By Mallory Bowers

On November 14, the International Neuroethics Society convened for its annual meeting at the AAAS building in Washington, D.C. I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at INS through the generous support of the Emory Neuroethics Program. The society is an interdisciplinary group of scholars – including lawyers, clinicians, researchers, and policy makers – and the 2014 agenda reflected this diversity in expertise.

The conference opened with a short talk by Chaka Fattah, the U.S. representative for Pennsylvania’s 2nd congressional district. As a Philadelphia native, I was excited to learn that Congressman Fattah was an architect of the Fattah Neuroscience Initiative, which was an impetus for developing the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.

Courtesy of Gillian Hue

Discussion of the BRAIN initiative continued through the following panels, “The BRAIN Initiative & the Human Brain Project: an Ethical Focus” and “The Future of Neuroscience Research & Ethical Implications”. Panelist Stephen Hauser spoke about the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, while Henry Markram discussed the Human Brain Project – the European-based research collaboration to establish innovative neurotechnologies and develop a more thorough understanding of the human brain. Representatives of several scientific funding institutions (Dr. Tom Insel – Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. George Koob – Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and Dr. Geoff Ling – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) discussed the progress of neuroscience research, while emphasizing the need for continued advancement. Although the morning panels were interesting (as a behavioral neuroscientist, seeing Dr. Tom Insel was quite thrilling), I was left with the impression that the scientific “establishment” was only beginning to scratch the surface of the neuroethical implications of the research being conducted by scientists like myself. I wondered if any of the morning panelists attended the later sessions, which discussed more neuroethically hard-hitting issues, such as “Neuroscience in the Courts” and “Neuroscience and Human Rights”.

By Daniela Ovadia

Daniela Ovadia is the co-director of the Neuroscience and Society Lab in the Brain and Behavioral Sciences Department of the University of Pavia and is the scientific director of Agenzia Zoe. 

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is one of the oldest neuromodulation techniques; it was approved by the FDA in 1997 for the treatment of essential tremor, and a few years later, in 2002, the indication was extended to the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and dystonia (in 2003). In 2009 a new era for DBS started when the FDA also approved it as a therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some patients experienced a very good outcome, while others were less lucky and experienced side effects such as cognitive, behavioral or psychosocial impairments. DBS is now a common procedure for the treatment of many motor and behavioral impairments. As certain patients associations and civil liberties groups claimed that psychosurgery was back, and with it the social control on the patient’s mind, the media became interested in the topic. With the aim to protect the use of a promising technology, scientists and researchers also became involved in the field.

In this recently published article, authors Mecacci and Haselager focus their attention on the conceptual framework influencing the lack of compliance (or maladaptation, as they define it) to DBS implants. They identify two key elements determining patients expectations toward the effects of this neurodevice: mind-brain dualism (or, at the opposite, a braincentric point of view on human nature and behavior) and a hype in presenting potential benefits of new neurotechnologies. Both can modulate the patient’s expectations and influence the clinical and adverse effects of the device. But even if the authors cite the role of the media in shaping the public perception of new brain technologies and in building common knowledge about them, Mecacci and Haselager don’t delve deeply into the topic.

During the weekend of September 12^th, Georgia State University was home to fascinating conversations between prominent lawyers, neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists. The challenging, thought-provoking, and interdisciplinary nature of this forum was condensed within its title: Neurointerventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity.

Image from AJOB Neuroscience

Organized by the Atlanta Neuroethics Consortium (ANEC), the conference sought debate on the legal implications of using modern neuro-interventions. Some of the questions that were raised included, but were not limited to:

• What mental capacities does one need in order to be eligible for trial? For punishment? For release? For cognitive enhancement?
• What policies should be in place to control such neuro-interventions?
• What are the current neuro-interventions used in the courts, and how are they regulated?
• How should we view the relationship between mental capacity and both moral and legal responsibility? 

Image from Knowing Neurons

The conference gathered many prominent members of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. Some of the participants were Senior Judge Andre Davis (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit), Nita Farahany (Duke University), Walter Glannon (University of Calgary, Stephen Morse (University of Pennsylvania Law School), Justice David Nahmias (Supreme Court of Georgia), and Paul Root Wolpe (Emory Center for Ethics).

By Stephanie Hare

Stephanie Hare is a second-year PhD student studying neuroscience at Georgia State University. She is the recipient of the first 2CI Neuroethics Doctoral Fellowship and has research interests in psychiatry, law and the normative impact of neuroimaging research. You can connect with Steph via email at [email protected] or use her Twitter handle, @NeuroSteph.

On September 20, Emory University hosted a book talk and signing with Dr. Heidi Ravven, author of The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences and the Myth of Free Will. Dr. Ravven received an unsolicited $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to write a book rethinking traditional ethical frameworks and theories of moral agency. As a leading scholar on the work of Baruch Spinoza and Jewish philosophy, Ravven is perfectly situated to recognize socio-cultural assumptions regarding our beliefs about free will and agency, allowing for the consideration of alternative perspectives. For nine years, she performed research on new findings from psychology and neuroscience to gain deeper insight into the fundamental facts about human nature and flourishing, and in turn, what we can and should reasonably expect of each other as moral agents.

Via hamilton.edu

By John Banja 

John Banja, PhD is a medical ethicist at Emory University’s Center for Ethics, a professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, and the editor of AJOB Neuroscience.

In next month’s (December, 2014) issue of the American Journal of Bioethics, I’ll have an article appear on drug and alcohol use among health professionals. My paper is a counter-argument to one that appeared in JAMA in 2013,¹ which recommended that physicians who are involved in serious, harm-causing medical errors should be drug and alcohol tested on the spot. Now, I’ve studied the occurrence of medical errors for over a decade, and the more I thought about that proposal, the more I thought it was a bad idea. So I wrote the article, sent it to AJOB, and eventually it was accepted.²

The point of this blog post is to discuss something that stems from what I learned from the literature on drug and alcohol abusing physicians: most of them can go years, even decades, without the drug or alcohol abuse seriously affecting their work life or technical skills. Physicians who abuse alcohol—which is the most commonly abused substance—can go decades without anyone noticing performance deterioration.³ And when I asked an anesthesiologist recently about the second most popularly abused drugs, oxy- or hydrocodone based narcotics, and how long she thought a physician can be on them without anyone noticing, she pursed her lips and quietly said, “years” (although this doesn’t include intravenous injection of narcotics, where the impact on performance will probably become noticeable in months.)^3-5

Men and women experience fluctuations in sexual motivation over a lifetime. Whether sexual desire is enhanced or diminished at any particular time can depend on a number of factors and circumstances, but researchers from McGill University recently set out to determine specifically how pain impacts sexual behavior.¹ Results from this study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience earlier this year, were the topic of the most recent “Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News” discussion facilitated by Emory Women’s Gender and Sexuality graduate student Natalie Turrin and Neuroscience graduate student Mallory Bowers.

To study how pain impacts sexual motivation, researchers used a partitioned Plexiglas chamber where the partition contained small, semi-circular openings only large enough for the female mice to pass through (this study required that male mice be greater than 45 g and female mice smaller than 25 g). In this set-up, the females were free to either cross the partition and engage in sexual activity with the male mice or “escape” to the side where the males were unable to follow. Sexual motivation in this study was measured by how many total mounts occurred, and since mounting involves male participation, time spent on the male side of the chamber was also a measure of female sexual motivation. When researchers injected female mice with inflammatory agents in the vulva, hind paw, tail, or cheek to induce pain, female mice consistently participated in less mounting behavior and spent less time on the male side of the cage compared to no injections. Males, on the other hand, when injected with the same inflammatory agents in either the penis, hind paw, tail, or cheek, experienced unimpeded sexual activity (total number of mounts did not decrease compared to controls) in an open field paradigm where the males had unrestricted access to the females. Although it has been observed that female mice can have a higher sensitivity to pain than male mice,² researchers observed that male and female mice exhibited the same level of sensitivity towards inflammation to the hind leg according to the mouse grimace scale (MGS), a visual observation of a mouse’s facial features to determine pain levels.

The final experiments to study sexual activity involved rescuing the lack of sexual motivation from female mice using either an antinflammatory agent or two different prosexual drugs. The analgesic pregabalin reversed the reduction of total mounts that resulted from inducing pain in females, and according to the MGS, also reduced the level of pain. “Prosexual” drugs, apomorphine (APO) and melanotan-II (MT-II), had the same rescuing effect, but based on the MGS, did not have the ability to relieve pain from the inflammatory injections. It should be noted though that APO increases locomotion³ in mice, which may partially account for the females moving towards the male side of the cage more often.

By Walter Glannon, PhD

Walter Glannon is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Ethical Theory. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience editorial board.

Philosophers have argued that moral and criminal responsibility presuppose that actions cannot result from sequences that bypass agents’ control of their mental states as the causes of their actions (A. Mele, Autonomous Agents, 1995). Agents must act from their own mechanisms, which cannot be influenced by drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain, brainwashing or other interventions (J. M. Fischer and M. Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, 1998). Moral and criminal responsibility excludes all forms of brain manipulation.

Via thejuryexpert.com

With deep-brain stimulation (DBS) and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), neuroscientists can alter the brain and the mental capacities it mediates. The first device modulates dysfunctional neural circuits causing neurological and psychiatric disorders through electrical stimulation of targeted sites in the brain. The second allows people with extensive paralysis to bypass the site of injury and translate intentions into actions by transmitting signals from the motor cortex to a computer. Because these devices and the practitioners who implant and activate them manipulate the brain and mind, the philosophical argument noted above suggests that they undermine the mental control necessary for criminal responsibility. Yet by modulating, bypassing or replacing damaged or dysfunctional regions of the brain, they can restore the mental capacities necessary to form and execute action plans. By enabling rather than disabling these capacities, neural prosthetics allow people to regain enough control of their thought and behavior to act autonomously and be responsible for their actions. Moral and criminal responsibility does not depend on brain function or dysfunction as such but on whether or to what extent the brain enables or impairs the mental capacities necessary for behavior control. In cases of brain injury or disease impairing these capacities, brain implants may restore some of this control. Theoretically, it does not matter whether mental states and events are generated and sustained by a natural or artificial system, provided that agents identify these states and events as their own and is what moves them to action. Artificial devices implanted to regulate thought and behavior are not necessarily alien to the agent but can be considered as a type of expanded embodiment. They can ensure that the agent is the source of her actions. Brain- and mind-altering devices should make us reconsider the meaning of ‘autonomy,’ ‘ownership’ and ‘control’ in discussions of moral and criminal responsibility.

There is still time to register for the annual International Neuroethics Society Conference.

The schedule can be found here.

Learn the latest on the United States National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative and the European Commission Human Brain Project. Hear about international case studies of neuroscience in the courtroom, discuss human rights in the neuroethics dialogue AND engage in networking opportunities during breakfast, lunch and two receptions.

Speakers include NIH Directors, representatives from Congress, co-director of the Human Brain Project and a representative from the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

Public Event on November 13: “Neuroscience Knowledge & the Robotic Mind.”
We kick off our meeting with a thought-provoking public event on November 13 from 5 – 7 p.m.

All-day Annual Meeting on November 14: Speakers include

• Paul Catley, Open University, UK; 
• Jennifer Chandler, University of Ottawa; 
• Lisa Clayton, University of Manchester; 
• Katy deKogel, Dutch Ministry of Justice; 
• Nita Farahany, Duke University; 
• Chaka Fattah, US House of Representatives; 
• Stephen Hauser, President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues; 
• Tom Insel, National Institute of Mental Health; 
• George Koob, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism; 
• Story Landis, National Institute of Neurological Disease & Stroke; 
• Alan Leshner, American Association for the Advancement of Science; 
• Geoff Ling, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; 
• Henry Markram, Human Brain Project; 
• Steven Marks, Harvard University of Public Health; 
• Barbara Sahakian, Cambridge University & INS President; 
• John Williams, Wellcome Trust 

Check the website for updates www.neuroethicssociety.org 

Both events take place at the award-winning American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Building, 12th & H Streets, NW. Washington, D.C. Space is limited!

Photo credit: Anders Gade

By James Burkett

James Burkett is a 2014 recipient of the Emory Center for Ethics Neuroethics Travel Award. He is a graduate student in Emory's Neuroscience program, conducting research on social attachment and empathy in Dr. Larry Young's lab.

As an undergraduate, I took several introductory level philosophy classes while majoring in neuroscience. Some of it I could appreciate and most of it went over my head, but a thought that kept nagging me was, “haven’t neuroscientists solved all of these issues by now?” It was only after I had worked in neuroscience laboratories for a few years that I began to realize just how qualified all of our statements had to be due to the plethora of limitations that go along with any result. I began to wince anytime I heard someone use the word “proof” (only salesmen use the term “clinically proven”, but don’t get me started on that…). It seems clear to me now that, for the most part, natural scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars are really all working toward the same goal just in different, albeit complimentary ways. At the first “Neuroscience, ethics and the news” journal club of the semester, Lindsey Grubbs, a PhD student in Emory University’s English Department, facilitated our discussion about a topic that she has previously written about for this site. The main focus was on what role neuroscience can and should play in answering questions that have long been in the realm of the humanities and how these results should be communicated to the general public.

From the Daily Mail Online

By Neil Levy, PhD

Neil Levy is the Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, Head of Neuroethics at Florey Neuroscience Institutes, University of Melbourne, and a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. His research examines moral responsibility and free will.

The most hotly debated topic in neuroethics surely concerns the ethics of cognitive enhancement. Is it permissible, or advisable, for human beings already functioning within the normal range to further enhance their capacities? Some people see in the prospect of enhancing ourselves the exciting prospect of becoming more than human; others see it as threatening our humanity so that we become something less than we were.

In an insightful article, Erik Parens (2005) has argued that truthfully we are all on both sides of this debate. We are at once attracted and repulsed by the prospect that we might become something more than we already are. Parens thinks both frameworks are deeply rooted in Western culture and history; perhaps they are universal themes. We are deeply attached to a gratitude framework and to a more Promeathean framework. Hence we find ourselves torn with regard to self-transformation.

When someone feels torn in this kind of way about how they should think about or respond to something, they are ambivalent. Parens thinks that ambivalence is in fact the right response to cognitive enhancement: we ought to recognize that we are torn in both directions and acknowledge and respect this fact. We should not seek to resolve the ambivalence; we ought to embrace it. While I think that Parens highlights something of great importance when he argues that we are torn, I think he is wrong that we ought to attempt to respect both frameworks.

In a previous post, Kim Lang presented the views of several prominent neuroscientists and neurologists on spirituality and religion. With the knowledge that atheism is prevalent in the scientific community, she wondered how is it that some neuroscientists are nevertheless able to integrate their religious and scientific beliefs. One of the neuroscientists whose standpoint she surveyed was Michael Graziano, a Professor of Neuroscience at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Graziano believes that current research on the neurological basis of consciousness proves that spirituality is not only a natural tendency of humans, but also that its foundations are visible in the very structure of the brain [1].

Several questions arise from Dr. Graziano’s statement, and I will try to shed some light on each.

To start with, is neurotheology actually studying spirituality, religion, or both? What is the difference between the two? The conceptual separation between the two terms is definitely blurred. In this interview for Big Think, American Buddhist writer and academic Robert Thurman says that spirituality is “love and compassion”, is “going into a deeper area of your mind where you are asserting your free will”, where “you let go of your self-protective and defensive controls, and what you tap into is the nature of the universe, the flow of energy interconnecting things”. In contrast, Thurman believes religion is built upon spirituality, but has taken a secondary role as a tool of social and state organizations. Rituals and rules specific to each religion end up regulating the access to the spiritual, and become, in Thurman’s words, a control rather than a regulating mechanism. Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, who has recently authored a book called Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, seems to have similar views on the issue. He explains:

"Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating religion from spirituality is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit."

I recently interviewed fellow Neuroethics Blog contributors Dr. Julia Haas and Dr. Gillian Hue about courses they taught during the summer at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in South India as part of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI). Julia (who is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University) taught philosophy of science at Drepung Loseling Monastery in Karnataka, and Gillian (who is the senior program coordinator for the Emory University Initiative to Maximize Student Development, program associate in the Emory Neuroethics Program, and the Managing Editor for AJOB Neuroscience) taught neuroscience at the Sera Jey Monastery in Bylakuppe.

A neuroscience class at Sera Jey Monastery (Photo credit: Gillian Hue)

The ETSI (part of the Emory-Tibet Partnership) works to introduce science programs into the education of Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns. Julia explained that “for the past six years they had a pilot program in the north of India [in Dharamsala], and now it is gradually being rolled out as part of the curriculum for some of the higher monastic degrees.” Such degrees are offered at Drepung Loseling and Sera Jey, which function as monastic universities.

Anyone who turned on CNN this past summer probably remembers the most popular news stories ranging from Obama’s recent efforts to quell political violence in Iraq to Emory University’s admission of two Ebola patients. What was missing from several (if not all of these newscasts), however, was any mention of the continuation of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative right here at Emory University. Specifically, this past June, the Atlanta university welcomed the prestigious Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to confer over many pertinent issues surrounding various ethical and neuroscientific issues. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the session and catch a glimpse of the commission in action. Upon the commission’s completion, I found myself excited while simultaneously confused about the group’s overall mission and decided it would be worthwhile to investigate the Bioethics Commission further. Particularly, I hoped to understand why it is that Obama created a group to investigate several important issues discussed on this blog every week.

From Center for Genetics and Society

I made and abandoned several attempts at an opening sentence for this post and all of them included a deft way to bury the lead. The lead is this: I’m thrilled for two of my students whose video, Empathy and your Brain, was selected as one of the top submissions to the 2014 Brain Awareness Video Contest. Their video now has the chance to be selected as the fan favorite in the People’s Choice contest.

But why was I burying it?

“They said, ‘You can’t mess with my emotions. It’s like messing with me. It’s mind control.'” That’s what Cornell communication and information science professor Jeffrey T. Hancock reported in a recent New York Times article about the public outcry over the now infamous Facebook emotional manipulation study (read on for details). Hancock was surprised and dismayed over the response. He sees the advent of massive-scale sociology and psychology research on the Internet as a “new era” and he has a point. The days of mostly relying on college students as research subjects may be coming to an end. But how should research be conducted in this new online setting? Is it even appropriate to use data from web sites as it is collected now with little, if any, user knowledge and informed consent existing only in the form of privacy policies that nobody reads?¹ In this post I argue that the Internet is not the Wild West and therefore internet-based research should not be allowed to side step established practices of informed consent. Furthermore, significant changes must be made so that these new research opportunities are maximized in the best way possible.

Via Linkedin

 Earlier this year Facebook, the social network with well over 1 billion users, found itself in hot water after publishing a study in collaboration with academic researchers (including Hancock above) that sought to measure “emotional contagion” online.² In January of 2012 Facebook researchers altered the News Feed content of nearly 700,000 users without their knowledge or explicit consent. Users in a control group had random posts withheld from their News Feeds, irrespective of emotional content, whereas others either had some posts with a positive valence removed or some with a more negative tone hidden. They found that overall, omitting News Feed content – either negative or positive – seemed to affect the emotional valence of subsequent posts. And all those Facebook users who saw fewer emotion-tinged posts subsequently posted fewer updates. In effect, Facebook researchers were successfully able to manipulate the emotions of hundreds of thousands of users simply by altering their News Feed content. The researchers were able to study a phenomenon – emotional contagion – which can be very difficult to study in person due to a variety of potential experimental confounds and they were also able to achieve extraordinary statistical power. But by not explicitly asking for consent many users felt well, used.

By Emily Bell, PhD

Dr. Emily Bell is Researcher at the Neuroethics Research Unit, Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM). Dr. Bell’s MSc and PhD research in Psychiatry at the University of Alberta focused on investigating brain activity in mood and anxiety disorders using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Her postdoctoral work shifted her into the field of neuroethics, where she examined ethical and social challenges associated with deep brain stimulation in psychiatric disorders. As an investigator of the Neuroethics Core of NeuroDevNet, a Canadian Network of Centres of Excellence, Dr. Bell has been involved in a wide range of network activities and research in the area of pediatric ethics. This includes recent work on the implications of stigma for public health policies and practices in fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and ethical concerns associated with the transition of youth with neurodevelopmental disorders to adult health services. Dr. Bell has been awarded support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the Killam Trust. She is currently lead co-investigator on two CIHR grants, including one in the area of vulnerability and mental health research ethics.

Let me start by saying that I never planned to have a research or action agenda in ethics and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), as an umbrella term, describes a range of adverse developmental outcomes resulting from exposure to alcohol during pregnancy. Sure, my graduate degrees in psychiatry were an entry to understanding the challenges experienced by vulnerable patients, the social and relational aspects of health, and the deep and enduring force of stigma. All this prepared me to some degree for the complex web of ethical and social tensions in the study of FASD. These tensions cut across disciplines and domains and touch on alcohol policy, public health initiatives, concepts of motherhood, of maternal/fetal rights, and of specialized care for persons with disability throughout the life course. I was fortunate, the sheer complexity of the issues at stake also gave way to a network of colleagues (NeuroDevNet, a Canadian Network of Centres of Excellence) who themselves were jack of all trades; scientists and physicians with a sincere interest in and powerful grasp of the ethical issues faced by policy makers, pregnant women, and those affected by prenatal alcohol exposure.

From neurodevnet.ca

FASD is a leading cause of developmental disability and a significant public health issue accompanied by substantial lifelong burden, especially through secondary disabilities (i.e., difficulties at school, trouble with the law, challenges living independently). One of the key challenges associated with developing a comprehensive strategy for managing and preventing FASD is the need for a coordinated approach across a variety of social systems (i.e., foster care system, criminal justice system, health systems). Moreover, despite the fact that prenatal alcohol exposure continues to be a prevalent cause of developmental disability it receives far less attention than some other neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism. It’s probably not hard to imagine why the field as a whole might suffer from a lack of concerted attention. The stigma associated with drinking during pregnancy is well known and can dissuade women who drink during pregnancy from seeking treatment or disclosing their drinking habits (Eggertson, 2013). We anticipate that this stigma also filters down to the child or the individual with FASD (Bell et al., under review). The moral elements potentially influencing the construction of fetal alcohol syndrome have been well characterized. Armstrong (1998) has described how the diagnosis risks becoming just another way to label women and children who are “beyond hope and destined to be societal problems”.

One of the most famous examples of reminiscence includes a madeleine dipped in tea, which lead to almost 3,000 pages of recollection by the narrator in the beginning of Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, and we have all experienced these sensory triggers to a particular memory. Remembering the past helps us to re-examine our lives, make choices, and share personal accomplishments. We often use external devices to help us remember events big and small, and with advances in technology, we often record and make plans using a variety of digital devices such as iPhones, Microsoft’s Outlook, and even smart watches. We have the capability to store a lifetime of data with these advanced technologies, and with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, “selfies”, and blogs it has become routine for many people to document their lives on a daily basis in a digital form, a practice that has been referred to as “lifelogging.” The outcome of documenting activities digitally are human digital memories (HDM), which have been defined as “a combination of many types of media, audio, video, images, and many texts of textual content [1].

The concept of recording and then later having the ability to review certain documents was first proposed by Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1945 when he described the “Memex” (a combination of “memory” and index”) in an issue of Atlantic Monthly [2]. As described in the article, a Memex was “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”The device would look like a desk where documents were either recorded via microfilm or photography.

From u-tx.net

Since that time, many similar devices have been developed, but a revolutionary advance was seen with Microsoft’s SenseCam a wearable camera with a wide-angle lens and multiple sensors, including an infrared sensor to detect the presence of other people. The camera takes a photo every 30 seconds, resulting in up to 2,500 photos a day and is capable of storing 30,000 images in total. Photos can then uploaded to a computer and viewed later using a Microsoft application [3]. SenseCam was developed as a memory aid and there has been over 50 research institutions that have used the device in a variety of studies involving memory and behavior [4]. Notably the SenseCam has shown promising results in studies where it was used as memory aid for a child with anterograde amnesia [5] and with adult patients that were suffering from amnesia [3]. Aside from the medical purpose that a camera such as SenseCam could potentially serve, “lifelogging” has become more socially acceptable as we live in a digital age where Facebook posts and Twitter feeds are consumed constantly, and “selfies” are a regular occurrence at most events.

The SenseCam. From microsoft.com

REGISTER before September 15 to receive a discount. Learn more at www.neuroethicssociety.org

 The preliminary program can be found here.

Learn the latest on the United States National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative and the European Commission Human Brain Project. Hear about international case studies of neuroscience in the courtroom, discuss human rights in the neuroethics dialogue AND engage in networking opportunities during breakfast, lunch and two receptions.

Speakers include NIH Directors, representatives from Congressman, co-director of the Human Brain Project and a representative from the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.



Public Event on November 13: “Neuroscience Knowledge & the Robotic Mind.”
We kick off our meeting with a thought-provoking public event on November 13 from 5 – 7 p.m. More details will be on the website soon.

All-day Annual Meeting on November 14: Confirmed speakers include

• Paul Catley, Open University, UK; 
• Jennifer Chandler, University of Ottawa; 
• Lisa Clayton, University of Manchester; 
• Katy deKogel, Dutch Ministry of Justice; 
• Nita Farahany, Duke University; 
• Chaka Fattah, US House of Representatives; 
• Stephen Hauser, President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues; 
• Tom Insel, National Institute of Mental Health; 
• George Koob, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism; 
• Story Landis, National Institute of Neurological Disease & Stroke; 
• Alan Leshner, American Association for the Advancement of Science; 
• Geoff Ling, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; 
• Henry Markram, Human Brain Project; 
• Steven Marks, Harvard University of Public Health; 
• Barbara Sahakian, Cambridge University & INS President; 
• John Williams, Wellcome Trust 

Check the website for updates www.neuroethicssociety.org 

Both events take place at the award-winning American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Building, 12th & H Streets, NW. Washington, D.C. Space is limited!


**The Neuroethics Program will be offering a limited number of travel awards. Stay tuned for details!