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

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





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



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



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



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



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



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

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

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

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



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



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



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



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

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

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



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



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

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (Source: TIME Magazine)

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



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





References



1. Ramirez, S. et al. Science 2013.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Harvard Law Review 125:1514, 2012.

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





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

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Static and dynamic metaphysics of free will: A pragmatic perspective

By Eric Racine, PhD and Victoria Saigle



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



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



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



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



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

From SMBC Comics

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



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



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





References



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autism and Well-Being

By Richard Ashcroft, MA, PhD



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



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



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



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



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

Source

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



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



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

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Ashcroft, R. (2013). Autism and Well-Being. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
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200th Post! Why is Neurodiversity Useful?

Neurodiversity is a term that was coined by Australian social scientist and autism advocate Judy Singer. In her 1998 thesis, she wrote: “For me, the key significance of the ‘Autistic Spectrum’ lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of Neurological Diversity, or what I want to call ‘Neurodiversity.’ The ‘Neurologically Different’ represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.”[1] Similar to the way biodiversity is discussed as critical to the stability of the ecosystem, neurodiversity is considered to be critical for human and cultural stability. In other words, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and other neurological differences should be a part of our community and, thus, neither cured nor subject to intense rehabilitative or normalizing efforts. Before I discuss how neurodiversity is useful to my work and to ASD-related professions, I want to quickly review ASD and my current project for the Neuroethics Scholar Program.

Source: Cafe Press

ASD is traditionally defined as a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects a person’s social and communicative style and includes frequent displays of specific behavioral patterns.[2] There is a huge range of autistic expression, from significantly impaired to subtle displays of autistic characteristics. As the Neuroethics Scholar at Emory’s Center for Ethics, I am working on a project at the Marcus Autism Center exploring how to communicate the results of future infant screeners for ASD to parents. This project was described in The Neuroethics Blog on October 1, 2013. A neurodiverse perspective informs my work in two important ways: shaping the language I use to talk about ASD and ensuring I maintain a focus on the quality of life for ASD individuals and their families. I believe that neurodiversity can be similarly important for all professionals working with and studying ASD or related disabilities.

In American civil rights movements, there has always been a linguistic focus—people pay attention to the ways individuals with different racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic identities are labeled and described. This language changes over time, becoming more appropriate and representative. The disability rights movement also works to change the way disability is spoken about. Neurodiversity is a part of this movement, and so advocates are thinking about and promoting respectful ways to talk about ASD and related disabilities. As a whole, the disability community argues for the use of a language of difference, not deficit. For ASD, this means saying individuals have different social interaction styles, rather than “deficits in social communication and social interaction,” or prefer adhering to a specific routine, rather than “inflexible adherence to routines.” The statements communicate the same thing, however the latter is linguistically demeaning and suggests autistic people are broken or somehow less than those who are not autistic.

My use of the phrase ‘autistic people’ is also informed by neurodiversity. In the field of disability studies, there is an ongoing conversation about the use or nonuse of ‘people first language.’[4] This approach attempts to verbally demonstrate that a person is more important than the disability by using phrases such as ‘person with a disability’ or ‘person with autism,’ thus rejecting the notion that a disability subsumes a person’s entire identity. This inaccuracy is most pronounced in phrases like ‘an autistic’ or ‘autistics.’ However, there are many self-advocates who prefer the use of the term ‘autistic person’ (and also ‘disabled person’) because autism is a central element to identity formation and the phrase ‘people with autism’ seems to serve as a reminder to others that autistic people are, in fact, people. As a result of many interactions and conversations with friends and colleagues who are autistic self-advocates, I now rely primarily on ‘autistic people’ with the understanding that this phrase is meant to respect the identity of autism. 

Source: Zazzle

In this way, neurodiversity draws attention to the ways we describe autistic people that serves to stigmatize and separate this community from the non-autistic community. Eradicating this stigma by focusing on the improvement of the lives of autistic individuals rather than finding cures for or rehabilitating autism as a primary tenet of neurodiversity. This is a fairly controversial topic in the ASD community. Many parents believe that neurodiversity fails to account for autistic children who are significantly impaired. Working towards acceptance, they argue, does not help them or their children who are significantly impaired and may be engaging in self-harm, difficult to communicate with, or having persistent sleep or eating difficulties. These parents want to find ways to alleviate the most significant autistic characteristics because they and their children are living stressful and exhausting lives.

I argue that neurodiversity is useful for these families as well. Neurodiversity does not promote allowing children to continually harm themselves or families to go without sleep for days out of respect for the neurological difference of the child. Neurodiversity means improving the quality of life for autistic people and their families. An autistic person who has not developed a reliable communication method, verbal or otherwise, would benefit from learning how to get her preferences, needs, and emotions expressed. This often does involve educational techniques and interventions. Similarly, some autistic people want to work on their social skills with explicit social skill instruction. This, however, does not mean that all autistic people should be subject to intense social skill instruction regardless of their desire to make and keep friendships.

Focusing on the quality of life of autistic individuals and their families does not mean leaving them alone until the surrounding community develops a more tolerant and accommodative environment. It means discovering ways to ensure that the autistic individual has a primary role in his life decisions. It means ensuring autistic individuals are employed in environments that respect and utilize their differences and skills. It means setting up school and adult environments where autistic individuals can thrive, feel comfortable, and learn. It means finding ways to support families and caregivers of autistic children and adults so that they can focus on loving and supporting the autistic people in their lives, rather than the frustrations of finding and fighting for appropriate and supportive services and environments. 

For my current project, relying on neurodiversity will result in suggestions to ensure that telling parents about the possibility of a later autism diagnosis is done in a supportive and realistic manner. This includes not suggesting that the introduction of autism into their lives will destroy the family that they want or expect and that information about ASD is provided using language that is respectful of autistic people and their families. This information should be provided in a reciprocal, ongoing dialogue about the future of a child and the family that answers caregiver questions and directs them towards useful resources and services for both the child and entire family.

For me and my work, neurodiversity means working towards a community that respects and interacts with autistic people and people with intellectual and developmental differences. But it also means that, while working towards this goal, researchers, clinicians, and educators can and should focus on developing immediate and sustainable ways to improve the qualities of life of autistic people and their families. Neurodiversity should be presented to professionals, parents, and the public as an alternative narrative about ASD that could supplement the more medically-oriented, cure-focused way of thinking about ASD. Thinking through these approaches is where neuroethics, bioethics, and neurodiversity can come together. Although the approaches seem contrastive, there is an important common ground—that of ensuring autistic individuals and their families lead fulfilling, rewarding, and uncomplicated lives.

[1] Singer, Judy. (1998) Odd people in: The birth of community amongst people on the "Autism Spectrum". A personal exploration of a new social movement based on Neurological Diversity. Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Technology, Sydney. 

[2] American Psychiatric Association. (2013) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Shapiro, Joseph P. (1993) No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Suggested Resources:

1. Armstrong, Thomas. (2010) Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.

2. Autistic Self Advocacy Network: http://autisticadvocacy.org/

3. Disability Studies Quartetly Special Topic: Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity (open source): http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43.

4. Jaarsma, P & Welin S (2011) Autism as natural human variation: Reflections on the claims of the neurodiversity movement. Health Care Analysis, 20(1): 20-30.

5. Kapp S, Gillespie-Lynch, K, Sherman, LE, & Hutman, T. (2013) Deficit, difference of both? Autism and neurodiversity. Developmental Psychology, 49(1): 59-71.

6. Nazeer, Kamran. (2006) Send in the Idiots : Growing Up in Another World. Bloomsbury: Trade Paper.

7. Neurodiversity Weblog: http://www.neurodiversity.com/main.html

8. Saverese, Ralph. (2007) Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. New York: Other Press.

Want to Cite This Post? 



Sarrett, J. (2013). Why is Neurodiversity Useful? The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2013/12/why-is-neurodiversity-useful.html

It's Complicated: Molly Crocket and Patricia Churchland Discuss the Future of the Neuroscience of Morality

Last month, as a recipient of the Emory Neuroethics Program Neuroethics Travel Award, I had the wonderful opportunity of attending the International Neuroethics Society Annual Meeting in San Diego, California. The conference brought together leading neuroethics scholars from around the world and focused on the themes of moral enhancement, disorders of consciousness, and the role of neuroscience in the courtroom. (The conference was structured around three star-studded panels. For a full program, please visit here. For full videos of the panels, please visit here.) There were also five oral presentations and a poster session. As part of the event, I exhibited a poster entitled “Revising Weakness of Will: A Reply to Neil Levy,” where I challenged Levy’s use of the theory of ego depletion as an explanation of weakness of will and provided an alternate, neurocomputational account.

Presenting my poster at INS.

Photo credit: Karen Rommelfanger

As a philosopher interested in the intersection of the computational neurosciences and morality, “The Science and Ethics of Moral Enhancement” session was a particularly enlightening one for me. It brought together three leading women neuroethics scholars, Barbara Sahakian (as Moderator), Molly Crockett, and Patricia Churchland, as well as neuroethicist Julian Savulescu of the Oxford University Center for Neuroethics. It was a remarkable conversation. Throughout their discussions and even in the question period that followed, I was struck by how clearheaded the panelists were about the challenges facing the field. At the same time, and despite their very different perspectives, they evidently shared a real optimism about the future of this area of research. As the session moderator, neuroscientist and neuroethicist Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge University set the tone by explaining that the panelists would tackle, “the science of what’s possible now,” but also look at “what we may be able to do in the future.”





A Morality Pill?

Molly Crockett

The first panelist, Molly Crockett, is a leading neuroscientist working at the University College London and the University of Zurich. She is also in the process of setting up a lab at Oxford University. She explained that, as a scientist, the aim of her presentation would be to describe, “What it’s like, on the ground, doing this research.” In particular, she focused on how own area of expertise, which is in exploring how different brain chemicals influence moral behavior.



To start off, she emphasized, “It’s complicated.” She described how, in light of her work on the neurotransmitter serotonin, people often ask her about the possibility of a morality pill. She explained that she often feels compelled to point out that both the moral behaviors in question and the biological systems underlying them are very complex. For example, she noted, her research on serotonin and sociality was picked up in the media in such as away as to suggest that “Enhanced serotonin biases moral judgment and decision-making toward sociality.” While not necessarily inaccurate, she explained, she also wanted to make clear that there is a lot more going on.



In her talk, Crockett laid out three major reasons for why she believed a straightforward ‘science of moral enhancement’ would not happen overnight. First, she noted, there is ongoing discussion as to exactly what constitutes ‘moral behavior,’ and hence, what it is exactly that we would want to enhance if we could. Second, she detailed how that all the neurochemicals in question do many different things: oxytocin may enhance empathy, for instance, but also increase Schadenfreude in individuals participating in economic games.



Finally, Crockett emphasized that moral behavior is highly context-specific. For example, it is not clear that we would want to be helpful to anyone we meet, wherever or whenever. There is a technical term for this kind of individual, she noted: “Sucker.” The audience loved the joke but also certainly appreciated the point. Like cognition, morality is so complex that it cannot simply be replicated in specific circumstances.



In her own efforts to study morality, Crockett noted, she found it useful to hone in what she called “low-hanging fruits,” that is, on behaviors that almost no one would find to be morally objectionable. As an example of such a behavior, she discussed Peter Singer's dilemma regarding the duty of easy rescue, where an agent passes a drowning child and decides whether to help or not. "These are a set of behaviors we would want to target if we could," she noted.



'Before Going Whole Hog'

Patricia Churchland discusses oxytocin

The second panelist, philosopher Patricia Churchland, is Professor Emerita of the Department of Philosophy University of California San Diego. Like Crockett, Churchland emphasized that she was skeptical of the idea of a ‘morality pill’ and argued against the claim that morality could be something like a “swiss army knife” set of moral modules. But she proposed to tackle the issue from a slightly different perspective, proposing to examine some of troubling issues surrounding the frequently touted molecule of oxytocin.



Oxytocin is known to play an important role in childbirth, lactation, intimacy, pair bonding, and trust. In a recent study, researchers at Yale argued that “intranasal administration of oxytocin enhances activity in the brain for socially meaningful stimuli and attenuates its response to nonsocially meaningful stimuli in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as measured via functional MRI.” But, Churchland argued, the issue is not so simple.



To start, Churchland outlined some general problems with oxytocin and its recent popularity in both scientific research and the popular press. Its mechanisms are relatively poorly understood, it interacts with other neurochemicals, it makes female voles go into estrous, and there is very little known about the long term effects of its administration. In addition, she added, the general and unregulated availability of oxytocin makes it vulnerable to abuse. Nonetheless, the problems go even deeper for Churchland. The main body of her talk emphasized that how oxytocin is administered and measured in human beings plays a surprising role in how the molecule becomes understood, reported, and used by scientists in the field.



In human beings, oxytocin is measured by comparing levels of the molecule before and after a behavioral manipulation. For example, a plasma sample is taken, the participant is given a massage, and then a second plasma sample is taken. Researchers then compare oxytocin levels to examine the effect of the manipulation. But how is oxytocin measured in these kinds of studies? Churchland explained there are two standard ways to look at plasma and measure oxytocin. She described the first method as the ‘gold standard,’ using a radioimmunoassay to “tag the thing in question” on extracted, highly purified samples. By contrast, the second method is commercially available and relies on a much easier-to-use enzyme-linked immunoassay (EIA). But it has the disadvantage of often not producing accurate results.



In a recent paper, Michael McCullough, Churchland, and Armando Mendez compared the two kinds of assays. In addition, they tested the commercial kits independently and found that that were misidentifying all kinds of molecules as oxytocin, including vasopressin. This led them to argue that the EIAs “lack reliability when used on unextracted samples of human fluids, and that they tag molecules in addition to oxytocin, yielding estimates that are wildly discrepant with an extensive body of earlier findings that were obtained using methods that are well validated, but more laborious.”  Building on this finding, Churchland showed a rather striking comparison of data. One the one hand, she she showed how, using the ‘gold standard’ radioimmunoassay, women in late stages of labor register between 1-5 pc/ml of oxytocin in their plasma. By contrast, using the commercial kits, individuals who had merely received a massage appeared to have 200 times as much oxytocin in their blood. Despite these shortcomings, however, Churchland noted that the results achieved using EIAs are “widely cited and widely used in good faith to apply oxytocin to children with social difficulties.”



Here, Churchland made clear the ethical import of what earlier on she had acknowledged was a rather ‘technical’ talk. She noted, “if the way you’re measuring oxytocin is unreliable, you have results that are un-interpretable, then you have to ask yourself if it’s okay to be giving oxytocin to people with schizophrenia or with autism.” And then she added, “What we really need to do, before going whole hog on using oxytocin as a treatment for socially difficult children, is we really need to get this straight.”



In her conclusion, Churchland acknowledged that her talk may have sounded rather negative and, in general, a little bit too pessimistic about the neuroscience of morality. To counter this, she emphasized, “I think it can be done.” But she emphasized that it must be done with patience and care for those involved all along the way.



All in all, in was an enlightening experience. I’m already looking forward to the 2014 International Neuroethics Society meeting in Washington, DC!

Want to Cite This Post? 



Hass, J. (2013). It's Complicated: Molly Crocket and Patricia Churchland Discuss the Future of the Neuroscience of Morality. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2013/12/its-complicated-molly-crocket-and.html

Bias in the Academy Video Archive of Presymposium Seminars

Neuroethics Symposium December 10, 2013

Bias in the Academy: From Neural Networks to Social Networks

 

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

Presymposia seminar series 1/4: An Introduction to Bias: A Social Network Primer facilitated by Jacob Billings, Neuroscience graduate student, Emory University 

Presymposia seminar series 2/4: Biased People or Biased Researchers: A puzzle for Social Psychology facilitated by Chris Martin, Sociology graduate student, Emory University 

 

Presymposia seminar series 3/4: A Look at Power Structures and Bias in Academic Settings facilitated by Roger Sikes

 

Presymposia seminar series 4/4: Operationalizing the Research on Bias: Faculty Hiring and Recruitment Processes, facilitated by Dona Yarbrough, PhD, Vice Provost for Community and Diversity, Emory University

 
 

Disclaimer: 



Titles and institutional affiliation for individuals who contribute to
these seminar series are for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed
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contained on these videos represent the personal views of the individual speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of any organization
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who might post on this blog.