The Ethics of Forgetfulness Drugs

Drugs that could modify or erase memories could soon be possible. We shouldn't rush to judge them unethical, says a Nature opinion piece by Adam Kolber, of the Neuroethics & Law Blog.



The idea of a pill that could make you forget something, or that could modify the emotional charge of a past experience, does seem rather disturbing.



Yet experiments on animals have gone a long to revealing the molecular mechanisms behind the formation and maintanence of memory traces. Much of the early work focussed on dangerously toxic drugs but recently more targeted approaches have appeared.



Kolber argues that we should not shy away from research in this area or brand the whole idea unethical. Rather we should consider the costs and benefits on a case-by-case basis.

The fears about pharmaceutical memory manipulation are overblown. Thoughtful regulation may some day be appropriate but excessive hand-wringing now over the ethics of tampering with memory could stall research into preventing post-traumatic stress in millions of people. Delay could also hinder people who are already debilitated by harrowing memories from being offered the best hope yet of reclaiming their lives.

He says that

Given the close connection between memory and a sense of self, some bioethicists...worry that giving people too much power to alter their life stories could ultimately weaken their sense of identity and make their lives less genuine.



These arguments are not persuasive. Some memories, such as those of rescue workers who clean up scenes of mass destruction, may have no redeeming value. Drugs may speed up the healing process more effectively than counselling, arguably making patients more true to themselves than they would be if a traumatic experience were to dominate their lives.

This is a complex issue. I can see his point, although I'm not sure the rescue worker example is the best one. A rescue worker, at least a professional one, has chosen to do that kind of work. The experiences that are part of that job are ones they decided to have - or at least that they knew were a realistic possibility - and that may be an expression of their identity.



The argument is perhaps more convincing in the case of someone who, quite unexpectedly, suffers an out-of-the-blue trauma. In this case, the trauma has nothing to do with their lives; if it interferes with their ability to function, it might "stop them from being themselves".



Kolber ends by quoting a fascinating story from Time magazine in 2007, which I didn't catch at the time:

Take a scenario recounted by a US doctor in 2007 (ref. 9). The doctor had biopsied a suspected cancer patient and sent a tissue sample to a pathologist while the woman was still in the operating room. Thinking she was completely sedated, the pathologist announced a bleak prognosis over the intercom.



The patient, who had received only local anaesthesia, heard the news and began to shriek, “Oh my God. My kids!” An anaesthesiologist standing by quickly injected her with propofol, a sedative that causes some people to forget what happened a few minutes before they were injected.



When the woman woke up, she had no memory of hearing her prognosis.

Kolber A (2011). Neuroethics: Give memory-altering drugs a chance. Nature, 476 (7360), 275-6 PMID: 21850084

The Ethics of Forgetfulness Drugs

Drugs that could modify or erase memories could soon be possible. We shouldn't rush to judge them unethical, says a Nature opinion piece by Adam Kolber, of the Neuroethics & Law Blog.



The idea of a pill that could make you forget something, or that could modify the emotional charge of a past experience, does seem rather disturbing.



Yet experiments on animals have gone a long to revealing the molecular mechanisms behind the formation and maintanence of memory traces. Much of the early work focussed on dangerously toxic drugs but recently more targeted approaches have appeared.



Kolber argues that we should not shy away from research in this area or brand the whole idea unethical. Rather we should consider the costs and benefits on a case-by-case basis.

The fears about pharmaceutical memory manipulation are overblown. Thoughtful regulation may some day be appropriate but excessive hand-wringing now over the ethics of tampering with memory could stall research into preventing post-traumatic stress in millions of people. Delay could also hinder people who are already debilitated by harrowing memories from being offered the best hope yet of reclaiming their lives.

He says that

Given the close connection between memory and a sense of self, some bioethicists...worry that giving people too much power to alter their life stories could ultimately weaken their sense of identity and make their lives less genuine.



These arguments are not persuasive. Some memories, such as those of rescue workers who clean up scenes of mass destruction, may have no redeeming value. Drugs may speed up the healing process more effectively than counselling, arguably making patients more true to themselves than they would be if a traumatic experience were to dominate their lives.

This is a complex issue. I can see his point, although I'm not sure the rescue worker example is the best one. A rescue worker, at least a professional one, has chosen to do that kind of work. The experiences that are part of that job are ones they decided to have - or at least that they knew were a realistic possibility - and that may be an expression of their identity.



The argument is perhaps more convincing in the case of someone who, quite unexpectedly, suffers an out-of-the-blue trauma. In this case, the trauma has nothing to do with their lives; if it interferes with their ability to function, it might "stop them from being themselves".



Kolber ends by quoting a fascinating story from Time magazine in 2007, which I didn't catch at the time:

Take a scenario recounted by a US doctor in 2007 (ref. 9). The doctor had biopsied a suspected cancer patient and sent a tissue sample to a pathologist while the woman was still in the operating room. Thinking she was completely sedated, the pathologist announced a bleak prognosis over the intercom.



The patient, who had received only local anaesthesia, heard the news and began to shriek, “Oh my God. My kids!” An anaesthesiologist standing by quickly injected her with propofol, a sedative that causes some people to forget what happened a few minutes before they were injected.



When the woman woke up, she had no memory of hearing her prognosis.

Kolber A (2011). Neuroethics: Give memory-altering drugs a chance. Nature, 476 (7360), 275-6 PMID: 21850084

Science Without Method

Everyone knows that The Scientific Method is the key to doing science. No-one's quite sure what it is, but they know it's there, and it's something rather special.


It's not. When scientists sit down to work, we don't use "the scientific method" to make discoveries. We use microscopes, brain scanners, telescopes and particle detectors, all of which are just ways of looking at things. They're special in terms of what they let you look at, but that's it. Science is looking.

It's true that in order to do good science, you need to be careful. You need to avoid falling into various traps that lead to misleading data and false conclusions. You could call the care taken over scientific observations "The Scientific Method", and some people do, but that's misleading, because none of it is specific to science.

One of the most important considerations in science is making make sure that you have a proper control condition. This sounds technical, but all it really means is that you need to make sure that you really are looking at what you set out to observe.

To discover the effect of a drug on people, say, you just give them the drug and look to see what happens, using the appropriaye equipment. However, you need to compare this to an appropriate control, such as a placebo pill, because if you don't, you're not just seeing the effect of the drug, many other things as well, such as the placebo effect, the passage of time, random events.

In the same way, if you wanted to find out what happens when you push that little button on your TV remote, you wouldn't mash five other buttons at the same time. To discover what was in the top drawer of your dresser, you'd look there, not in the bottom drawer.

That's really all there is to it. It can be complicated to do this in practice, but the principle is that simple: you take care to look at what you're interested in.

It's said that part of the "Scientific Method" is forming hypotheses, or theories. Scientists do that, but so do we all, all the time. You might have a theory that your boss is an alcoholic, or that your husband is cheating on you, or that your car's spark plug is bust.

You might call these ideas, notions, hunches, suspicions, thoughts, fears, but they're still hypotheses about the world. Indeed, scientists often use those words too. One word is as good as another.

If your boss was an alcoholic, the way to prove it might be to somehow give him a breathalizer test after lunch, or sneak a peek at his credit card bill and see how much he spends on booze. That would be an observation to test your hypothesis, or in other words, an experiment (another formal word that scientists don't always use).

That's all science is. Looking at things carefully, getting ideas, and checking them out.

I said this in my last post, but it bears repeating: this is why most objections to, or concerns about, "science" or worse "modern science", fail. Any given scientist, or any given scientific theory, may be wrong, just like anyone or anything else. Yet to say that "Science can't" do something is saying that looking and thinking can't do it. To blame "Science" for something is to blame the human mind.

Note: This post is a follow-up to Science Doesn't Say, and the second in a three-part series.

Science Without Method

Everyone knows that The Scientific Method is the key to doing science. No-one's quite sure what it is, but they know it's there, and it's something rather special.


It's not. When scientists sit down to work, we don't use "the scientific method" to make discoveries. We use microscopes, brain scanners, telescopes and particle detectors, all of which are just ways of looking at things. They're special in terms of what they let you look at, but that's it. Science is looking.

It's true that in order to do good science, you need to be careful. You need to avoid falling into various traps that lead to misleading data and false conclusions. You could call the care taken over scientific observations "The Scientific Method", and some people do, but that's misleading, because none of it is specific to science.

One of the most important considerations in science is making make sure that you have a proper control condition. This sounds technical, but all it really means is that you need to make sure that you really are looking at what you set out to observe.

To discover the effect of a drug on people, say, you just give them the drug and look to see what happens, using the appropriaye equipment. However, you need to compare this to an appropriate control, such as a placebo pill, because if you don't, you're not just seeing the effect of the drug, many other things as well, such as the placebo effect, the passage of time, random events.

In the same way, if you wanted to find out what happens when you push that little button on your TV remote, you wouldn't mash five other buttons at the same time. To discover what was in the top drawer of your dresser, you'd look there, not in the bottom drawer.

That's really all there is to it. It can be complicated to do this in practice, but the principle is that simple: you take care to look at what you're interested in.

It's said that part of the "Scientific Method" is forming hypotheses, or theories. Scientists do that, but so do we all, all the time. You might have a theory that your boss is an alcoholic, or that your husband is cheating on you, or that your car's spark plug is bust.

You might call these ideas, notions, hunches, suspicions, thoughts, fears, but they're still hypotheses about the world. Indeed, scientists often use those words too. One word is as good as another.

If your boss was an alcoholic, the way to prove it might be to somehow give him a breathalizer test after lunch, or sneak a peek at his credit card bill and see how much he spends on booze. That would be an observation to test your hypothesis, or in other words, an experiment (another formal word that scientists don't always use).

That's all science is. Looking at things carefully, getting ideas, and checking them out.

I said this in my last post, but it bears repeating: this is why most objections to, or concerns about, "science" or worse "modern science", fail. Any given scientist, or any given scientific theory, may be wrong, just like anyone or anything else. Yet to say that "Science can't" do something is saying that looking and thinking can't do it. To blame "Science" for something is to blame the human mind.

Note: This post is a follow-up to Science Doesn't Say, and the second in a three-part series.

Science Doesn't Say

How many times have you heard someone say that "science tells us" - or that it shows, reveals, says, proves, or makes clear?


It's very common. But it's misleading.

Scientists never talk like this while they're doing science, which suggests that there's something wrong with it. Rather, we say: "Our experiment was inspired by the fact that X, which was shown last year by Y et al".

Y et al aren't just some bunch of famous smart guys who came up with an idea and told everyone, and everyone believed them, because scientists respect authority - which is what "Science Says" means.

No, Y et al is a paper, or other report, and when we say that it shows something, we mean it quite literally. Scientific data is like a photograph or, more accurately perhaps, a window, through which we can just see X.

'Science' is nothing special. It's just looking at stuff.

Indeed, there are scientific papers where the key result is literally a photo, usually taken down a microscope or through a telescope, but still. This paper is a great example. The key result was that the little yellow thing in the third image grew some extra sprouts from day 0 to day 1. It takes some knowledge of the context to understand why that's so interesting, but the actual result is right there.

However, even where the result isn't literally a picture, it is still a window.

This line shows the chemical composition of a particular part of someone's brain. Each of the peaks on the curve corresponds to a particular chemical, and the height of the peak tells us how much of that chemical there is.

There's nothing mysterious about why particular chemicals cause particular peaks. It's well understood. (Conceptually, it's like each molecule is a bell, of a particular size and shape, and they make different sounds when you shake them around. The line is what you get when you shake the piece of brain up, and record how much of each sound you hear back.)

Getting this data is a high tech process requiring special equipment, but all that's just background detail when you actually come to do it. Just as a photographer doesn't need to worry about the mechanics of their camera, and you don't need to worry about how your eye gathers and focusses light as you're reading this.

There is an element of authority and trust in science, but not in any special sense. To take published evidence at face value, you do need to trust that the authors haven't manipulated it, and to trust that they gathered it in the way they described.

But the same goes for any other kind of evidence. Any photograph could be Photoshopped, or the caption could be misleading. Anything you read could be made up. In everyday life, we don't worry about this unless there's a particular reason to.

A scientific journal is just a newspaper with access to better equipment.

There's a view in which "Science" is a kind of oracle that hands down judgements from on high, with scientists as priests who record and proclaim the revelations. This leads to no end of problems.

It easily leads to the view that science is somehow especially hard to understand, or even that we can't understand it, so there's no point in trying. It can lead to the idea that science can't be very interesting compared to the real world. It leads to questions what good it can do, or whether science can ever answer 'the big issues'.

When you realize that science is just looking at stuff, you see that those concerns, far from being valid, don't even make sense.

Science Doesn't Say

How many times have you heard someone say that "science tells us" - or that it shows, reveals, says, proves, or makes clear?


It's very common. But it's misleading.

Scientists never talk like this while they're doing science, which suggests that there's something wrong with it. Rather, we say: "Our experiment was inspired by the fact that X, which was shown last year by Y et al".

Y et al aren't just some bunch of famous smart guys who came up with an idea and told everyone, and everyone believed them, because scientists respect authority - which is what "Science Says" means.

No, Y et al is a paper, or other report, and when we say that it shows something, we mean it quite literally. Scientific data is like a photograph or, more accurately perhaps, a window, through which we can just see X.

'Science' is nothing special. It's just looking at stuff.

Indeed, there are scientific papers where the key result is literally a photo, usually taken down a microscope or through a telescope, but still. This paper is a great example. The key result was that the little yellow thing in the third image grew some extra sprouts from day 0 to day 1. It takes some knowledge of the context to understand why that's so interesting, but the actual result is right there.

However, even where the result isn't literally a picture, it is still a window.

This line shows the chemical composition of a particular part of someone's brain. Each of the peaks on the curve corresponds to a particular chemical, and the height of the peak tells us how much of that chemical there is.

There's nothing mysterious about why particular chemicals cause particular peaks. It's well understood. (Conceptually, it's like each molecule is a bell, of a particular size and shape, and they make different sounds when you shake them around. The line is what you get when you shake the piece of brain up, and record how much of each sound you hear back.)

Getting this data is a high tech process requiring special equipment, but all that's just background detail when you actually come to do it. Just as a photographer doesn't need to worry about the mechanics of their camera, and you don't need to worry about how your eye gathers and focusses light as you're reading this.

There is an element of authority and trust in science, but not in any special sense. To take published evidence at face value, you do need to trust that the authors haven't manipulated it, and to trust that they gathered it in the way they described.

But the same goes for any other kind of evidence. Any photograph could be Photoshopped, or the caption could be misleading. Anything you read could be made up. In everyday life, we don't worry about this unless there's a particular reason to.

A scientific journal is just a newspaper with access to better equipment.

There's a view in which "Science" is a kind of oracle that hands down judgements from on high, with scientists as priests who record and proclaim the revelations. This leads to no end of problems.

It easily leads to the view that science is somehow especially hard to understand, or even that we can't understand it, so there's no point in trying. It can lead to the idea that science can't be very interesting compared to the real world. It leads to questions what good it can do, or whether science can ever answer 'the big issues'.

When you realize that science is just looking at stuff, you see that those concerns, far from being valid, don't even make sense.

Ban These Sick Ape-Man Frankensteins

According to a new report, urgent action is required to stop scientists creating a monstrous race of apes with fully functional human brains (just as Christine O'Donnell warned us about those mice), thus causing Planet Of The Apes to come true.

OK, that's not quite what the Academy of Medical Sciences said. But judging from most of the media coverage, you might think it was.

The report is actually about "Animals containing human material" and it notes that under British law, experiments of this kind are covered by generic animal research rules, but there are no special animal-human regulations.

Should there be?

I think there should be. We as a society allow experiments on animals or animal embryos that we don't allow on humans, even on human embyros. Clearly, we need to decide what we're going to do about organisms that have both human and animal DNA, or whatever. This doesn't mean restricting it - to clear up the rules could also facilitate such research, by making it explicit what is allowed.

However, we should tread carefully here. This is an area where our intuitions can lead us astray.

Although we have absolutely no idea how to make an animal-human "hybrid", or even whether it's possible at all, the very idea of it has many people worried. It's probably a case of the uncanny valley and lots of cultural baggage (Planet of the Apes et al).

So, for whatever reason, we have a hang-up about making monstrous ape-men. Fair enough. So long as we remember that this is entirely hypothetical, and that it might, for all we know, be literally impossible.

Yet other things in this debate are very real. Over-zealous regulation of research could easily end up delaying, say, a cure for Alzheimer's for, say, 10 years. That would be dooming tens of millions of people to suffering and death.

The problem is, that's hard to picture. It's hard to imagine how bad Alzheimer's is unless you have personal experience. Even if you do, it's hard to multiply that badness by ten million anonymous, hypothetical people. "One ape-man is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".

Delaying science is easy to do (for politicians), and hard to picture why it's bad. Whereas "a monstrous ape-man" is the exact opposite. Easy to imagine - just look at the media interest in this story - yet nowhere close to being reality.

This is a problem. The human mind and the way we think about these issues is a problem. Even when that mind is safely inside a nice normal human skull.

Ban These Sick Ape-Man Frankensteins

According to a new report, urgent action is required to stop scientists creating a monstrous race of apes with fully functional human brains (just as Christine O'Donnell warned us about those mice), thus causing Planet Of The Apes to come true.

OK, that's not quite what the Academy of Medical Sciences said. But judging from most of the media coverage, you might think it was.

The report is actually about "Animals containing human material" and it notes that under British law, experiments of this kind are covered by generic animal research rules, but there are no special animal-human regulations.

Should there be?

I think there should be. We as a society allow experiments on animals or animal embryos that we don't allow on humans, even on human embyros. Clearly, we need to decide what we're going to do about organisms that have both human and animal DNA, or whatever. This doesn't mean restricting it - to clear up the rules could also facilitate such research, by making it explicit what is allowed.

However, we should tread carefully here. This is an area where our intuitions can lead us astray.

Although we have absolutely no idea how to make an animal-human "hybrid", or even whether it's possible at all, the very idea of it has many people worried. It's probably a case of the uncanny valley and lots of cultural baggage (Planet of the Apes et al).

So, for whatever reason, we have a hang-up about making monstrous ape-men. Fair enough. So long as we remember that this is entirely hypothetical, and that it might, for all we know, be literally impossible.

Yet other things in this debate are very real. Over-zealous regulation of research could easily end up delaying, say, a cure for Alzheimer's for, say, 10 years. That would be dooming tens of millions of people to suffering and death.

The problem is, that's hard to picture. It's hard to imagine how bad Alzheimer's is unless you have personal experience. Even if you do, it's hard to multiply that badness by ten million anonymous, hypothetical people. "One ape-man is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".

Delaying science is easy to do (for politicians), and hard to picture why it's bad. Whereas "a monstrous ape-man" is the exact opposite. Easy to imagine - just look at the media interest in this story - yet nowhere close to being reality.

This is a problem. The human mind and the way we think about these issues is a problem. Even when that mind is safely inside a nice normal human skull.

Blindsight and Consciousness In The Brain

A new paper claims to show the neural activity associated with consciously seeing something:

Awareness-related activity in prefrontal and parietal cortices in blindsight reflects more than superior visual performance.

You might think it would be easy to find the neural correlates of seeing stuff. Just pop someone in the scanner and show them a picture.

However, it's not that simple, because that wouldn't tell you which brain activations were associated with concious awareness as such, as opposed to all of the other things that happen when we see a picture, many of which may be unconscious.

The new paper makes use of a patient, "GY", who has what's known as blindsight, a mysterious phenomenon caused by damage to the primary visual cortex on one side of the brain. In GY's case this was caused by head trauma at age 8. He's now 52, and is unable to see anything on the right side of his visual field. He only sees half the world.

However, he is still able to respond to some kinds of visual stimuli on the right, as if he could see them. But he reports that he doesn't. Blindsight is a rare phenomenon but one that's been extensively studied, because of its obvious scientific and indeed philosophical interest.

In this study the authors used fMRI to try to work out the neural correlates of concious awareness as opposed to unconcious responses. They showed GY a set of horizontal and vertical bars. His task was to say whether the horizontal bars were on top or not.


The stimuli were shown on either the left or the right. The trick was that they set it up such that it was equally easy in either the "good" or the "blind" side of the brain. In order to do that, they had to make the contrast of the bars much less bright on the "good" side.

What happened? As expected, behavioural performace was equal whether the stimuli were on the left or the right. GY got the judgement right about 75% of the time.

However, his brain responded much more strongly to stimuli on the good side - stimuli that were consciously perceived. Activations appeared all over the cerebral cortex in the occipital, parietal and frontal lobes, as you can see in the pic at the top.

The only area more activated by the unconscious stimuli was a tiny blob in the amygdala.

So what does this show? Is it "the neural correlates of conscious awareness", that Holy Grail of neuro-philosophers?

Maybe. It's a clever experimental design, which rules out some alternative explanations. It's hard to argue that the conciously perceived stimuli were just stronger, and hence more likely to affect the brain. They were actually much fainter.

And it's hard to argue that this represents subconscious information processing, or the process of making the decision whether the horizontal bars were top or bottom, because that was also going on in the blind condition and performance was the same.

Yet my concern is that the main route by which visual information gets into the cortex from the eyes, is via V1, the part which was damaged on one side. So in a sense it's no surprise at all that the cortex was more activated in the conscious condition.

Maybe this is the whole point - maybe this study shows us that consciousness is to do with cortical processing. However, when you put it like that, it seems a bit of an anticlimax. I don't think anyone would seriously dispute that. The cortex does almost everything. The interesting debates are about where in the cortex consciousness happens, if indeed it's localized at all, and what kind of processing underlies it.

It's unlikely that all of the activated areas were directly linked to conscious awareness. But we don't know which of them were.

Persaud, N., Davidson, M., Maniscalco, B., Mobbs, D., Passingham, R., Cowey, A., & Lau, H. (2011). Awareness-related activity in prefrontal and parietal cortices in blindsight reflects more than superior visual performance NeuroImage DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.081

Blindsight and Consciousness In The Brain

A new paper claims to show the neural activity associated with consciously seeing something:

Awareness-related activity in prefrontal and parietal cortices in blindsight reflects more than superior visual performance.

You might think it would be easy to find the neural correlates of seeing stuff. Just pop someone in the scanner and show them a picture.

However, it's not that simple, because that wouldn't tell you which brain activations were associated with concious awareness as such, as opposed to all of the other things that happen when we see a picture, many of which may be unconscious.

The new paper makes use of a patient, "GY", who has what's known as blindsight, a mysterious phenomenon caused by damage to the primary visual cortex on one side of the brain. In GY's case this was caused by head trauma at age 8. He's now 52, and is unable to see anything on the right side of his visual field. He only sees half the world.

However, he is still able to respond to some kinds of visual stimuli on the right, as if he could see them. But he reports that he doesn't. Blindsight is a rare phenomenon but one that's been extensively studied, because of its obvious scientific and indeed philosophical interest.

In this study the authors used fMRI to try to work out the neural correlates of concious awareness as opposed to unconcious responses. They showed GY a set of horizontal and vertical bars. His task was to say whether the horizontal bars were on top or not.


The stimuli were shown on either the left or the right. The trick was that they set it up such that it was equally easy in either the "good" or the "blind" side of the brain. In order to do that, they had to make the contrast of the bars much less bright on the "good" side.

What happened? As expected, behavioural performace was equal whether the stimuli were on the left or the right. GY got the judgement right about 75% of the time.

However, his brain responded much more strongly to stimuli on the good side - stimuli that were consciously perceived. Activations appeared all over the cerebral cortex in the occipital, parietal and frontal lobes, as you can see in the pic at the top.

The only area more activated by the unconscious stimuli was a tiny blob in the amygdala.

So what does this show? Is it "the neural correlates of conscious awareness", that Holy Grail of neuro-philosophers?

Maybe. It's a clever experimental design, which rules out some alternative explanations. It's hard to argue that the conciously perceived stimuli were just stronger, and hence more likely to affect the brain. They were actually much fainter.

And it's hard to argue that this represents subconscious information processing, or the process of making the decision whether the horizontal bars were top or bottom, because that was also going on in the blind condition and performance was the same.

Yet my concern is that the main route by which visual information gets into the cortex from the eyes, is via V1, the part which was damaged on one side. So in a sense it's no surprise at all that the cortex was more activated in the conscious condition.

Maybe this is the whole point - maybe this study shows us that consciousness is to do with cortical processing. However, when you put it like that, it seems a bit of an anticlimax. I don't think anyone would seriously dispute that. The cortex does almost everything. The interesting debates are about where in the cortex consciousness happens, if indeed it's localized at all, and what kind of processing underlies it.

It's unlikely that all of the activated areas were directly linked to conscious awareness. But we don't know which of them were.

Persaud, N., Davidson, M., Maniscalco, B., Mobbs, D., Passingham, R., Cowey, A., & Lau, H. (2011). Awareness-related activity in prefrontal and parietal cortices in blindsight reflects more than superior visual performance NeuroImage DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.081

Blind Spots & Braintrust

This is a review of two recently published books about ethics: Bazerman and Tenbrunsel's Blind Spots (not to be confused with this one), and Patricia Churchland's Braintrust.

The pair may come from the same publisher (Princeton), but they couldn't be more different.


Blind Spots is a good book. It tells a story in a clear and compelling fashion, which is what a book is for.

The story is that we often act unethically, not because we're faced with ethical questions and decide to pick the "bad" option, but because we fail to see that there is an ethical issue at all.

This is not the same as saying that 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. That old phrase warns against trying to be good and, as a result, causing evil, because your plans go wrong. Blind Spots is saying, even if all of your attempts to be good work out just fine, you might still cause evil despite that.

For example, you could be a good employee, who never calls in sick unnecessarily, kind to your friends and colleagues, and a generous charity donor.

Unfortunately, you're an accountant connected to Enron, and your work - ultimately - consists of defrauding innocent people. But of course, you don't think of it like that, because we don't tend to think about things "ultimately".

Which is hard to disagree with. At worst, you could say it's obvious, although I think it's still something we ought to be reminded of. That's not all there is to the book, though: it also discusses how this happens and suggests ways to avoid it within organizations.

For example, the authors give an example of how setting up rewards and punishments to "make people be ethical", can make them less so, by encouraging people to think of the issue as a personal trade-off between gain and loss, rather than an ethical dilemma - what the authors call "ethical fading".

A day-care centre was annoyed at the fact that some parents were picking up their children late. This was antisocial because it meant staff had to work late into the evening.

So they started charging parents a late fee. Not a big one, but enough to send people a message: this is wrong, don't do. But in fact what happened was that late pickups became more common.

Previously, many people were making an effort to be on time, as a matter of principle. Once the fees were in place, it stopped being an ethical issue and just became a financial trade-off: is it worth paying the fee to get an extra hour?

Of course, you could make the fees higher to get around this, but even then, you've caused ethical fading, and you'll be relying on the sanctions from that point on.


Braintrust, by contrast, is just not a good read. The bulk of the book consists of discussions of various neurotransmitters and brain areas and how they may be related to human social behaviour. Oxytocin, for example, may make us behave all trusting and kindly, as it's involved in maternal bonding. There's a long discussion of the neurochemistry of male sexual behaviour in voles.

It's not clear how this is relevant to ethics. Whether it's oxytocin that does it, or something else, and whether voles are a useful model of human behaviour or not, clearly sometimes we trust people and sometimes we don't. That's psychology. And biology can't yet explain it.

Churchland doesn't claim that the various biological concepts that she covers can fully explain anything, and she doesn't vouch that all of these findings are rock solid. Which is good, because they can't, and they're not. So why spend well over half of the book talking about them?

Churchland's big idea seems to be that human morality emerges out of our more general capacity for sociability. Hence all the stuff about oxytocin and "the social brain". OK. But I'd have said that's a given - there's obviously some relation between sociability and morality.

I think there is an interesting idea in here, albeit not very clearly expressed, namely that morality isn't a special function of the brain, but just one of the many forms in which our social cognition can take.

In other words, I think the claim is that ethics isn't just related to sociability, it is sociability. Even asocial animals care about their own welfare, in terms of pleasure and pain; social ones become social when they extend this caring to others; intelligent social animals including humans and maybe some primates also have a system for inferring the motivations and thoughts of others.

At the end of the book, Churchland stops reviewing neuroscience, and starts talking about the implications for philosophy. This is best section of the book, but it's too short.

Churchland makes the interesting point, for example, that when we are considering philosophical "ethical dilemmas", like the famous trolley problems, we may not be applying any kind of ethical "rules" as such. Rather, she thinks that our moral reasoning is pretty much a kind of pattern recognition based on previous experience - like all our other social reasoning.

Someone who'd just read a book about the horrors of Stalinism might tend to adopt an anti-consequentialist, every-life-is-sacred approach. Whereas if you'd just watched a movie in which the hero, reluctantly but rightly, decides to sacrifice one guy to save many other people, would do the opposite. Then the ethical "rules" might be confabulated to cover it.

This is a nice idea. It's open to criticism, but it's a serious suggestion, and one that deserves a decent discussion. Sadly, there isn't one. If only there were more room in the book for this kind of stuff - but oxytocin covers so many pages.

Basically, the good parts of this book are not about the brain at all.

Reading Braintrust is like going on date but then bumping into an annoying friend who insists on coming along for dinner. Jesus, The Brain, you want to say. I like you and all, but seriously, you are getting in the way right now.

Links: Other blog reviews.

Blind Spots & Braintrust

This is a review of two recently published books about ethics: Bazerman and Tenbrunsel's Blind Spots (not to be confused with this one), and Patricia Churchland's Braintrust.

The pair may come from the same publisher (Princeton), but they couldn't be more different.


Blind Spots is a good book. It tells a story in a clear and compelling fashion, which is what a book is for.

The story is that we often act unethically, not because we're faced with ethical questions and decide to pick the "bad" option, but because we fail to see that there is an ethical issue at all.

This is not the same as saying that 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. That old phrase warns against trying to be good and, as a result, causing evil, because your plans go wrong. Blind Spots is saying, even if all of your attempts to be good work out just fine, you might still cause evil despite that.

For example, you could be a good employee, who never calls in sick unnecessarily, kind to your friends and colleagues, and a generous charity donor.

Unfortunately, you're an accountant connected to Enron, and your work - ultimately - consists of defrauding innocent people. But of course, you don't think of it like that, because we don't tend to think about things "ultimately".

Which is hard to disagree with. At worst, you could say it's obvious, although I think it's still something we ought to be reminded of. That's not all there is to the book, though: it also discusses how this happens and suggests ways to avoid it within organizations.

For example, the authors give an example of how setting up rewards and punishments to "make people be ethical", can make them less so, by encouraging people to think of the issue as a personal trade-off between gain and loss, rather than an ethical dilemma - what the authors call "ethical fading".

A day-care centre was annoyed at the fact that some parents were picking up their children late. This was antisocial because it meant staff had to work late into the evening.

So they started charging parents a late fee. Not a big one, but enough to send people a message: this is wrong, don't do. But in fact what happened was that late pickups became more common.

Previously, many people were making an effort to be on time, as a matter of principle. Once the fees were in place, it stopped being an ethical issue and just became a financial trade-off: is it worth paying the fee to get an extra hour?

Of course, you could make the fees higher to get around this, but even then, you've caused ethical fading, and you'll be relying on the sanctions from that point on.


Braintrust, by contrast, is just not a good read. The bulk of the book consists of discussions of various neurotransmitters and brain areas and how they may be related to human social behaviour. Oxytocin, for example, may make us behave all trusting and kindly, as it's involved in maternal bonding. There's a long discussion of the neurochemistry of male sexual behaviour in voles.

It's not clear how this is relevant to ethics. Whether it's oxytocin that does it, or something else, and whether voles are a useful model of human behaviour or not, clearly sometimes we trust people and sometimes we don't. That's psychology. And biology can't yet explain it.

Churchland doesn't claim that the various biological concepts that she covers can fully explain anything, and she doesn't vouch that all of these findings are rock solid. Which is good, because they can't, and they're not. So why spend well over half of the book talking about them?

Churchland's big idea seems to be that human morality emerges out of our more general capacity for sociability. Hence all the stuff about oxytocin and "the social brain". OK. But I'd have said that's a given - there's obviously some relation between sociability and morality.

I think there is an interesting idea in here, albeit not very clearly expressed, namely that morality isn't a special function of the brain, but just one of the many forms in which our social cognition can take.

In other words, I think the claim is that ethics isn't just related to sociability, it is sociability. Even asocial animals care about their own welfare, in terms of pleasure and pain; social ones become social when they extend this caring to others; intelligent social animals including humans and maybe some primates also have a system for inferring the motivations and thoughts of others.

At the end of the book, Churchland stops reviewing neuroscience, and starts talking about the implications for philosophy. This is best section of the book, but it's too short.

Churchland makes the interesting point, for example, that when we are considering philosophical "ethical dilemmas", like the famous trolley problems, we may not be applying any kind of ethical "rules" as such. Rather, she thinks that our moral reasoning is pretty much a kind of pattern recognition based on previous experience - like all our other social reasoning.

Someone who'd just read a book about the horrors of Stalinism might tend to adopt an anti-consequentialist, every-life-is-sacred approach. Whereas if you'd just watched a movie in which the hero, reluctantly but rightly, decides to sacrifice one guy to save many other people, would do the opposite. Then the ethical "rules" might be confabulated to cover it.

This is a nice idea. It's open to criticism, but it's a serious suggestion, and one that deserves a decent discussion. Sadly, there isn't one. If only there were more room in the book for this kind of stuff - but oxytocin covers so many pages.

Basically, the good parts of this book are not about the brain at all.

Reading Braintrust is like going on date but then bumping into an annoying friend who insists on coming along for dinner. Jesus, The Brain, you want to say. I like you and all, but seriously, you are getting in the way right now.

Links: Other blog reviews.

My Grandma: Neurophilosopher

John Galliano is the British designer who got videoed being a bit unpleasant and ended up in court on racism charges.


His defence is that he was drunk and/or high. Which from the video he fairly obviously was. But here's an interesting quote from his lawyer:

Some things may have come out of his mouth that didn’t come from his brain.

So where did they come from, then... hmm. Don't answer that.

I doubt that the lawyer was actually trying to say that Galliano's mouth was moving of its own accord or under the control of some other organ. Rather she was expressing the idea that "my brain" in this context doesn't mean, literally, the whole of the grey blob of neurons in my skull.

Rather "my brain" means, roughly, "that part of my brain responsible for rational thought".

My grandmother once talked about a friend who'd had a stroke. She said, as far as I can remember, "Sometimes the stroke means you can't talk or walk, which is bad enough, but sometimes it gets into your brain and that can be really nasty."

Of course she knew that all strokes happen in the brain. What she was saying was that some strokes, but not all, affect the part of the brain responsible for "me" as a person - thoughts, emotions, and so forth.

So, this is all anecdotal evidence, but there seems to be a popular, common-sense temptation to believe in the "me part" of the brain, a tendency which neuroscientists are not immune to and which can lead to dubious conclusions.

I'd love to see someone do a proper study of what non-neuroscientists, ideally people with little exposure to neuroscience like children, think about the brain. A bit like this, but really in depth. I suspect that you'd find that many of the ideas underpinning today's neuroscience had their origins in pre-scientific, common sense intuitions.

We neuroscientists are human, and we have neuro-intuitions too. But if neuroscience has taught us anything, it's not to trust those.

My Grandma: Neurophilosopher

John Galliano is the British designer who got videoed being a bit unpleasant and ended up in court on racism charges.


His defence is that he was drunk and/or high. Which from the video he fairly obviously was. But here's an interesting quote from his lawyer:

Some things may have come out of his mouth that didn’t come from his brain.

So where did they come from, then... hmm. Don't answer that.

I doubt that the lawyer was actually trying to say that Galliano's mouth was moving of its own accord or under the control of some other organ. Rather she was expressing the idea that "my brain" in this context doesn't mean, literally, the whole of the grey blob of neurons in my skull.

Rather "my brain" means, roughly, "that part of my brain responsible for rational thought".

My grandmother once talked about a friend who'd had a stroke. She said, as far as I can remember, "Sometimes the stroke means you can't talk or walk, which is bad enough, but sometimes it gets into your brain and that can be really nasty."

Of course she knew that all strokes happen in the brain. What she was saying was that some strokes, but not all, affect the part of the brain responsible for "me" as a person - thoughts, emotions, and so forth.

So, this is all anecdotal evidence, but there seems to be a popular, common-sense temptation to believe in the "me part" of the brain, a tendency which neuroscientists are not immune to and which can lead to dubious conclusions.

I'd love to see someone do a proper study of what non-neuroscientists, ideally people with little exposure to neuroscience like children, think about the brain. A bit like this, but really in depth. I suspect that you'd find that many of the ideas underpinning today's neuroscience had their origins in pre-scientific, common sense intuitions.

We neuroscientists are human, and we have neuro-intuitions too. But if neuroscience has taught us anything, it's not to trust those.

Consciousness? FFS...

An interesting paper on the neurobiology of conscious awareness: Unconscious High-Level Information Processing.


The authors propose that consciousness may be associated, not with activation in any given area of the brain, but with recurrent information processing between areas, a kind of neural ping-pong.

When presented with sensory information, say the sight of an object, signals travel up through the brain from "primary" sensory areas to "higher" areas associated with more complicated processing. They call this the Fast Feedforward Sweep, or "FFS". Maybe not the best acronym.

Anyway, depending on the nature of the stimulus, this can lead to activation in almost any part of the brain. However, they say that it's not enough to generate consciousness; only if the later areas feedback to the earlier areas, and start a recurrent processing loop, does this happen.

This stands in contrast to the popular view, which seems to fit with common sense, that primary areas are unconscious and that consciousness is directly associated with activity in the higher areas, in particular, the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

The authors refer to fMRI and EEG studies showing that even "high level" processes, such as selective attention to stimuli, and inhibition of an action, can be triggered by subconscious cues, and that this is associated with activation in the prefrontal cortex - unconscious activation.

The details of these studies are fairly arcane but the point is that the prefrontal cortex is generally agreed to be the most developed, "highest level" part of the brain. If anywhere in the brain was going to be the seat of the soul, it's the PFC.


This shouldn't come as a surprise, though. While it's tempting to look for a part of the brain which "does" conscious experience - the "me module" - Daniel Dennet pointed out a while ago that this temptation is motivated by a fundamental confusion.

Likewise, while it seems common sense that conciousness is the "highest mental function" and therefore must be located in the highest brain area, this is a presumption: consciousness is a mystery, and we don't know if it's a high level function or not, or whether that question even makes sense.

Nor should the fact that consciousness isn't an inevitable consequence of high-level cognition come as a shock: in fact, that would be impossible. As Ryle pointed out in The Concept of Mind, this would create an infinite regression. Any conscious experience has to come from somewhere.

Right now I'm concious of choosing certain words rather than others in typing this post, in a conscious attempt to make it read better. But I'm not aware of all of the rules and experiences that guide my choices. I just feel that some words work. This feeling seems to come out of nowhere, or rather, out of the words themselves.

It isn't, of course, it's a product of calculations taking place in my brain, but I've no idea what they are. I wouldn't want to be, either: I'm too busy typing.

van Gaal S, & Lamme VA (2011). Unconscious High-Level Information Processing: Implication for Neurobiological Theories of Consciousness. The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry PMID: 21628675

Consciousness? FFS...

An interesting paper on the neurobiology of conscious awareness: Unconscious High-Level Information Processing.


The authors propose that consciousness may be associated, not with activation in any given area of the brain, but with recurrent information processing between areas, a kind of neural ping-pong.

When presented with sensory information, say the sight of an object, signals travel up through the brain from "primary" sensory areas to "higher" areas associated with more complicated processing. They call this the Fast Feedforward Sweep, or "FFS". Maybe not the best acronym.

Anyway, depending on the nature of the stimulus, this can lead to activation in almost any part of the brain. However, they say that it's not enough to generate consciousness; only if the later areas feedback to the earlier areas, and start a recurrent processing loop, does this happen.

This stands in contrast to the popular view, which seems to fit with common sense, that primary areas are unconscious and that consciousness is directly associated with activity in the higher areas, in particular, the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

The authors refer to fMRI and EEG studies showing that even "high level" processes, such as selective attention to stimuli, and inhibition of an action, can be triggered by subconscious cues, and that this is associated with activation in the prefrontal cortex - unconscious activation.

The details of these studies are fairly arcane but the point is that the prefrontal cortex is generally agreed to be the most developed, "highest level" part of the brain. If anywhere in the brain was going to be the seat of the soul, it's the PFC.


This shouldn't come as a surprise, though. While it's tempting to look for a part of the brain which "does" conscious experience - the "me module" - Daniel Dennet pointed out a while ago that this temptation is motivated by a fundamental confusion.

Likewise, while it seems common sense that conciousness is the "highest mental function" and therefore must be located in the highest brain area, this is a presumption: consciousness is a mystery, and we don't know if it's a high level function or not, or whether that question even makes sense.

Nor should the fact that consciousness isn't an inevitable consequence of high-level cognition come as a shock: in fact, that would be impossible. As Ryle pointed out in The Concept of Mind, this would create an infinite regression. Any conscious experience has to come from somewhere.

Right now I'm concious of choosing certain words rather than others in typing this post, in a conscious attempt to make it read better. But I'm not aware of all of the rules and experiences that guide my choices. I just feel that some words work. This feeling seems to come out of nowhere, or rather, out of the words themselves.

It isn't, of course, it's a product of calculations taking place in my brain, but I've no idea what they are. I wouldn't want to be, either: I'm too busy typing.

van Gaal S, & Lamme VA (2011). Unconscious High-Level Information Processing: Implication for Neurobiological Theories of Consciousness. The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry PMID: 21628675

The Unhelpful Brain

A reader pointed me to this study from a few months back which used fMRI to look at the effects of "Coaching With Compassion".

Unfortunately, the authors say at the outset that their paper is "Not to be quoted or reproduced without the expressed permission of one of the authors prior to publication" so I'm not going to... oh, hang on. Have I just broken the rules by quoting that? I hope not. But fair enough.

The paper describes an fMRI study of brain responses to being shown a variety of statements. The participants were students and the statements were about the university experience. They were either positive, negative, or neutral.

The authors found that the human brain responds differently to different kinds of stuff.

That's it. Well that ought to be it. The paper discusses things like Coaching With Compassion, The Ideal Self, and Intentional Change Theory, which are awesome no doubt, but they're not what this study is about.

Here's why. Before getting scanned, the students got two sessions of academic and career coaching. One session was focussed on hopes and goals for the future, dreams, and what they wanted to achieve in their studies. Yes you can! The other session, with a different coach, was all about challenges, fears, and disappointments. Maybe you can't.

The positive and the negative statements in the fMRI bit were based on these coaching interviews. The coach who did the nice bit said the nice statements (via recorded video clips) and vice versa. The positive and negative coaches were randomly assigned to each participant to avoid coach effects, and so on, which is good, the fMRI methodology was fine, and the data analysis looks good.

Who'd have thought it? Different parts of the brain were activated by positive, negative and neutral statements, and these were roughly what you'd expect from previous studies.

The reason this says nothing about coaching is that while participants got coaching beforehand, they all got the same coaching. These statements would have been positive or negative anyway - coaching or no. We don't know what, if any, effect coaching had.

Had half of them been randomized to get coached, and the other half assigned to a "placebo" coaching, say chatting about sports or the weather, then it would tell you something about coaching.

But that wouldn't mean it told you anything interesting about it, and this is the deeper problem with studies like this, of which this is only a good example.

Suppose that you found that positive, Compassionate Coaching made the brain respond more strongly to positive statements, or changed brain activity during decision-making, or whatever. That would be a result, and it might be really strong and statistically very significant, but for the life of me I can't see why you'd care, if you were interested in coaching.

Of course coaching affects the brain, and not just as a side effect: if it works, it'll work via changing the brain, in some way. But everything that changes behaviour changes the brain. That's what the brain does. How it does so is a detail of interest only to neuroscientists.

If you're a coach, or want to get coaching, or want to know whether coaching is effective, then you should look at coaching. The brain will be there, in the background, activating and deactivating happily, but it's not going to help you.

These kinds of studies happen, I think, because there's an inherent allure to seeing "the neural basis of" thoughts and feelings. It seems paradoxical and disturbing: you can't see thoughts! They're made of pixie dust and magic!

In the same way, quantum physics is universally agreed to be "weird". But it's always there, everywhere in the universe, and always has been. We're the weird ones, with our strange conviction that the most everyday thing in the world is really bizarre. God must find quantum physics incredibly boring.

Brains are not quite as commonplace as quarks, but they are at work whenever anyone, or most animals for that matter, does anything. Of course: how else would behaviour happen? We find this odd and fascinating. As a neuroscientist I'm no exception, the allure never "wears off". But that's just us.

Even people trying to be neuro-skeptical often fall into this trap. Here's Steven Rose in book review:

The weird locution – “it was not me; it was my brain that made me do it” – is increasingly used by neuroscientists who are sure that human thought and action are reducible to brain processes, and by legal defence teams pleading diminished responsibility for their clients. The trouble is that this way of speaking – and thinking, if such a term remains permissible – leaves unresolved who is the “me” that the brain drives.”

Well, human thought and action are reducible to brain processes. To deny this or (as is more common) imply that it's unhelpful, but not explain why, gets us nowhere.

The point is that all behaviour is brain activity, and that's why saying "It's brain activity" tells us nothing about any given behaviour. It’s an empty truism, like saying that a fire was started by something hot. Well, duh.