 There are plenty of seats down here in the front. And I understand we'll have some good chance for question and answer at the end of our lecture. So keep that in mind as you're selecting your seat. I'm Ruth Bergen. I'm the director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics and welcome to conversations about ethics. This presentation this evening is actually the 13th installment in our series which explores the ethical dilemmas that influence healthcare throughout the life cycle, beginning, middle and end of life. Always present decision-making challenges and that's what these conversations are meant to address. We do present this series twice a year in partnership with the Ecumenical Center, with our center here at the UT Health Science Center through the generous support of Methodist healthcare ministries. Would anybody who is here representing Methodist healthcare ministries or the Ecumenical Center please stand for a moment and be recognized so we can thank you. Thank you. All right, so a few brief housekeeping details if you will indulge me. Dr. Paul Ruth Wolpe and the planning committee have disclosed no relevant financial relationships with any commercial interests related to this activity. If you are seeking continuing education credit, I've gotta hold this up, please be sure to sign in at the appropriate desk according to your professional affiliation and that is the record of your attendance and those who are seeking continuing medical education credit will need to log on to our CME website at cme.utesca.edu a month from now and click on post conference to claim your credit and all of this information is on the record of attendance form that you should have and which if you didn't you can get one on your way out. Don't give this form back to us. It's for your information to connect you to your CME. All right, for continuing nursing education credit you must complete the evaluation certificates and they will be mailed within two weeks. For CEU credit fill out the survey provided at the sign in and return it to the CEU desk before you leave and you will receive a certificate at that time. If you're unsure about any of all of this we have wonderful volunteers at the back who'll be glad to answer your questions. Now for everyone here tonight we really value your feedback and we would ask you to thoughtfully evaluate this evening's program. We'll email an evaluation form to you after the presentation or you may use the QR code or link which is on the back of your program that you have in your hand now. Tonight's presentation is titled Is My Mind Mine? Neuroscience, Privacy, and the Self. It has long been taken for granted that a person's innermost thoughts are private but now neuroimaging techniques are challenging this assumption. This is a relatively new discipline of neuroethics which confronts the ethical, social and legal implications of this new era and our speaker Dr. Paul Root-Wolpe is considered a founder of neuroethics. Dr. Wolpe is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Bioethics, the Raymond Shinazi Distinguished Research Professor of Jewish Bioethics and the Director of the Emory University Center for Ethics. His work focuses on the social, religious, and ideological impact of biotechnology on the human condition. He is co-editor of the American Journal of Bioethics which is the premier scholarly journal in bioethics and he sits on editorial boards of more than a dozen professional journals. Dr. Wolpe is a frequent contributor and commentator in broadcast and print media. He has a recorded TED talk. He was profiled in The Atlantic Magazine as a brave thinker of 2011 and he is the senior bioethicist for NASA. Please help me welcome Dr. Paul Root-Wolpe. Thanks so much. Well, it's a really great pleasure for me to be here and I wanna thank everybody who invited me and has been so gracious in hosting me. It's been just a pleasure since I got here. So what I wanna do tonight, I was asked to talk about neuroscience and though I am going to give a significant part of the talk to the question in the title, I'm also gonna talk generally about this field of neuroethics and some of the kinds of interesting questions that it raises. I'm not gonna give you a lot of answers. I'm not sure there are a lot of answers yet but I really actually believe that it's everyone's responsibility to think about these questions because the kind of impact that neuroscientific findings are gonna have are gonna affect everybody and believe me, I know all the bioethicists, you don't wanna leave it up to us. I know these people. So let's move right along and talk about what this field is. The economist way back in 2002 said, if asked to guess which group of scientists is most likely to be responsible one day for overturning the essential nature of humanity, most people might suggest geneticists. In fact, neuro technology poses a greater threat and moreover it's a challenge that is largely ignored by regulators and the public. Now notice what's interesting about this is that they think of genetics and neuro technology as a threat. They didn't, for example, say this day of great promise. And there is that idea that these kinds of biotechnologies pose a threat because they are changing or at least challenging the essential nature of how we think about ourselves and neurologically where we put so much of our sense of identity. So neuroethics is a new field. This is, these are definitions of it one I wrote way back in 2003, one that Mike Kazanaga, the cognitive neuroscience wrote about 2007 or eight in his book, The Ethical Brain. And I think what neuroethics actually is is some combination of these two things. That is on one hand it really is an examination of neuro technologies. A lot of the questions that we raise about neuroscience right now are about brain imaging and deep brain stimulation and psychopharmaceuticals and we're gonna talk about all of those. But on the other hand it raises a whole series of conceptual and social and psychological and philosophical questions. I talked a lot about those questions at lunch today for those of you who are there. And what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna focus a little bit more on the technologies this evening. So there are different ways to frame these issues. We could talk about the ethical issues that neuroscience raises. Questions like privacy, which we are gonna talk about. Altering function, brain enhancement. So that's one way we could give a whole talk just using that as our conceptual schema. Or we could do it through the next neuro technologies which is actually pretty much what I'm gonna do tonight. Or we can do it through brain approaches. There are different ways to think about the brain diagnostically, conceptually for neuroscientists, for clinicians. Or we can do it through findings which is a little bit also what I did and we'll do a little bit tonight at lunch today. And that is neuroscience has had some findings that have challenged the way we think about ourselves as human beings and the way we think about our brain. I'm gonna talk about agency and free will in a moment. So let's start with that idea. Challenging ideologies and belief. And I'm gonna do this very briefly. But there are some fundamental concepts that neuroscience has been challenging. First is the sense of agency. There actually was a MacArthur funded four, three, four year project on neuroscience and the law. Because one of the places where neuroscience has become most problematic is in forensics. That is, what do brain scans mean in the courtroom? Recently the American Society for Neuroradiology had a consensus conference at our center. What was happening was lawyers would have a client that was guilty, you know, accused of some terrible crime and they'd throw them in the brain scanner hoping that the scan would find something that looked like an anomaly in their brain so that they could use that as a potential mitigating factor. And the American Society for Neuroradiology began to get very concerned because their members were being called as expert witnesses and the American Society for Neuroradiology didn't like what their members were saying. It was very often what they were saying actually wasn't supported by the science. So we did a consensus conference we called in people from all sides and we helped write the Society for Neuroradiology's standards now for their members testifying in court. But that's just a microcosm of what's happening in courtrooms right now as neuroscience has begun more and more to understand functional states of the brain that might affect people's sense of agency even to the point where some of them are arguing in the work especially by Libet on free will that actually we don't have agency in the way in which we think we have it at all. So Benjamin Libet's experiment which has become very famous was an experiment basically where he asked people to engage in an action it was just a small act of moving their finger and he asked them to determine with a through a mechanism, a clock when they decided to move their finger. Sounds simple enough but he was imaging their brain while they did it and what he discovered was that their brain activated 400 milliseconds before they said they decided to move their finger and there have been a number of studies since and what he decided that meant was and what many others have argued is that we actually make no decisions at all. We think we do but our brain makes a decision pre-consciously informs our conscious mind of what it is and we think of that as having made a conscious decision. So it's a very complex and very elaborate conversation going on about this but there is a whole area of neuroscience that suggests that we have no real agency that is conscious agency and that we have no free will that in fact our brains are making decisions and operating in some sense on their own and informing us and we interpret that as having made a conscious decision. And as I mentioned one of the things that has been argued is once that conscious decision comes to mind once our brain informs us of that conscious decision we can decide not to do it. So some people have argued we don't have free will we only have free won't. Very famously Phineas Gage was a man who had the iron bar shot through his head through his left eye and out the back of his head where lodged and he lived. He was a railroad worker who was tamping down some dynamite and it blew this thing through his head and the reason he has become so important as a symbol is because they didn't understand up until then that how much of who we are personality, memory, disposition even things like love and attachment were connected to the structure of the brain what that bar did was give Phineas Gage basically an instant lobotomy. And he changed completely from a very kind of responsible family man into a profligate couldn't hold a job had real memory problems and he changed completely into a different kind of person which started people asking the question so is there really no me outside this few pounds of mush between my ears that determines everything I am right now we many people kind of take that for granted that everything that I am is encapsulated in my brain but back then they didn't think that they thought that a lot of what I was was due to my soul and so you could mess my brain up all you wanted and I'd still be me and what Phineas Gage did was he really began to make people question that. I don't know how many of you have read about it or heard about it but now they're talking about doing head transplants and some of you are shaking your head so they've done it on mice a number of them in China but let's think about that as a philosophical conundrum for a moment, okay so if you take my head off and you put it on another human being who is that human being? Very interesting question because we assume for a minute in our culture that that human being is going to be me that's gonna have my memories and my thoughts and we'll consider my wife, its wife and my kids, its kids and so it will be me just with a different body but we actually don't know that we actually don't know that first of all, we've got enormous systems of enormous nervous systems outside of the brain we've got extraordinary complex set of nerves in the gut which create their own nervous system that probably has its own kind of intelligence maybe I won't just be me maybe I'll actually be some hybrid of me and then the person whose body I now my head now inhabits we actually don't know the answer to that question we're very cerebrocentric but other cultures are not so for example in Japan the seat of personhood is thoracic it's in the gut and that's why Japanese have such trouble with cataviric transplants with transplants from cadavers because in order to do a transplant you have to keep a cadaver alive that is you have to keep the blood flowing to its organs you have to keep it oxygenated well to Japanese traditional thought if the organs in your if the organs in your chest and stomach are alive and operating you are alive in fact your personality is alive even if you are brain dead whatever that means in the West the idea of a thoracic personality is why the Japanese commit sapuku they cut when they want to commit suicide they disembowel themselves they don't cut their heads off and they do that because that is the seat of personhood in Japanese traditional thought and it affects them so let's say for a minute what if they're right and what if so much of who we are and what we are is actually not cerebral but thoracic then maybe when we transplant that head onto another person we are not creating a new me we are actually creating some kind of a hybrid between me and that other person we are going to really know from mice we are actually not going to know it even from monkeys we won't know it until we try it on human beings if in fact we do and of course the most basic question is that of consciousness an issue that we still don't understand uh... William James I read this quote earlier today but William James in 1902 asked the question I pointed, I put it up here to show you that it is an old question and one we're still struggling with and in this quote he basically says you know those of us who think about religious experience we get really upset when people say to us that we are someday going to be able to understand all of this biologically because our experience of having religious experience is not one that we experience as something reducible to biology it is something really so much more uh... profound to us than that and that's why we feel outraged and hurt for we know that whatever our peculiarities our mental status have their own substantive value as revelations of the living truth 1902 we were trying to understand the relation between our biological our physiology and our biological functioning and the things that we experience and we still are it hasn't changed what i want to do now is go through a few of our technologies and talk about what the ethical challenges are and then spend a little time focusing on the one that has to do with privacy which is brain imaging so i'm going to talk a little bit about cycle farm then we're going to talk about brain imaging and privacy and then very briefly i'm going to talk about brain computer interfaces and neural nets and electrical simulations these are two others that have some important ethical questions but we just don't have time so i'm going to skip those two let's start with cycle farm ecology and neuro enhancement so we are we're already very much manipulating and micromanaging the chemical of our brains through using these technologies we have you know we certainly have therapeutics we have things that we take because of prescribed but then we also have all these whole categories other ones that now have names like cognosuticals and moodosuticals and sensosuticals which are drugs that actually change various aspects of who we are pretty soon and these drugs are getting more and more sophisticated and more and more specific so probably won't be too long before we micromanage our mood our affective and cognitive states throughout the day we'll wake up in the morning and we'll take our wake and do our work and then we'll have our lunch and we'll take some pill that'll keep us from having that post-prandial depression that you get about two or three where in most other cultures they take a siesta but we're too stubborn to actually do that so we just fall asleep at our desks you know and then you know at the end of the day on the way home we'll pop sublime the drug that makes you want to see your family again i don't know but you know that kind of thing is not as far-fetched as it sounds we take more psychopharmaceuticals in the united states than any other country by far uh... we take more drugs than any other country except for one is anybody know who beats us germany germany germany takes more drugs than we do but they take less psychopharmaceuticals than we do uh... and we worry about it more than any other country we take them and feel very guilty in them but we take them and uh... now we're beginning to think in a in a different way about them so let's talk about some of them so what about the amphetamine salts the uh... drugs which riddolin and aterol are that are stimulants that we have taken for many many many years for attention deficit disorder and other things like that and now we have modafinil and other drugs like modafinil which are unlike riddolin and aterol are not amphetamines uh... modafinil is an attention enhancing drug that is uh... not a systemic exciter it doesn't do what amphetamines do uh... and uh... there's a lot of question about these drugs you know one of the things we have to understand a lot of drug taking is a function not of disease and infirmity but of society's interpretation of disease and infirmity so attention deficit disorder for example is an adaptive trait in a hunting population but it's maladaptive in a society where you're asking an eight-year-old kid to sit for seven hours in a chair now one might argue that in fact we're the ones who are maladaptive by asking a seven-year-old kid to sit for seven hours in a chair and that the kinds of behaviors that he demonstrates that were evolved over thousands of years of hunting and gathering are actually would be fine if we had a different environment we fit into an environment and we define disease within an environment either as adaptive or maladaptive but now we've got these drugs like modafinil that have no amphetamine that aren't amphetamines and have no systemic uh... effect like amphetamines and the question now becomes what about those drugs they seem to be very safe drugs should we take them should we start taking them recreationally or for particular purposes in fact here's an interesting question about that should it be required should it be required so they took some pilots they put him in flight simulators they gave some a modafinil analog and they gave others a placebo and then they threw flight emergencies at them in the simulator and the fascinating thing was not only did the pilots who are on modafinil respond more quickly to the emergency they responded more appropriately if you actually could prove that that was true in a number of follow-up studies and now i gave you a choice to be on a plane with a pilot that took modafinil or one that didn't what would you choose and what about your surgeon and your bus driver and your train driver and anyone else who has a responsibility of human beings at you know in their hands and needs to be attentive in order to execute that so maybe we should start saying some of our uh... professionals should be forced to take modafinil and in fact what about in the workplace what if i take modafinil and i get more productive because i'm taking it and you sit next to me in fact that was a question that they asked wired magazine one of my co-workers a rising star at the firm is using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours our boss started getting on my case for not being as productive so i tell him about should i snitch on him or should i take modafinil myself so maybe pretty soon everybody's going to be taking modafinil because of you or some other drug like that because if you don't take it you're not going to be competitive in the workplace or what about memory first let's talk about memory suppression so propranolol and other beta blockers of now being used in memory suppression therapeutically for people with PTSD what's interesting about is people think that we now have drugs that can suppress memory we actually don't it's more complicated that's more interesting than that one of the things that we kind of know but might not realize we know is that emotion cements memory so if i'm walking along in the woods and the lion jumps out at me right that emotional trauma is evolutionarily designed to make me remember that lions live here on the other hand when i sit for four hours at the department of motor vehicles staring at the ceiling tiles waiting for them to call my number there's no particular reason why remember that right and i don't right we do things for now hours and hours that we have no real memory of but as soon but if someone at the department of motor vehicles started screaming all of a sudden or had an epileptic fit in from i'd remember that so when you emotional valence is tied into memory what propranol actually does is when you evoke the memory so in PTSD someone we memory so that tiger the lion jumps out at me i have this acute fear response and over time that fear response is supposed to extinguish i'm supposed to remember where the lion lives but every time i walk by there for the next thirty years i'm not supposed to collapse in a heap of fear but what PTSD is is in failure to uncouple the memory from the acute emotional response and what propranol does is it decouples that connection and it allows the memory to extinguish in a normal way or at least that's a theory uh... of it but the point is that it's not about memory suppression it doesn't suppress a memory decouples insofar as it works and we know that's still all experimental but the point is that we do not yet have away to suppress memory like in some movies that you know have come out uh... eternal sunshine of the spotless mine and others that suggests that someday we might but what we really might have very soon is the opposite this is our candela won the noble prize for uh... discovering how memories are encoded in neurons and uh... he is the c l of memory pharmaceuticals which is trying to develop a memory pill presumably for uh... all timers and other uh... memory deficits i'm gonna tell you something considering how many kids are on adderall and riddolin who do not have a diagnosis of a d d where it's used either record you know there's a bimodal distribution of of uh... diagnosis of a d d uh... it's more common in inner cities and it's more common in wealthy suburbs and it dips in sort of the uh... middle-class differences in the wealthy suburbs it's the parents pushing the diagnosis while in the inner cities it's school management pushing the diagnosis right school officials to use it as management so the point is that uh... in the wealthy suburbs you know if johnny it's like a johnny cocker in uh... uh... poem if johnny gets a b he must have a d d right you know my kid got a b must have a d d i'll take the doctor get some riddolin into him and maybe now i'm not i'm not talking riddolin is a good drug for those who are actually have a d d and are diagnosed i'm not speaking against that i'm talking about it it's overuse in many places just imagine what happens when the memory enhancement pill comes out right how many parents in those wealthy sub in a in all kinds of school actually if it turns out to boost memory and be fairly benign uh... i am i i i i have myself at the age of fifty eight what is called by position as normal middle-aged forgetting it looks something like this you know i was just talking to uh... looks like that you can recognize it very quickly uh... if there was a safe effective memory enhancement pill where i would immediately remember my best friend's name you know i might be tempted and i'm sure a lot of you would too uh... and then there's trust induces like oxytocin that's larry young one of the uh... uh... premiere researchers and oxytocin really interesting set of questions oxytocin uh... seems to enhance trust and when they do these experiments where they give people oxytocin then they play the psychological trust games there is a significant difference between people who take oxytocin and those who don't in terms of their willingness to trust others so raises a lot of interesting question by the way you can go on the web right now and supposedly get oxytocin cologne that you're supposed to put on and then try to you know get it and the woman that you're dating will then trust you more there's a real problem with that though meaning makes absolutely no sense first of all there's no oxytocin in any of that oxytocin it's really expensive you're not going to get on the web nine it doesn't even make sense because i put it on and i'm breathing it in all day she might breathe it in for a minute or two but i'm going to start trusting everybody now it makes no sense so oxytocin though if it does work that way and there's a lot of experiments there's some interesting questions so we have a paranoid schizophrenic it's someone who believes everyone's after me doesn't trust his doctors either is it ethical to give him some oxytocin if we can show that that would increase his trust what about in kids on the autistic spectrum who have social bonding issues would be ethical to give it to them and try to increase their social bonding issues i mean these are really interesting questions that we're gonna have to ask ourselves and it might end up being an effective drug if if my wife and i go into marital counseling just you know little internasal spritz of oxytocin before we go in and you know might break down some of those distrust barriers that got us into counseling in the first place i'm not trying to change you i'm trying to enhance you so you know pretty soon we may have the tools to do that and people are using it this is already two thousand seven okay so this is eight years ago uh... nature magazine did uh... question of the people read it how many of them use enhancement technologies in twenty percent or so we're using uh... unprescribed enhancement drugs and now the rate is much much higher in addition we're talking about uh... there all kinds of conferences human enhancement nano technology exploring human enhancement uh... there all kinds of conferences now talking about using these technologies a lot of articles here's one that i uh... these two uh... i was involved in writing uh... and john chatterjee is a neurologist who invented the term cosmetic neurology arguing that pretty soon people are going to go to neurologists and just asked for a series of enhancement type drugs to increase their neurological functioning uh... so we had so here's the different the very set of interesting questions about enhance uh... around cycle for let's move on to brain image my thoughts they roam freely who can ever guess them well the answer is right now we're beginning to be able to gets them not just gets them something actually fundamentally different is happening you know in ethics we don't usually get things that are fundamentally new we get new versions of questions that we've asked for centuries my argument is that we're about to enter a fundamentally new situation that we've never had before in human history and what is that for all of human history without any single exception in the whole history of humanity any information you got any meaningful information you got through my peripheral nervous system through language through gesture through me blushing or sweating or my eyes dilating or whatever it is whether you were looking at me or whether you're using a polygraph or whatever was was all through the peripheral nervous system you couldn't get any meaningful information at all through my central nervous system through my brain and let's forget the spinal cord for now uh... but from directly from my brain you couldn't get any information at all they tried we had for knowledge we had craniometry these were supposedly science trying to use the shape of the brain or the size of the brain to get meaningful information for people and of course they how many phrenologists and craniometrists do you know they weren't all that successful uh... but now for the first time in human history and i'm gonna try to show this to you quickly we are actually developing the ability to get subjective information directly from your brain i'm gonna have to prove that to you which i will hopefully won't admit it but assuming for a minute that i can prove it to you the big question is doesn't make a difference and there are people that say fundamentally it doesn't and i say fundamentally it does first very quickly let me prove this to you so kamatani and tong showed that they could brain image someone while that person was looking at images and they could tell whether the person was looking at checkers or spots whether they were looking at stripes now and that that that work was done eight or nine ten years ago we've gotten to the point now where they can tell uh... they can give you twenty faces have you look at one brain image you and tell which face you're looking at or which movie scene you're looking at turhan cannelly uh... showed that the uh... size of the singulate gyrus was correlated part of the brain correlated with extroversion and introversion so by looking at that the size of that they can in general not in any particular individual it's an aggregate so people with larger ones tend to be more extroverted but no particular individual can we tell that about here's the fascinating one liz felps did this extraordinary study she took white males and black males and she put them in a first she gave them this test of well understood and validated test innate racist ideology it it doesn't mean you are racist or that you're on prejudice against others it means that the your thought processes involve racist so she had a score of racist ideology for each person in her study then she put them in a scanner and she flashed in front of them pictures of known and unknown white and black males so uh... known black male faces like celebrities and sports stars and politicians and then and and white faces and then just random white and black faces and what she discovered was a correlation strong correlation between racist ideation is as measured on that scale and activation of the amygdala which is the part of the brain that it that evokes fear and anxiety and and discomfort in white males when they viewed non-familiar black faces now when you think about it makes little sense if i have some discomfort african-americans uh... especially african-american males and you show you know chris rocker someone i might not feel anxiety but then if you start to show faces i'm not familiar with i might show that anxiety but here's the point and she hates when i say this was was felps does because no one's ever done the study but can we actually reverse engineer that that is can i know nothing about you put you in a scanner flash some pictures of unfamiliar faces of another race by the way did the same thing was not true in the black males that is their race ideation was not correlated with amygdala activation in straight in unfamiliar white face but could i do it and say uh-huh this person has racist ideation i'll show you see when they look at black male faces their amygdala activates that means i could know something extraordinary about you having never asked you a question knowing nothing about you just look getting it directly from your brain we've never been able to do anything like that before in history green with moral judgment i went over this at lunch in great detail but he created the tree uh... brain image people when they were doing a philosophical problem called the trolley car problem and he found that in fact different parts of the brain light up when we try we when we present different kinds of moral problems and he's the one that then postulated that we actually make moral decisions in two different ways we make rational moral decisions and we make emotional world moral decisions one make impersonal moral decisions very rashly we make personal moral decisions emotionally and sometimes those two are in great conflict so he discovered ways that we make price in the fear of were involved in finding the part of the brain that's specific to reading and no other language so why is that important let's say i go out to the field of battle and there are enemies and we capture some but i'm not a member of the enemy uh... i don't even speak the language i don't read the language don't know anything about it and then i'm not speaking to you anymore theoretically we could put them in front of a scanner we could look at the part of the brain that's the reading part of the brain we could flash up words in different languages and then when we get to the target language we can see whether the reading center lights up because you cannot look at a word in a language that you can read and not read it it's instantaneous i i can't i can't say don't read this flash cat up there and have all of you go okay i saw but i have no idea what it adrian range violent offenders in brain structure shown that there's he believes a strong correlation between certain brain states and violent offense i'm gonna start going fast uh... john dylan hains uh... did a thing where he asked people to decide whether they were gonna add or subtract some numbers brain image them and predicted with eighty percent accuracy what they were going to do so we could understand what their future decision was based on differential brain states dresler and chis this is an amazing study they found intentional dreamers these are people who can go to sleep and control their dreams they are conscious and volitional in their dream states and so he asked them they call them lucid dreamers of the technical name he asked them at some point to raise their right hand and clench it and they bring image them and it precisely that moment there was activation of the motor cortex their hand didn't their hand didn't clench because we have sleep paralysis sleep paralysis keeps our body from doing what we're dreaming it's doing uh... but in fact the motor cortex at the very part of the brain that would light up if they actually clench their hand lit up at exactly the moment that they were intentionally doing that in their dreams and then finally from case western uh... not case western carnage uh... marcel juist and tom mitchell did this study incredible study predicting human brain activity associated with the meaning of nouns i wish i had an hour to talk to you about the study but basically what they did was they had a computer look at uh... a trillion can't find it well here it is data from a trillion word text corpus so this computer examined trillion words of text to find out how nouns were used so broccoli what are all the words that are ever used in the english language associated with broccoli so green vegetable whatever it is right and so they get the computer learned what kinds of things we think about in relation to then they picked fifty-nounds or so and they would give fifty-eight of the nouns sixty-nounds i think was fifty-eight an ounce of someone in brain image them then they'd say okay they picked two more nouns at random and they'd say this is what his brain is going to look like for the now bicycle based on the other fifty-eight nouns that we looked at we know exactly what the pattern of activation of his brain is going to be bicycle and in fact they were extraordinarily right they presented a computational model that predicts the funk fmri neural activation associated for for words for which the data isn't available that is they don't know they don't need data that that's what your brain is going to look like they've never imaged you when you thought of a bicycle but they had enormous predictive ability to decide so what's all of this about this is about our ability now to begin to apprehend subjective thought and it doesn't end with just words or ideas it also involves brain imaging lie detectors of which we now have a number uh... this is uh... no lie mri i don't know who named that company uh... the technology used by no i mri represents the first and only direct measure of truth fabrication and lie detection human history sephos the only company licensed to perform brain based lie detection they actually don't do it anymore at sephos we now have uh... a pentagon uh... technology with new kind of voice lie detector used by the u.s. military but doesn't work but the point is we are now exploring brain imaging based lie detection and uh... in fact it is uh... seems to be not effective enough to be used but more effective than polygraphy uh... mark georgian frank coastal of uh... south carolina very famous neuroscientists said okay if we can actually determine what part of the brain activates when you lie then we could take this little thing called a tms one transcranial magnetic stimulation what a tms one does is it send pulses into the brain and disinhibits turns off the part of the brain that's right under it and it's used for a variety of things they put in a patent that said the following this part of the brain for example activates when you lie and what if we put a tms wand over it turn it on deactivate that part of the brain and then the individual will be unable to deceive so not only one might we have a lie detection device we also might have a lie prevention all of this leads to a really interesting question of neuro privacy are we getting to a point where we're gonna have to start worrying about technologies that will uh... that will intervene in the brain in such a way as to reveal private information that i actually don't want reveal that may be where we are going and in fact there's a lot of evidence right now that's where a lot of people are trying to my thoughts are my most private and personal part of me it is in fact what makes me my memories my beliefs my way of thinking it's far more precious to me than my dn a people so worried about their genetic privacy forget it you can have my dn a many people have already published people like craig venter and uh... james uh... watson very famous scientists have published their entire genome you can go get it because they realize there's not much you can do with it but what if you could actually intervene in my brain don kennedy former editor of science that i don't i already don't want my employer insurance company know my genome as to my brain on already made up uh... i don't want anyone to know it for any bottom line is the question of whether i thought our own and how we should think about the issue of privacy uh... the bar association new york asked that question what are the legal cases are your thoughts i have been advocating for a while that we should designate the skull as a zone of absolute human privacy that is even with the court order a court should not have the right to force me to reveal the contents of my mind now we can't do that yet don't run out of here and say paul just said that they can read our minds not yet i mean we're still it's still very elaborate and here's the really important caveat you can't bring image someone against their will they have to lie very still in a brain imager they have to think about what you're asking them to think about and do it if you don't want to do it there are lots of ways to beat it there may be reasons why people feel coerced or very much uh... that they need to do it especially in certain kinds of situations uh... certain kinds of legal okay i'm gonna race now because we're running out of time and i'm going long wanted to say a word about brain computer interfaces that's an asian cockroach uh... set of electrodes that allow people to control uh... laboratory they also do it with rat that's the rat bot by san jitawar where they can actually uh... make this rat bot go and and send it around track by using a reward they zapped they put electrodes in the frame so it feels like someone is touching its right or it's left whisker in a way it turns that way it gets a nice zap reward and so they've trained it to move around the track Miguel Nicoleles trained these owl monkeys uh... who had electrodes in their brains to move prosthetic arms to the point that these monkeys could begin to move prosthetic arms with their brain uh... entirely independently making them the first animals in history to have first primates three functional independent arms is in which we are beginning to extend our uh... reach in biotechnology and neuro technologies in new ways and we have augmented cognition these are caps that take your brain waves and translate them onto screens so that pretty soon people are going to be working at computers eventually without caps at all computer will be able to begin to apprehend brain waves in other ways but right now people who have quadriplegics and others can begin to use these technologies even right now or if you want wearing a headset containing both EEG and NIRS sensors a man uses a brain machine interface to control a robot only in japan uh... would you find this thing but this guy can actually control this robot just by thinking uh... using EEG waves and near infrared spectra to be to control this robot so we are actually entering the age we're going to begin to control mechanisms we're going to begin to control the things around us, our computers our homes, our refrigerators and ovens simply by thinking I'd like the oven to turn on now uh... I'm gonna skip that and go uh... say one word about brain to brain and then conclude so that we have a few minutes to talk then a study was recently done extraordinary study brain to brain uh... study for the first time what happened in this study and we've written a paper on this if you're interested on the ethics of this question so this is the uh... encoder rat and the encoder rat is uh... when a particular light goes on they press a button and get a treat and when the other light goes on they don't get a treat so they train this rat to learn how to do that then they connected this rat's brain to that rat's brain and they found that rat much better than so if they weren't connected what the lights meant, what to press or anything and we just press randomly trying to get treats once they connected them up this rat guesses became far better than chance that is this rat's brain was sending signals to that rat's brain brain indicating which lever to press when the lights came on so they showed that there can be brain to brain translation then believe it or not they did human brain to rat transmission they did it very differently than that, they had an anesthetized rat they had a guy wearing one of those hoods like you saw with augmented cognition and his EEG brainwaves would then be sent over to the rat and when he saw a particular signal the rat's tail would start to wag and only when he saw that signal and then the ultimate goal is to try to see if they can create brain to brain communication so that using some kind of technology where I transmit when you're wearing something that connects the outside of your head not you know just like cap and I'm wearing one I can actually send a thought to you non-verbally entirely through the function of my brain that is not as far away as you think that is something that we have the preliminary technologies and then finally the last thing is brain stimulation we now have different ways to try to stimulate brains for Parkinson's and for depression but what's important to know about that is that that TMS one I showed you can do a lot of these things without having to implant things physically and now what's happening is companies like Neuronix this website is not intended for use in the USA because Neuronix isn't allowed to sell anything in the USA treating you a breakthrough in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease where they actually use trans-cranial magnetic stimulation to argue that if you put it in this particular place it'll improve your memory or do other things I think it's completely bogus and I think it's problematic but the point is that these technologies are not just in the laboratories if you start to look on the web you're going to begin to you already can see all kinds of neural technologies being sold to the general public and you can just go out and buy yourself one of these machines from Neuronix as you can see they're small and inexpensive so in conclusion I've just given you sort of this whirlwind tour through a lot of different technologies and the idea here was not to scare you though I think some of this is a little bit scary the idea was to say we are marching ahead in neuro technology in ways that I think people in the public have no idea of that and there are decision moments that are made there will be a decision moment about when we start using lie detection technology in the courtroom or whether you're going to be able to you know come home to your dented car and have two teenagers both who claim they didn't do it and drag them off to no lie MRI to see which one actually dented your car you know we we have these technologies we have technologies we tend to use them and the question we need to ask ourselves is this do we have an absolute right to privacy or are our brains just the last frontier where the state has some right to go in there I have colleagues in ethics in law who say to me basically it's no different than anything else that you know under the proper protection under court order the state should be allowed to order a brain scan of you if they think that that's the thing that will solve the case it's a very long complicated discussion there have now been many many articles on this but it's a really interesting question how are we going to think about privacy here and there will come a point at which the Supreme Court of the United States is going to have to make a decision about whether these kinds of technology is going to be allowed to be used in the courtroom or not who gets to use them do you get to use them when your kids dent the car do the schools get to use does the bank get to say if you want to work as a teller here I need to know you're honest so we need to do a brain scan is that going to be already allow lie detection in certain federal agencies are we going to start using brain scans in those agencies who's who has the power to use it what about covert use there actually are some technologies now trying to be able to brain scan not in the sense of an f m r i but using things like ultraviolet light that may be able at some point in the future to be used covertly not just overtly uh... and who's going to make the decisions about this is it going to all going to go through the courts i gotta tell you something judges don't understand the first thing about neuroscience are we going to leave it up to them to make these kinds of decisions and they shouldn't and then finally uh... what what are these going to say to us about the nature of self-worth and the changing view of who we are as human beings with all these questions the nature of self-worth believe you with the single most important take away to the same when i left everybody with lunch in diagnosing and manipulating the brain we've been doing it for many many many years doing it for over a century and our record on it is dismal throughout history we have made the stake at the stake at the stake why because underlying our view of what a well-functioning brain is is a whole set of moral and social assumptions about how people should be and those change over time and that's why an example like this of the prefrontal lobotomies that were done by joe freeman over ten thousand of them in the United States the United States for the most trivial of reasons but because they thought that these would help create and a lot of them on young people between fifteen and twenty five who are in trouble and they thought of lobotomy would just straighten them right out you know we tend to project our moral social uh... values onto medicine and then suggest that we're being objective what are hundred years from now when they look back at twenty fifteen what are they gonna say how could they possibly have believed that how could they have been so immoral as to think that that was a good thing to do we have to be really really cautious about these technologies ethics has to have some relationship to where science goes and uh... that's part of why uh... i do what i do and i hope that uh... i've given you something to think about thanks for your attention so you have a couple minutes lobotomy is to all of those things so here's the thing about lobotomy i'm a sociologist many bioethics or philosophers or theologians sociology gives me no disciplinary way to make a normative decision that a sociology is not a normative discipline it doesn't say what should or should not be it's a descriptive discipline it says what is so i actually though everyone calls me a bioethicist i have to call myself a bioethicist i'm actually not a bioethicist i'm a sociologist of bioethics which is different philosophers and theologians are bioethicists in the sense that philosophers believe they have a system of what the right thing to do is and religious people from religious traditions believe they have a faith tradition that lets them know what the right thing to do is but as a sociologist i can't pull from sociology to say do this rather than that i do it but on my point is that when i make a normative judgment i usually try to say i'm making this normative judgment with no more authority to make it than you have except for the fact that i've studied a lot more than you do so i know more about it but i don't have so what bioethicists are all of those things they're advisors they're uh... you know i write articles in which i say i've really examined this issue so you should take me seriously when i say i think we should do this but you can certainly disagree with me about it they tend to be watchdogs sometimes people like Carl Elliot who's been for the last ten years in a fight with the university of minnesota where he works over what he thinks are unethical activities they did in human subject experimentation uh... there are bioethicists who've been extraordinarily extraordinarily courageous and were fired from their jobs because they took moral stances on bioethics so bioethicists do all those things but the thing i am absolutely firmly that i believe it is that while bioethicists may serve as consultants and advisors on this it's not up to bioethicists and should not be up to bioethics to make these kinds of decisions these are decisions that affect everybody in society the reason i come out and talk about this stuff is because everybody needs to think about this it's going to have profound impact on our lives moving into the future and so all of us need to be part of the decision making process don't be shy no that's not exactly what i said so if you want to implant something in your brain if you want to voluntarily go and get uh... fmr if you were if you're if you're accused of a crime and you're innocent and somehow fmr i could prove that you were innocent and you go and you say i want to get this brain scan to prove a myth that's all great what i'm saying is the state should not be allowed to coerce you to get any invasive brain technology very different thing than saying they should never be used right if you want to go do that be my guest your brain uh... but the state should not be able to force you to get a brain scan uh... that i have a profound belief in personal privacy and there is nothing more if there's any privacy of all the possible privacy we have that we should guard it is my right own my own private thoughts without your ability to intervene in there and get on both sides that are the greatest human capacity the final and ultimately capacity is the capacity to say no no i will not tell you whatever it is i won't tell you no i will not cooperate but if you can coerce if you can go in my brain and get that information i've lost the most profound right i have as a human being to resist something and that is to not cooperate with you and not tell you what i don't want to tell this was taken for granted throughout all of human history my private thoughts were private and there was no way anyone could ever get them out of me if we can now get them out of me that is what i mean by saying it is qualitatively different it'll be the first time in human history that we could do that torture doesn't work truth serums don't work none of that stuff works uh... but this could work so it could be the first time in human history that we could force people to reveal things that uh... lived in their private imaginations and i think that that is a profound that is the single most profound violation of personal privacy word freedom but that's not why i was that's not what i was going to ask somebody who's science times a couple of weeks ago that there is no way biologically or any other way that the soul would you address that so steve pinker when the famous public intellectuals we have wrote about that very famously in his book the soul in the machine uh... and i talk about that i do a whole section on that classes i think they're absolutely right biologically the soul probably doesn't exist but whoever said the soul was biologically there's absolutely no way to prove biologically the existence or non-existence of the soul it's a metaphysical postulation so all they can ever say is we've looked and looked and looked and haven't found it which is basically what steve pinker said the other thing he says it's a little subtler than that he says there is no human quality that we know of historically was attributed to the soul because we couldn't figure out how he means to express it his argument was there is no none of those qualities that we now can't explain biologically nonsense completely nonsense there are lots and lots and lots of things we can't explain consciousness biologically we have a hundred and fifty theories but every theory is flawed and you speak to one person to tell you what everything wrong with that person's theory and that person will tell you everything there's absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how the brain generates it to say that we've explained it biologically is nonsense we haven't explained it biologically uh... so uh... the idea that we can disprove biologically the existence of the soul this isn't true it's a it's a faith that is steve pinker has faith that we don't have a soul he just can't call it that because he doesn't believe in faith developing pharmaceuticals and using the brain scans there isn't a close connection between brain scans and pharmaceuticals that is brain scans and this is it's a very complicated issue and one by the way that I'm not an expert in but brain scans are not the best way to determine pharmaceutical effectiveness of pharmaceutical need so brain imaging and pharmaceuticals are not natural death fellows right there are other ways to determine blood chemistry is a much better way to determine when we want to know the when we want to know the percentage of whether someone has something like a serotonin deficiency we can't use a brain scan to determine that so uh... so it's not really brain scans and pharmaceuticals that have a lot of connections that's not entirely true there are some examples I could give you where they do have a connection but that's not the natural pairing for female libido I'm just kind of curious if that if that is if that registers in brain scans or if you know anything about that yeah I don't know that they've ever so here's the interesting thing I'll tell you the interesting about brain scan that always fascinates me and I've I've said this in the press and neuro marketers don't like me because of it so they do these neuro and I'm gonna get back I'm gonna take a little detour to get back to your question so neuro marketing is this new field where they put people in scanners and they try to ask them questions and find out things about products so they like to stick you in a scanner and ask you whether you like cocopepsy or they show you pictures and look at your brain and so they you know they want to know if you like this packaging they want to know if you like this cookie whatever it is the problem is that they have not yet proven that there is a strong correlation between what they find an actual behavior and in fact it probably is a lot cheaper and a lot more accurate to ask you if you like the cookie you know and very often they find things that are kind of really obvious like they put people in brain scanners they put democrats on public as a brain scanner and ask them about bush and another candidate back when Bush was president and you know they discovered shockingly that people who were for bush were much more likely to like bush and were much more likely to excuse bush when he said things that were problematic and attack the other candidate when they said things that were problematic and they didn't like him as much and I mean they said that much more fancy than that but that's what it really boiled down so here's a perfect example I am sure that they're gonna give that drug to women stick them in brain scanners and look for signs of excitation what we have found though is that though there is correlation between brain states and subjective reports of behavior there's not one-to-one connection so we can see people who seem to their brain seem to be telling us that they feel a certain way or engage a certain way or or anger whatever it is and the person will point out I don't feel that at all we don't get how the brain works brains the brain, the human brain listen to this the human brain is the single most complex thing we know about in the universe think about that there is nothing we have discovered in the entire universe as complex as the human brain it has trillions of connections trillions of connections made into these structures that we don't really understand we can look at them and see whether you know all that we know about this or not all but a lot that we know about this is whether that structure lights up when you do this and what does light up mean it doesn't light up what light up means is we do a scan to look at blood flow to particular parts of the brain and we want to see where is there a little bit more blood flow when you engage in this activity that means that that part of the brain is working harder because it's taking up more oxygen and therefore we say you're using that part of the brain when you are doing this and that's our brilliant strategy for understanding the brain that's where all of the studies I showed you came from that basic premise and so yeah we might do a study might give that to women to see if the part of their brain that seems to indicate sexual excitation is lit up when they take this but you know might make a lot more sense to ask the woman if she's become stimulated so long married couples want an answer to this question short of a court order how do I keep my wife from sucking my thoughts when we're sitting in the same room together I know that happens a lot I've heard the phenomenon described a lot from other people what's behind that I'm going to answer your question more seriously than you meant it of course the obvious answer is nothing can stop your wife from sucking your thoughts out of your brain my wife does it to me too but here's a really interesting thing about that I'm very very much against the court being able to order someone to get a lie detection brain scan but there is a real problem with that people argue against me there's a guy named Paul Ekman who is a psychologist and he developed he discovered very interesting actually so if I put you in front of a picture of people talking of a television screen of people talking some of whom are telling the truth and some of whom are lying over and over again studies have shown that people cannot tell they do about 50-50 we think we can tell when people are lying there are certain gives that certain people might have but on average we're actually really bad at it at telling when people are lying except there are certain people who are really good at it the problem is they can't tell you why they think she's lying well how do you know I just look at her and I can tell she's lying and they end up being right like 70% of the time or something like that so Ekman decided he was going to figure out why these people could tell and what he discovered is what he calls micro expressions and this isn't just sort of popular science he was at Columbia a very serious researcher and now it does this he trains police departments and intelligence agencies all over the world it turns out our faces engage in these micro expressions they're just a few milliseconds long and when people lie the majority of people actually all have a tell in their face through this micro expression that flits across their face in just a few milliseconds and some people have figured out how to detect that without knowing that they're actually detecting it because it's almost out of consciousness it's so fast but when you slow faces down lots of people can do it so if you train someone how to do it and then if especially you slow the film down you know ah there's the tell right and then he trains people how to do it more quickly well here's the thing he does it about lie detection but in fact we have all kinds of micro expressions that flit across our face not just about lie detection and i think what happens is that after thirty years of living with someone you get to know their micro expression and that's why she's sucking thoughts out of your head all right i can see that the audience is still is riveted and they could probably stay here and ask you questions for another hour and i know everyone's going to go sign up for a neuroethics course if they can find one but we're going to draw this to a close i think they'll be an opportunity maybe ask a few questions in person here down at the front but please join me in thanking dr wolby and we are adjourned hey talk about the car great there in my bag over here