s article, I came across a response by Swedish philosopher Pär Segerdahl, who cited his colleague, Kathinka Evers, as someone whose work serves as a perfect counterexample to Scruton’s point of view. Segerdahl described Evers as a philosopher committed to “a responsible form of neuroethics: one that does not translate ethics into neuro-jargon, but sees neuroscientific findings about the brain as a philosophical challenge to understand and clarify, very often in opposition to the temptation of jargon.” [2] Needless to say, I was intrigued.

Less drama, more research.

Picture via www.dixitciencia.com

Evers is a senior researcher at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics at Uppsala University, and focuses on the neural basis of consciousness. She recently published a book entitled Neuroethics: When Matter Awakens in French (2009) and Spanish (2011), and is currently working on an English edition of the text. She draws on her research to defend what she sees as a richer conception of neuroethics, and to present her hopes for future developments in the field. As I turned to her work, I wondered, ‘Can her position provide an adequate response to Scruton’s critical point of view?”



Evers is a strong proponent of what she identifies as ‘fundamental’ neuroethics. Broadly speaking, the discipline of neuroethics can be divided into two parts: ‘fundamental’ and ‘applied’ neuroethics. ‘Fundamental’ neuroethics aims to understand how brain structures shape the nature of human morality. ‘Applied’ neuroethics examines the ethical implications of technological advances and clinical practices within the neurosciences. Evers argues that fundamental neuroethics has generally been underrepresented in the field, despite the fact that it “provides applied neuroethics with the theoretical foundations needed to address ethical problems of applying neurological science.” [4]



Standing in strong opposition to Scruton, Evers believes that a theoretically well-grounded mode of neuroethics is certainly possible. When asked about the ‘Brain Drain’ article, she remarked, “contemporary neuroscience can enrich numerous areas of social science. But the reverse is also true. The brain is largely the result of socio-cultural influences. Understanding the brain also involves understanding its embodiment in a social context. The social and neurobiological perspectives dynamically interact in our development of a deeper understanding of the human mind, of consciousness, and of human identity.” [5] For Evers, neuroethics must be undertaken in the spirit of "joint responsibility," involving, in order:

1. Empirical research


2. Philosophical analysis of key concepts (e.g. 'consciousness')


3. Evaluation of concrete ethical issues concerning technological applications and clinical practices [6]

On these grounds, I believe that Evers undoubtedly provides a level-headed and compelling response to Scruton’s treatment of ‘neuro-disciplines.’

Via books.google.com

However, I would like to press Evers on two points. First, while it is true that the term ‘neuroethics’ is typically used to refer to the narrower sub-discipline of applied neuroethics, many of the issues she hopes to emphasize - including consciousness, personal identity and moral judgment - are, in fact, being studied in a systematic way, albeit under different disciplinary headings, i.e.,  ‘philosophy of mind’ and ‘moral psychology.’ For example, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s Moral Psychology is a standard in contemporary philosophy and discusses topics ranging from  the evolution of morality to neuroscientific analyses of a number of brain disorders. Rather than suggest that fundamental neuroethics is undervalued, then, Evers’ criticism should focus on the need for more substantive dialogue between scholars focusing on philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and neuroethics, respectively.



Second, I would like to put pressure on Evers’ suggestion that fundamental neuroethics constitutes a necessary foundation for applied neuroethical analysis. Of course, as philosophers and scientists, we aim to arrive at sound theories of the brain and the mind, at accounts of consciousness and free will, and so on. But these theories and the ethical implications of technological and clinical developments are not as conditionally related as Evers suggests they are. Rather, they are and ought to be pursued in parallel: we can, for example, study the neural structures underpinning human sexuality while also considering the potentially harmful implications that projected neuro-technological interventions may have on our understanding of certain sexual disorders. [6] For this reason, I disagree with Evers’ statement that “ethical discussions can precede neither scientific nor philosophical interpretation.” [5]



That said, I believe Evers would be well-situated to address some of the fears regarding advancement in neuroscience and neuroethics – fears that almost certainly underlie positions such as the one Scruton presents in ‘Brain Drain.’ As Evers has noted, “it is not uncommon for philosophers to take a rather defensive position against neuroscientific attempts to enter philosophical domains.” [4] I agree, and suggest that the next question to be addressed is, ‘Why? Why do so many philosophers and non-philosophers have such an adverse reaction to neuroscience?’ Genuinely understanding the nature of these fears would be a valuable step towards introducing these thinkers to the Great Brain Debate.



----------------------------------------

Want to cite this post?


Hass, J. (2012). Kathinka Evers: On 'Responsible Neuroethics' and Neuro-rubbish. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from

http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/07/kathinka-evers-on-responsible.html

[1] Scruton, R., "Brain Drain" in The Spectator, March 17, 2012.

[2] Segerdahl, P., 'Can Neuroscience Modernize Human Self-Understanding, 'The Ethics Blog, May 17, 2012.

[3] Evers, K. 'Towards a Philosophy for Neuroethics," in Science and Society, Vol. 8, 2007, 48.

[4] Segerdahl, P., 'Interview with Kathinka Evers, 'The Ethics Blog, June 5, 2012.

[5] Evers, K., 'Neuroethics: A Philosophical Challenge," in American Journal of Bioethics Vol. 5 (2), March/April 2005, 31.

[6]Gupta, Kristina. 2012. Protecting Sexual Diversity: Rethinking the Use of Neurotechnological Interventions to Alter Sexuality. AJOB Neuroscience, 3(3): 24 - 28.

What’s in a Name?: DSM Criteria and Addiction

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” This is the famous question posed by Juliet in the immortalized balcony scene.  And while Shakespeare could afford to question the idea, patients with mental disorders, scientists who study the disorders, and the insurance agents that fund the aid have not yet found a way to do without names. In a recent interview, Steven Hyman puts this sentiment in his own words: “Classifications are, in the end, cognitive schemata that we impose on data in order to organize and manipulate it. Many disorders are better represented for scientific purposes, but also for setting rational thresholds for treatments as continuous quantitative dimensions.”

Image of Dr. Hyman: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/hyman_release/

Coinciding with the 2nd Annual Neuroethics Award, several staff members of Emory’s Center for Ethics interviewed Dr. Steven Hyman,
the esteemed Director of the Broad Institute Stanley Center for
Psychiatric Research and former provost from Harvard who is a part of
the committee for the DSM-5,
among his many prestigious positions. In one year, the fifth edition of
the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) will be
released. It has been twelve years since the last edition was
published. In the past few months, however, the committee organizing the
DSM has experienced much pressure from many concerned parties. Of
course, when there is such a negative reaction, it is important to
remember the important functions that the DSM plays. Ultimately, these
naming guidelines provide a standardized way for clinicians and patients
to cooperate.

Dr. Hyman gave us a better understanding about the thought processes for decisions, such as the likely choice of the DSM-5 recognizing gambling as a behavioral addiction. “The core of addiction is an inability to control use, and that’s often best described as continued use despite potently negative consequences. For example, a person may continue to drink despite his spouse leaving and being threatened with being fired from his job.”

Image: freedigitalphotos.net

“Observers and clinicians have made a very strong case that gambling – as people go form being a social drinker to an alcoholic compulsive drinker, people can go from being a recreational gambler to being a compulsive one despite the negative consequences of stealing your kid’s college money, losing it on roulette, and being unable to make the mortgage payment.” He explained the neurological basis of this addiction by saying, “In neuroscience, we now recognize the compulsion that is related to drug use involves brain reward circuits, and the neurotransmitter dopamine and failures of the prefrontal cortex to exert top-down negative control on these behaviors.” He admits that he does not personally believe that the research regarding gambling and brain circuitry is very robust, but he still believes that the evidence is adequate for it to be defined in the DSM-5.

Dr. Hyman and the DSM-5 committee still grapple with many difficult questions. One of the most important questions being, “Where does it stop?” He asks, “Is there a sex addiction? Is there a shopping addiction?” The Chinese government wanted the WHO (World Health Organization) to recognize Internet addiction because of the number of young people that are “flunking out of life in some way as a result.” Though, this is an unlikely addition to the DSM, there are many existing decisions that people refuse to accept. Hyman points to the effects of these changes as being initially a questioning of existing societal values, but the changes also mark alterations to policy decisions because “permitting a diagnosis of compulsive gambling begins to medicalize a trait that previously was seen as willful condition. Defining gambling, as an addiction will present all sorts of legal and societal implications. Since the addiction is based in the malfunction of the brain, the diagnosis risks reductionism to a purely biological phenomenon, which could compromise the efficacy of voluntary efforts by an addicted person.

http://io9.com/388744/a-chinese-cure-for-internet-addiction

One of the other major concerns is that creating these diagnoses are a way that would allow drug companies to profit from a wider spectrum of addiction-based diseases. In response to this general public assertion, Hyman notes that in the case of drug addiction and gambling, drug companies are essentially uninvolved. Apart from stopping to smoke by using nicotine patches, Hyman says that these companies have generally kept away from these products seeing the individuals as stigmatized. Perhaps, the inclusion of these addictions in the DSM will ultimately allow for a legitimate neurological cure for these addictions and help lessen this stigma.

Though the DSM committee’s delineation is carefully constructed, the fact remains that humans are the ones holding the pencil. The definitions are bound to be somewhat shaky and imperfect. However, without these standardizations, those who suffer from a mental disorder may not be able to find adequate relief or support. Of course, the purpose of these discussions is to continue the questioning and analyzing in hopes of finding a perfect solution.

Want to cite this post?

Kallarackal, A. (2012). What’s in a Name?: DSM Criteria and Addiction. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from

http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/07/whats-in-name-dsm-criteria-and-addiction.html

Further Reading:

Steven Hyman’s personal opinion - “Diagnosing the DSM”

http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=32066

NYTimes – “ D.S.M.-5 promises to be a disaster”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/opinion/break-up-the-psychiatric-monopoly.html

Neuroethics at the Core Blog - Labeling addictions as “brain disease” could increase the social stigma

http://neuroethicscanada.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/the-depiction-of-addiction/

Autistic Self Advocacy Network - Analysis of the overall impact of the DSM-5 on Autism http://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/DSM-5_Policy_Brief_ASAN_final.pdf

Spotlight on Ethics: Neuroethics--How Neuroscience Challenges our Values

Mind-reading, neuro-marketing, and neurolaw: It seems hardly a day goes by without a discussion of how new studies of the brain are challenging concepts in daily life as we know it. Neuroscience is now influencing how we think about every aspect of our lives from identity, (animal) personhood, and definitions of disease to the law, and marketing of novel commercial products. Dr. Karen Rommelfanger, neuroscientist and Program Director of Emory University's Neuroethics Program, gives insights into the field of neuroethics and the wide-reaching ethical and social implications of neuroscience and neurotechnologies.

--originally featured on Emory University Center for Ethics Blog

Let's talk about "Precrime"

Last month I blogged a
little bit about constitutional protection, lie detection technology, and
wildly speculative but totally valid concerns about what happens if someone
else could tell what I was thinking. As promised, this month I’m going to
follow up with some information about “precrime”: what it is, outside of a
science-fiction context, what it could become, and what
neuroscientific knowledge contributes to the area.

This is a wonderful book; everyone should go read it.

Pre-crime is exactly what it sounds like; it is the science
of predicting when crimes are likely to happen and trying to intervene and
prevent them. The idea that police officers could prevent crime by predicting
it captures the public imagination in a big way, leading to a lot of
sensationalism. There were a series of articles starting in 2004 about London’s
so-called “Homocide Prevention Unit,” which captured public imagination so much
it had a television show
based on it.[1]
According to more recent reports, the HPU identifies dangerous individuals
based on psychological
profile and reportedly maintains a list of the top 100 most dangerous
individuals in London.
In 2006, the First Judicial District of Philadelphia announced a partnership
with the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology which, among other things, created a
special unit in the Philly police department to “treat
and supervise convicted felons who have the greatest risk of being charged with
murder.”  In press releases, the organization was sometimes called the
Homicide
Prevention Unit and sometimes called the Strategic
Anti-Violence Unit (SAV-U).

CSI: TARDIS.
The Doctor always knows.

(It’s a post mentioning sci-fi, crime, tv shows, and London.
I had to.)

However, in these cases, what the media are calling
“precrime” are criminal justice units tasked with identifying specific people
who are either at-risk of victimization or likely to commit violent crimes. This is not exactly science fiction. Police departments, like the section of the Met that made headlines in 2004, use intelligence units to predict the likelihood of
certain types of violent crime. Some
courts employ working units that use sociological and psychological research methods to identify
and supervise parolees who pose the greatest risk of recidivism. The city of
Philadelphia has an Anti-Violence Supervision Program  designed to help paroled offenders
who they predict will commit “murder,
attempted murder, rape (or other sex offenses), robbery, or aggravated
assault.”[2] News media like to imagine these units are on
the forefront of precrime when in fact the tactics they employ are not all
that “futuristic.”

In fact, if we frame all crime prevention as precrime, then
it’s not hard to see how this is actually in effect all around us all the time. There are many general intervention strategies designed to lower crime rates or
educate vulnerable populations. Anyone of roughly my generation will remember
the D.A.R.E. program, which was both about preventing drug addiction and
lowering drug crime rates. (but by many accounts it failed spectacularly on both
fronts.) Programs like this could theoretically be seen as part of the
“precrime” umbrella, in that they are generally designed to target at-risk
populations (here, pre-teens) before they engage in criminal activity and try
to give them the education necessary to avoid that criminal behavior. Programs
like this also focus on prevention of victimization- and here you can imagine
the “Stranger Danger” programs of the same era (which also failed
spectacularly.)  There are much more effective modern versions
of these kinds of programs; CDC has an initiative specifically
aimed at violence prevention.

Media sensationalism and television dramas aside, these
programs are widespread, and their methods are not really that experimental.
Whether criminologists are employing sociological or psychological methods, one
of the major points of understanding crime has always been to reduce the amount
of it that is happening. And as controversial as things like the forensic
psychiatric prediction of future dangerous are (and have been),[3]
the fact is that the actual strategies employed by criminal justice units
attempting to reduce crime rates are not exactly the stuff of science fiction.
It also isn’t what intrigues us about precrime in a neurological age.

© Nevit Dilmen

To understand how precrime would work, neurologically, we
first have to understand the ways that neuroscience is already effecting
forensics.  As I mentioned previously, there is the idea that if fMRI brain scans
result in rudimentary “mind-reading,” then someone could be arrested if a brain
scan shows they are planning a crime. However, there is a giant difference between getting facts about
behavior and gleaning intent, and having this information via a brain scan does not mean we are actually "reading minds." Let me give an example: let’s say you have a
person who undergoes a brain scan, perhaps for medical reasons, or perhaps as
part of a futuristic lie detection test. The people reading the scan notice that this individual's brain shows evidence of prolonged and severe feelings of anger or depression, some preoccupation with death, and that they are telling the truth about a recent gun purchase. They alert the authorities because the pattern of facts
indicates this person may be a danger to themselves or to someone else.

Sound familiar?

This isn’t a new
procedure- this is, in fact, facts from a hypothetical brain scan being
interpreted in the same way facts from a verbal patient history or a psychological
evaluation would be interpreted. This individual might, based on this
information, be held on a psychiatric hold for a few hours or a few days, but
the intervention would be a medical one- not a criminal one. New technology does
not always result in total systemic change.

However, there is another area of neurology and precrime,
and this has to do with the idea that your brain contains your “fundamental
nature.” Neuroscience is imagined to uncover who you are in a way that prior
sociological or psychological methods alone could not.[4]
This includes being able to calculate things you are and are not likely to do, familiar territory for Neuroethics. Frequent readers of this blog have
seen discussions about free
will, autonomy,
criminal
responsibility, and the ethics
of prediction vs. intervention. When it comes to neuroscience and the
courtroom, a lot of discussion centers on the fear of criminal actors blaming
their brains for their decisions and shirking actual responsibility. As a result,
you have neuroscience enthusiasts and neuroethics scholars debating what will
happen if researchers are able to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that every
action a person takes can be traced through a network of neurons firing. This,
as one set of scholars recently argued, “challenges
the very notion of conscious will on which the criminal system is based.” [5] 

Translation: it really, really messes with mens rea.

Now, consider what happens
when we reverse engineer “My Brain Made Me Do It.” Researchers figure out, a)
the specific characteristics of a “murderer’s brain” and b) the environmental
factors most likely to trip the “murderer’s brain” into committing murder.
Instead of using that information to retroactively explain a murder, “precrime”
technology would use it to contain people before
they commit murders. This is of great ethical concern, and rightfully so,
as it is generally considered a violation of the U.S. Constitution to hold
someone just because they might commit a crime in the future. [6] In order to accurately match brain scans to criminal histories and then spot
patterns, researchers would have to keep large databases of personal
information, and these databases would have to include people who had not yet
committed crimes.

Given that these
issues are highly controversial, it is not that there will be a giant prison
built just to hold all of the future “brain-criminals” anytime soon. However – this does not mean that police
units cannot use this sort of information to help focus surveillance. And if
this sounds more immediately frightening to you than the “brain-criminal” prison,
perhaps that is because we know police units already do this. We know they do
this because we all already do this. This
is the exact reasoning behind sex offender registries, community notification
laws, and publicly searchable police records, systems built on the
understanding that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior and
that knowledge is the best defense. What if patterns of past behavior were bolstered,
not only with a sense of “mental abnormality” as they are with sexual predators,
but with tags for “violence” alleles and “criminal impulsivity” brain
malformations? Is that a potentially problematic use of such information, or is
that just using science to design a more efficient criminal justice system? Let
me know what you think!

Want to cite this post?


Cipolla, C. (2012). Let's talk about "Precrime". The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/07/lets-talk-about-precrime.html

---

[1] I say
“so-called” because although it is identified as the HPU in a few press
releases, I cannot find any official documentation of this unit, although there is a Specialist Crime and Operations Bureau.

[2] It is
unclear whether the Anti-Violence supervision division mentioned later is a descendant of the prior relationship with UPenn.

[3] In the early 1990s, as laws targeting violent sex offenders were
weathering their first constitutional challenges, there were lawyers who
complained the study of predicting dangerousness was barely better then
phrenology. I also should add, at this point, if it hasn’t become
patently obvious to anyone who has read my blog posts previously or looked at
my website, I am a
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies scholar who studies sexuality and crime.
Sexually motivated crimes and the people who commit them are, by and large,
treated differently within the United States criminal justice system than
crimes (and criminals) that are not sexually-motivated. This is particularly
true when it comes to issues like harm reduction and recidivism, both of which
factor heavily in most discussions of “precrime.”

[4] There is
a simultaneous and related conversation going on regarding the use of genetics.
See: Michael T. Treadway and Joshua W. Buckholtz, "On the Use and Misuse
of Genomic and Neuroimaging Science in Forensic Psychiatry: Current Roles and
Future Directions," Child and
Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America 20, no. 3 (2011).

[5] Giuseppe Sartori, Silvia Pellegrini, and Andrea Mechelli, "Forensic
Neurosciences: From Basic Research to Applications and Pitfalls," Current Opinion in Neurology 24, no. 4
(2011).

For a classic argument, see: Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, "For the Law, Neuroscience Changes
Nothing and Everything," Philosophical
Transactions: Biological Sciences 359, no. 1451 (2004). Adina Roskies, "Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and
Responsibility," Trends in Cognitive
Sciences 10, no. 9 (2006). and Adina L. Roskies, "How Does the Neuroscience of Decision Making Bear
on Our Understanding of Moral Responsibility and Free Will?," Current Opinion in Neurobiology, no. 0.

[6] This is called preventive detention,
although there are giant exceptions: holding an accused criminal between when
he is charged and when he is tried, civil commitment, certain portions of the
PATRIOT act, etc. Violent sexual
predators who are indefinitely committed have to have been convicted of at
least one violent sexual crime.

The Man Who Voled the World

Last Monday, Dr.Hasse Walum gave a talk titled "Genetic and Hormonal Influences on Pair Bonding Related Behavior in Humans" at the Center for Translational Social Neuroscience at Emory. I hadn't heard of Walum's work before I saw the e-mail announcement for his talk, but a little googling got me interested. Here's the most titillating version of his findings: Walum found the gene that makes men cheat.

Okay, that is most definitely not what he found, and I got the sense from talking with him briefly that he would be the first one to tell you that. So why am I misrepresenting his results?

Dr. Hasse Walum: hard-hitting Wired reporter  David Ewing Duncan compares him to Kurt Cobain, but my science and rock star senses detect a David Bowie influence

I want to make some points about how science interacts with the media. Like I said, it was reading news reports that made me want to go hear Walum talk. As a graduate student, in his first published study, Walum reported that different forms of a certain gene are associated with the strength of relationships that men form. As he told me after his talk, he spent the week after the study was published just answering phone calls from the press. On Wired’s site I found an article about the paper that struck me as fairly cautious, even if the author did point out that "Walum did not report if he carries the tell-tale gene". Then again, on the BBC website I found a piece that opened up with a pic of actor George Clooney, pointing confidently at someone off camera, along with a caption that asks if he's "afraid of commitment?" Clearly, the press sensationalized this story. In a recent post on this blog, Emory neuroscience grad student Jordan Kohn put a lot of blame on journalists for the sensationalizing of research results. Unfortunately, there's plenty of blame to go around for the way that science gets represented in the media, and I think some of it should fall squarely on the shoulders of the science establishment.

Let's face it; Dr. Walum's study wouldn't have been published if the title was: "We can't find any evidence that this gene has anything to do with dudes that suck at monogamy". He told me as much after his talk. I don't mean to use Walum's words against him--in fact, I think anyone who's studying anything remotely interesting about the brain faces the same ethical dilemma. I'll say more about that after I sum up the seminar.

Ratty (actually a water vole)

What I didn't realize when I got the e-mail announcement was that Dr. Walum was here giving a job talk. The reason for Dr.Walum's visit became obvious when he got to the slide in his Powerpoint presentation featuring a picture of Ratty from Wind in the Willows. Ratty, for the uninformed, is a water vole, and Dr.Walum's childhood love of Ratty establishes that he's wanted to work with voles ever since he was a kid. If that didn't convince us, he also informed us that he wrote a literature review of filial mate bonding for his degree project as an undergrad, and that the inspiration for his work was Larry Young's studies of the vasopressin receptor gene in voles.

As you are no doubt aware if you have spent more than five minutes on Emory's campus doing something besides playing beer pong, a significant component of Emory's neuroscience research revolves around voles. Voles provide a convenient model for understanding how monogamy works in the brain. Species like montane and meadow voles are promiscuous, but the prairie vole is monogamous. Young's group has shown that this difference is due in large part to a 482 base-pair long snippet of DNA which the prairie voles carry. This length of DNA lies in the regulatory region of the vasopressin receptor gene—that is, the DNA near the gene itself that affects how the cell’s machinery churns out vasopressin receptors. As the name implies, these receptors bind vasopressin, a hormone known to play a role in bonding (and in other more mundane physiological tasks, like water retention). By inserting the same length of DNA in the regulatory region of the vasopressin receptor gene in mice, which are easier to manipulate genetically, you can increase affiliative behaviors in males. Male mice carrying the insert show increased levels of olfactory exploration and grooming of females. Now all we have to do is figure out how that change in regulatory regions translates into a change in behavior, and...viola! We've figured out monogamy. And cured autism. Maybe.

Not everyone feels the love for the Young lab's research agenda. Last week this blog also featured an interview with feminist science studies scholar Angela Willey. While at Emory, Dr. Willey problematized the heck out of the Young lab's research on monogamy. I'm still processing that post. The neuroscientist in me wants to defend the Young group's work with adjectives like "elegant". On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to feminist and queer critiques of neuroscience research, and I think it's important for neuroscientists to engage with those critiques. To their credit, the Young lab did just that. I could echo Willey's points about how their definition of monogamy seems to reduce a very complex human behavior to a single number which they assign to vole behavior--a simplification I'm sure the lab is aware of--but let me stay focused on the seminar.

Walum’s began his with that first paper on the human vasopressin receptor gene that got him all the press. I'll state what he and his colleagues reported in scientific terms. Then I'll explain those terms, just in case anyone finds them as opaque as I once did, before undergoing years of training that allow me to speak complete gibberish to strangers. Their results show a correlation in humans between scores on a Partner Bonding Scale and variations in a microsatellite upstream of the human gene for the vasopressin receptor. Dr. Walum created the Partner Bonding Scale, as he proudly told us, basing it on the behaviors that are measured to put a number to the strength of pair bonds between great apes and other nonhuman primates. By sequencing microsatellites in roughly two thousand Swedes, Walum et al. were able to show an association between scores on his scale and the version of the microsatellite that men carried. Microsatellites are short regions of repeats in DNA. When they occur in the regulatory regions outside of a gene, these microsatellites can affect gene transcription, and by extension the protein that the gene encodes. Case in point: the vasopressin receptor has a different distribution in the brains of the monogamous prairie voles and the promiscuous montane voles. As outlined above, the Young lab has shown that a 428 base pair insert in the genome of the prairie vole, right next to one of the vasopressin receptor genes, causes this change in receptor distribution. Similarly, Walum et al found that men who carried the so-called "334 allele" were significantly more likely to receive lower scores on the Partner Bonding Scale. You might know that alleles are different versions of a gene, or in this case microsatellite. There’s not 334 versions—the number refers to the length of the repeat. The effect they found was “dose-dependent”: men that carried one or two copies of the 334 allele were much more likely to have lower Partner Bonding Scale scores. It’s worth emphasizing, though, that the 334 allele does not show any sequence similarity to the 428 base pairs of prairie vole DNA that supposedly make that species more monogamous, and neither does any other part of the regulatory region flanking any of our vasopressin receptor genes. Different microsatellites, related effects. At least that’s what Walum et al. argue.

Cyberball: image taken from a study

of "social exclusion" (Bolling et al. 2010)

Dr.Walum went on to talk about the other studies he carried out as a grad student. One set of experiments looked at the effects of oxytocin, another hormone that some argue increases trust. To try and measure the bond that female subjects formed with males they were partnered with during the experiments, Walum and company used a videogame of sorts they called “cyberball”. In cyberball, the female subjects could choose to “throw” a ball to either an icon of their partner’s face or to an icon of an unfamiliar male. If female subjects that recevied intranasal oxytocin more readily trusted the male partners, it should show up in the cyberball score. After the talk was over, I went up talk with Dr. Walum. I had to know, did the data from cyberball tell them anything? At first he said he couldn’t remember. Then he said something about “trending in the same direction”, only to interrupt himself and say that the scores had only been significant when lumped together with other metrics they’d used. I replied sympathetically. “It’s hard to find a way to measure human behavior.” Then I told him that the Cyberball game reminded me of the Partner Preference Test, a behavioral assay designed by the Young lab to measure monogamy. In the test, voles are put in a three-part cage, with their partner on one side and a stranger on the other. Prairie voles tend to spend more time with their partner. I asked Dr. Walum if he was trying to find a way to do the Partner Preference Test with humans. “Yes, exactly,” he said, “but you can't do that with humans. You can't do the experiments you would like to do." I agreed. "I don't think that an experiment proposing that you put humans in a large plastic tank would make it past the Institutional Review Board." He went on: “With human subjects, it's all about variation. You can do some pharmacological manipulations, like with the intranasal oxytocin, but with our first study [on the vasopressin receptor allele] we had to think more about our story than about our results”, he said. “In a way we published the story that everybody wanted to hear.”

Again, I’m not trying to use Dr. Walum’s words against him. While I might not have the expertise to critique his study’s use of Generalized Linear Mixed Effect Models, I also don’t have any reason to doubt his results. As Dr.Walum made perfectly clear in the Karolinksa Institute press release that the Wired and BBC alike were so quick to quote, “There are, of course, many reasons why a person might have relationship problems.” What am I trying to say is that we should keep the economic realities of science in mind when we talk about how research filters through to the media. Every neuroscientist who complains about how the only things the press can do is cut and paste pretty pictures from fMRI studies should remember that, right now, those are the studies that get published, and by extension, the studies that get media attention. Like it or not, the axiom of “publish or perish” still applies. All these papers that only trot out sexy results “provide strong evidence”, as us science types like to say,  that studies should be registered and accepted by journals before the experiments are carried out. Scientists already write their grants this way—they sell the research they’re going to do—so why shouldn’t that be what journals are buying? This is the system that Neuroskeptic has advocated on his blog (here’s a hyperlink by way of citation). If the experiments don’t provide any evidence, then publish that lack of evidence, and save everyone else the effort of pointlessly repeating the same study.

Under this system, if neuroscientists find themselves angry about how the media represents their results, at least they can tell themselves it’s not because they're only publishing what gets them funding. I don't think that system would put an end to press releases that tout tantalizing findings, though. After all, someone has to sell the science so more science can get done. I'm guessing that's the explanation I'd get if I talked with the Man who Voled the World.

Want to cite this post?


Nicholson, D. (2012). The Man Who Voled the World. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/07/man-who-voled-world.html

Call for "Late Breaking" Abstracts

*Deadline for abstract submissions: August 13, 2012* 

Brain Matters 3: 

Values at the Crossroads of Neurology,

Psychiatry and Psychology 

October 24th-25th, 2012

This conference provides a venue for
collaboration and learning in the area of neuroethics. The plenary
speakers of this conference will address ethical challenges in the
treatment and research for conditions with neurological symptomatology
but that are without identifiable biological correlates/causes. The
complexities of suffering and disability experienced by individuals with
these conditions are significant, including exposure to dangerous and
futile treatments.

Parallel sessions will include accepted
abstracts from a broad range of neuroethics interests.  At this
conference, presentations will be given by patients, physicians,
neuroscientists, and ethicists and is intended to appeal to a broad
audience.  Please see the call for abstracts and conference information
at http://www.clevelandclinic.org/BrainMatters3.

Please email abstracts to fordp@ccf.org by August 13, 2012.



Topics

In recognition of the fast-paced nature of the neurosciences, we invite scholars and researchers to submit abstracts for poster presentations on specific topics that fall into one of the following 3 categories

1. Empirical research projects that are works in progress or pilot projects


2. Reviews of emerging controversies in the scientific or popular discourse


3. Analysis of emerging legal and regulatory challenges in the neurosciences

The abstracts will be judged on relevance to novel and emerging topics, academic quality, and responsiveness to one or more categories of interest.


Format

Please structure submissions according to the following sections:Background, Methods, Results/Analysis, Discussion, and Conclusion. Abstracts shouldbe no more than 250 words.

Please submit in a standard Microsoft Word file format with contact information and all of the authors' names within the body of the file.

Submission Process

Please email the completed abstract to fordp@ccf.org by August, 13, 2012 with a subject line of "late breaking abstract." Early proposals are strongly encouraged.

Conference Registration

Email notification of acceptance will be sent by September 13, 2012. There will be a two-week

opportunity to confirm attendance at the conference once notification has been sent. Attendance is required for accepted submissions to be included in the program. All

presenters must register for Brain Matter 3 and are responsible for their travel, lodging

expenses, and registration fees for the conference. Please
note that the number of attendees will be limited due to meeting space
restrictions, therefore early registration is strongly encouraged. 



In collaboration with:

        Cleveland Clinic Epilepsy Center

        International Neuroethics Society