Lumosity: a "personal trainer for your brain"?

Is intelligence more like height or strength? Could high school students improve their IQs in time for the college entrance exams with a few weeks of “brain training” like college students pump up their biceps before spring break? For many years, psychologists believed that intelligence, and particularly fluid intelligence, is for the most part a fixed quantity – somewhat like height. Fluid intelligence, which is thought of as the ability to perceive patterns amongst noise, understand meaningful connections, and analyze information in the moment is a strong predictor of future success yet has been remarkably resistant to training¹. In a way, this sounds strikingly similar to what neuroscientists once said about the biology of the brain (i.e. neurons don’t regenerate after injury and they are only lost, not added throughout life). Now we know that the brain is incredibly plastic and that new neurons are produced even into adulthood². So, why wouldn’t an aspect of intelligence, undoubtedly a product of the dynamic brain, also be mutable? Recently, a lucrative new industry has aimed to capitalize on this notion. Web-based programs such as Lumosity.com have grown rapidly. They aggressively market their services with the assertion that they are backed by neuroscience but with a decidedly fad-diet feel. Who wouldn’t want to “unlock your inner genius”?

Jane’s Brain: Neuroethics and the Intelligence Community

By Jonathan D. Moreno, PhD

Dr. Jonathan D. Moreno is one of 14 Penn Integrates Knowledge university professors at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the David and Lyn Silfen chair. He is also Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, of History and Sociology of Science, and of Philosophy. Moreno is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. In 2008-09 he served as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board.

In September I arrived in Geneva to keynote a conference at the Brocher Foundation on the banks of Lake Geneva, where the ghost of John Calvin still casts a long shadow over the stern ethos of the Swiss. It was a glorious day in that oasis of calm and cleanliness, where the sheer power of holding much of the world’s money in its vaults justifies a muffled smugness. Compulsively, I checked my email as my taxi glided past the Hotel President Wilson, the monument of grateful bankers to the American president whose ill-fated League of Nations nearly made Geneva the official as well as de facto capital of the world. (Its $81,000 a night penthouse suite is said to be the most expensive in the world; I didn't stay there.)

Can Neuroscience Data be Used to Minimize the Effects of Stereotype Threat?

Last December 2013, the neuroscience graduate students at Emory University spearheaded an effort alongside many other sponsors to organize and implement a symposium to explore the neuroscientific basis of race and gender bias. The program, entitled “Bias in the Academy: From Neural Networks to Social Networks,”  awarded the Laney Graduate School New Thinkers/New Leaders fund and support from CMBC and the Center for Ethics, aimed to provide students and faculty alike an overview of the psychological and neuroscientific research on race and gender bias and how this might be used to mitigate harmful effects of stereotype and bias in the academy. After listening to and participating in the symposium, I realized that the symposium speakers and student planners all hoped to answer a similar question regarding the nature of the brain: Is the brain “hard-wired” to categorize people into groups in a way that makes negative stereotyping inevitable or is the brain exquisitely plastic insofar as biases we hold toward groups can be altered via certain interventions? One individual cannot find the answer to this question; rather, multidisciplinary scholarship can work to bridge the gap between disciplines such as neuroscience and social psychological findings that begin to answer this question and real-world issues.

“Faith, Values and Autism” A Symposium Held by the Marcus Autism Center and the Atlanta Autism Consortium

On December 13, 2013 the Marcus Autism Center and the Atlanta Autism Consortium co-hosted a mini-symposium looking at the role of faith and religion in the lives and well-being of individuals living and working with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Organized by Marcus psychologist Dr. Samuel Fernandez-Carriba and Georgia State professor Dr.  Anne-Pierre Goursaud the event, titled “Faith, Values and Autism,” included a panel of six individuals from a variety of faith perspectives and featured a presentation by Dr. Alfiee M. Breland-Noble on the development and implementation of faith based mental health promotion. This topic has important implications for neuroethics and neurodiversity, the perspective that autism and other neurological disorders are part of natural human neurological diversity that should be neither cured nor normalized.

The religious or faith-based perspective of a family impacts how the presence of autistic traits in a child is framed. Some religions, for example, may connect autistic difference to experiences in a past life, a state of being that is closer or further from God than non-autistic individuals, or a test from God. A non-religious caregiver or autistic individual[1] may be more likely to accept and discuss biological or genetic causal models than those with strong religious doctrines. For example, during my dissertation research, for which I studied perceptions of autism in India, I learned that genetic causal models are more stigmatizing than explanations of evil eye or maternal pre-natal behavior because it is seen as more permanent and transmissible through the family’s ‘bad blood.’ Understanding a family’s or individual’s faith perspective can help professionals understand treatment decisions as well as develop more trusting doctor-patient relationships. Both of these benefits can greatly enhance the efficiency of autism-related interactions, from diagnosis to planning for transition into adulthood. 

Neuroethics Journal Club: How early can signs of autism be detected in infants?

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex disorder typically characterized by social impairment and communication deficits, and most recently the CDC has estimated that 1 in 88 American children are affected by a form of ASD.¹ A reliable diagnosis for autism can be offered at 24 months, but most children are diagnosed later after attending school. For the first Neuroethics journal club of the spring semester, ILA graduate student and Neuroethics Scholar Jennifer Sarrett led a discussion on a new technology that could offer preclinical risk assessment in children as young as 2 months.

Even though children and adults with autism exhibit a wide variety of individual and unique symptoms, a common attribute of those diagnosed with autism is a deficit in the ability to make eye contact. In a paper published in Nature late last year, researchers from the Marcus Autism Center and Emory University School of Medicine used special eye-tracking equipment to measure eye fixation in children only 2 months of age and were able to observe the earliest signs of developing autism ever recorded.² Infants that were enrolled in the study were measured at 10 different time points between the ages of 2 months and 24 months, and then an autism diagnosis was made at 36 months. Infants were classified as either high-risk for ASD if a full sibling had already been diagnosed with ASD or low-risk if no first, second, or third degree relatives were affected by the disorder. Eye-tracking was analyzed at each of the time points for 36 boy infants, 11 of which were later diagnosed with ASD (10 from the high-risk group and 1 from the low-risk group) and 25 of which were classified as typically developing. At each of these time intervals, infants watched videos of a caregiver behaving in a natural, standard manner, and the amount of time each infant fixated visually on the eyes, mouth, body, and objects in the room was measured. It was hypothesized that in the children later diagnosed with autism, a deficit in the attention given to the caretaker’s eyes would be observed beginning from the earliest time point measured.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.