When the wealthy, the famous, and the beautiful weren’t listening to Bill Clinton and Karl Rove at the Aspen Ideas Festival two weekends ago, they were treated to a set of symposia featuring some top-flight neuroscientists and neuro-dilettantes. The goal of the sessions was to explore recent developments in our understanding of how the brain works, how differences in brain development make each of us unique, and the potential social ramifications of the increasingly undeniable realization that everything we experience happens in the chemical and electrical reactions taking place in the three pounds of wrinkled meat in our heads.
There seemed to be general consensus that the highpoint of the sessions was a presentation by Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist now based at Duke University who has conducted some truly remarkable experiments to understand how the brain controls our physical movements. He and his colleagues have devised an interface that translates the firing of configurations of neurons in the monkey’s brain into physical motion. In a series of experiments, he first taught a monkey to play a simple video game using a joystick to move a cursor around a screen. By implanting a set of sensors in the monkey’s brain, he could determine which neurons fired as it performed various tasks. Next, he took the joystick away from the monkey, but connected the sensors to a robotic arm that held the joystick. When he put the monkey in front of the game again, the firing patterns in its brain were the same, enabling it to learn to manipulate the cursor and the robotic arm merely through its “thoughts.” Nicolelis’s discovery of how to create such an interface has enormous potential for everything from new types of prosthetic limbs, to robotics, to (I would imagine) defense industry technologies. His work is the stuff that cyborgs are made of.
The lecture series also featured two presentations discussing the potential ramifications of neuroscience for the practice of the law. As brain research and genetics increasingly show that there is a purely biological component to many of our thoughts and actions, it presents some difficult questions of personal responsibility. If it is discovered that particular types of development in the brain increase the likelihood of antisocial behavior, should an individual still be held responsible for his actions? If a brain scan can predict the possibility that an individual would be more likely than others to commit a crime, is it right to take preventative actions against him?
According to legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen, who published an article on the subject in a March 2007 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, such questions are already being raised in the courtroom, and judges are increasingly being put in the uncomfortable position of needing to decide on scientific issues. Rosen argued for the pressing need for a public dialogue to reach a consensus on how best to reconcile neuroscience with constitutional law and legal precedent. Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s most prominent cognitive neuroscientists, took up similar topics on Sunday. He recounted scientific findings showing the existence of a gap in mental processing between the moment when the brain commits to a decision and the moment when we become conscious of that decision. Such a construct could call into question the existence of the free will on which so much legal theory is based. Gazzaniga argued that even if neuroscience does produce the ability to predict whether a person is likely to commit a crime, however, the question of personal responsibility is ultimately a social, not a biological, one, meaning that, at least for the time being, it wouldn’t be correct to rely too heavily on the brain when making legal judgments.
I was also intrigued by a presentation from Marcus Raichle. Raichle is one of the most important researchers in the field of neuroimaging, and contributed to the invention of positron emission tomography. Following a general introduction to explain the history of brain imaging and how current methods work, he talked about the importance of studying the “intrinsic” functional activity of the brain instead of the “evoked” responses so often analyzed in neuroimaging. He likened the intrinsic activity to the large portion of an iceberg that floats below the ocean surface. Whereas much current practice is good at identifying the changes in brain activity associated with specific events, he proposed that researchers should be attending to the vast, unknown activity in the brain that remains constant, or that constitutes the noise in measured brain signals. His ideas point to the critical importance of a vast, complex world.
At the Academy we’ll be publishing an eBriefing on the conference soon, hopefully in August sometime, featuring a detailed meeting report, video, and recordings of all of the talks. Stay tuned. Thanks to the Academy and the Haseltine Foundation for allowing me to attend the festival, and to all of the speakers for being so friendly and helpful.
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