Brain boosting, thought scanning and other neuroethics issues
Several comments on this and other blogs express surprise that the Reuters blog on religion, faith and ethics should be interested in neuroscience. Several posts here — on a “God spot” in the brain, on moral instincts, on religious studies and on meditation and prayer — showed the growing relevance of brain science to the issues we cover. One angle we haven’t yet covered is the one that originally drew me towards this field, namely neuroethics. Rapid progress in neurological research has prompted a debate on the ethics of unlocking the brain’s secrets. I first wrote about this debate in early 2007, interviewing several neuroscientists on how to separate good uses of their work from bad after studies showed brain scans could read some kinds of intentions before the subjects revealed them.
One of those experts, University of Pennsylvania cognitive neuroscience professor Martha Farah, is head of Penn’s new Center for Neuroscience and Society. She was also the director of the neuroscience “boot camp” that I attended this month. At the end of that session, I asked her to talk about new issues currently challenging neuroethicists.
In this short video, Farah discusses how neuroscience is increasingly producing insights into human behaviour that are relevant to society and below she discusses how this progress also brings new ethical concerns.
Brain enhancement has been a leading issue since neuroethics emerged as a field early in this decade. Farah said it continues to attract interest because drugs such as Ritalin or Adderall — originally meant to help people suffering from ADD — are increasingly used by healthy people to help focus more on their work or study. “More and more normal healthy college students are using these drugs as study aids,” she said. “More professionals are using them to work longer hours and help them multitask when they are sitting in a meeting, listening to what’s going on and trying to contribute while texting people on their Blackberries.”
A related issue is the proper use of deep brain stimulation, where a similar kind of usage drift has set in. “In just the last five years, there’s been a big increase in experimental use of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for psychological disorders,” Farah said. “It was shown to be very effective and safe on balance for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Then, serendipitously, brain surgeons noticed that deep brain stimulation did sometimes alter mood or alter the way people felt… Because they’ve had very good initial results with these methods, its now being tried on less severe psychiatric problems, including addictions and eating disorders.”
One set of ethical questions has to do with what’s research and what’s treatment here. Research trials of new drugs have formal rules and the procedure to approve them for treatment is regulated. But a surgeon stimulating a brain may experiment in the relevant area to see if another effect results. “If a surgeon uses the same device but puts it in a different place, is that to be considered research or just a variation on a tried and true method?” Farah asked. “If the treatment is successful or there is a bad result, how does that information get collected and systematised?
How God (or more precisely, meditation) changes your brain
Some book titles are too good to pass up. “How God Changes Your Brain” is neuroscientist Andrew Newberg‘s fourth book on “neurotheology,” the study of the relationship between faith and the brain. All are pitched at a popular audience, with snappy titles like “Born to Believe” or “Why God Won’t Go Away.” Anyone reading the latest one, though, might wonder if the title shouldn’t be “How God Meditation Changes Your Brain.” As he explains in an interview with Reuters here, the benefits that Buddhist monks and contemplative Catholic nuns derive from meditation and intense prayer are also available to atheists and agnostics. The key lies in the method these high performing believers use, not in the belief itself. But that would have made for a more awkward title.
That’s not to say Newberg doesn’t have some interesting points to make in this book. His brain scans of meditating monks and praying nuns show that the frontal lobe — the area that directs the mind’s focus — is especially active while the amygdala — the area linked to fear reactions — is calmed when they go through their spiritual experiences. His studies show these brain regions can be exercised and strengthened, like building up a muscle through training. And his treatment of a mechanic with a faltering memory showed that a traditional Indian meditation method, even when stripped of its spiritual trappings, could bring about these changes in two months.
The book goes on to ascribe a list of positive results from meditation and offer advice on caring for the brain. Newberg’s “number one best way to exercise your brain” is faith. As he puts it, “faith is equivalent with hope, optimism and the belief that a positive future awaits us. Faith can also be defined as the ability to trust our beliefs, even when we have no proof that such beliefs are accurate or true.” Critics, especially clerics, would probably protest that this is not really theology, but psychology. If we’re talking about God, where’s the religion?
That brings up another interesting aspect. While he is clearly favourable to faith and spirituality, Newberg remains a scientist eager to study the religious feelings he calls “among the most powerful and complex experiences people have.” He studiously avoids promoting any one faith or closing the door to atheists who might be reading the text. The tone is upbeat, the approach inclusive and the conclusion optimistic. There’s a touch of Eastern mysticism, too, with sections on how widely practiced meditation could foster compassion and understanding among people and peoples. Thanks to this open-minded approach towards both religion and science, Newberg teaches radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and speaks frequently to church groups or in religious media.
Newberg gave me a few SPECT brain scan images that illustrate the changes he finds in his subjects’ brains. The image above left shows the brain of a Buddhist monk before and during meditation. The increased yellow in the lower right of the right-hand image shows reduced activity in the parietal lobe, the brain area responsible for orientation in space and time. Below right, the image shows a nun before and during prayer, with increased activity in the frontal lobe, the area for concentration and analytical thinking, and in areas linked to language.
Newberg, a cheerful and optimistic man who was brought up in a Reform Jewish family and says he is still exploring his own beliefs, told me his next book will be an academic work on neurotheology. He stresses that the field is in its infancy and its brain scanning methods are still “incredibly crude. We really don’t know which neurons are firing in that little three-millimeter space” captured in fMRI scans. “If we can ultimately say something epistemologically interesting, then that’s great,” he told me. “But it’s going to take me a long time before I get to saying something like that.”
UPDATE: After some failed attempts at editing this, here is a video clip of Newberg explaining his views during our interview:
It is very obvious that yoga first make impact on your mind in positively, so if you make your mind in right manned so all diseases automatically leave you, because mind it server of your whole body..
Is a moral instinct the source of our noble thoughts?
Until not too long ago, most people believed human morality was based on scripture, culture or reason. Some stressed only one of those sources, others mixed all three. None would have thought to include biology. With the progress of neuroscientific research in recent years, though, a growing number of psychologists, biologists and philosophers have begun to see the brain as the base of our moral views. Noble ideas such as compassion, altruism, empathy and trust, they say, are really evolutionary adaptations that are now fixed in our brains. Our moral rules are actually instinctive responses that we express in rational terms when we have to justify them.
Thanks to a flurry of popular articles, scientists have joined the ranks of those seen to be qualified to speak about morality, according to anthropologist Mark Robinson, a Princeton Ph.D student who discussed this trend at the University of Pennsylvania’s Neuroscience Boot Camp. “In our current scientific society, where do people go to for the truth about human reality?” he asked. “It used to be you might read a philosophy paper or consult a theologian. But now there seems to be a common public sense that the authority over what morality is can be found by neuroscientists or scientists.”
This change has come over the past decade as brain scan images began to reveal which areas of the brain react when a person grapples with a moral problem. They showed activity not only in the prefrontal cortex, where much of our rational thought is processed, but also in areas known to handle emotion and conflicts between brain areas. Such insights cast doubt on long-standing assumptions about reason or religion driving our moral views. “A few theorists have even begun to claim that that the emotions are in fact in charge of the temple of morality and that moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as the high priest,” University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading theorists in this field, has written.
Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory argues that morality is based on five concepts that evolved in all cultures: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authorty/respect and purity/sanctity. Those concepts have real-life consequences, he says — political liberals and conservatives disagree so much on so-called “culture war issues” because liberals base their moral views on the first two concepts while conservatives use all five. Other theorists such as Marc Hauser of Harvard and John Mikhail of Georgetown suggest humans have a universal moral grammar akin to the universal grammar that linguist Noam Chomsky claims underlies all the world’s languages.
For more on these ideas, see review articles such as “The Moral Instinct” (Stephen Pinker, New York Times), “Do The Right Thing” (Rebecca Saxe, Boston Review), “The Emerging Moral Psychology” (Dan Jones, Prospect), “The Roots of Morality” (Greg Miller, Science) and “The End of Philosophy” (David Brooks, New York Times). Hat-tip to fellow boot camper Tamar Gendler for pointing them out.
Does this mean that public opinion will turn away from seeing reason or religion as the bases for morality, in favor of the brain? Robinson doubts that. “I don’t know that they will shift to a completely neurobiological view of morality (and) I don’t think this is a fundamental shift away from religion. But it will mean that religion will have to come to terms with the public’s perception.
“I think there will be a greater acceptance of biology as an accepted domain within which to ask certain types of questions. That isn’t to say that people will understand morality completely differently in the future, or won’t have any morality. But they will at least know that (neuroscience) is another domain to go to for answers. The question of authority is a big one. Who is the ultimate authority on these issues about the fundamental nature of human morality?”
Clearly inherited morality exists in that children are powerful, albeit primitive, moralists. The endless plaint of siblings that ‘it isn’t fair’ is actually a moral pronouncement because the child is indicating that it wants its share but does not want its brother to go completely without.
However, there is a knockabout silliness to arguments which say ‘science says A, you say B, therefore you are a gullible fool’. The major problem with an exclusively scientific explanation of morality is that it begs the question ‘where does ultimate moral authority lie?’ And it is this question which religion identified a long time ago and imputed to God.
Science is on somewhat shaky philosophical foundations itself. It may seem that its laws are immutable, but eventually most are superceded when more information is acquired. ‘Survival of the fittest’ which is the basis of evolutionary science is particularly dubious because it is circular in its fundamental argument: ‘that which survives is fittest, that which is fittest survives’.
Any scientific theory is potentially falsifiable, but most people think it is wrong to kill another human with an absolute conviction that could not possibly be ‘explained away’ by a scietific theory.
Beware brain scientists bearing gifts (gee-whiz journalists too…)
Knowing what not to report is just as important for journalists as knowing what to write. We’re inundated with handouts about some pioneering new scientific research or insightful new book. Should we write about it? It’s refreshing to hear experts who can dazzle you with their work but warn against falling for any hype about it. This “let’s not overdo it” approach has been a recurrent theme in the Neuroscience Boot Camp I’m attending at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Andrew Newberg‘s “no God spot” message to boot campers has already been noted here on FaithWorld. Other lecturers added similar reality checks to their presentations. Cognitive science has already begun to influence religion studies (as John Teehan explained here) and we’re bound to hear more in the future about what neuroscientific research has to say about faith, morals, altruism and other issues of interest to readers of this blog. Much of this will be fascinating. But before the next “gee-whiz” report comes out, here’s the advice the neuroscientists are giving us about speculative claims based on brain research.
After two days of explaining fMRI brain scanning, the sexiest procedure in current neurological research, Geoff Aguirre poured cold water on some of the exaggerated conclusions that researchers or journalists draw from it. When shown brain scan images, he said, “people immediately start thinking about trying to catch terrorists and being able to screen people as they pass through metal detectors.” This is “science fiction, science fantasy,” he said, but it comes up regularly. Why? Aguirre, who is an M.D and assistant professor of neurology at Penn, listed several reasons:
- scientific awesomeness — “This is an incredible technology. Neuroimaging is not phrenology. It really is a scientific discipline that has reproducible results that makes valuable predictions that explain larges areas of cognition and cognitive neuroscience that previously had been inaccessible.”
- image properties — “There’s definitely an esthetic in the presentation of this data. People see this as a natural aspect of the brain, not the result of tests. Some groups made a very wise investment in the display technology for how neuroimaging results were reported. Those were the images that got displayed on the covers of the top scientific journals and made a splash.”
- thresholding — The brain images leave out data outside the main focus. “This contributes to the overly localised view of brain function. So we say, ‘ah this is the spot for love’ or whatever, because it’s all that we see.”
- overinference — “It’s very easy to believe a lot of things about these images that might not be true… It’s also implied that when you’ve found activisation in a region, you’ve found the region ‘for’ something. But what does that mean?”
- chicken versus egg problem — “Just because you find a difference between groups in some brain imaging measure does not mean that structural difference was genetically determined.” But the brain also develops according to its owner’s environment and experience, so this is too narrow a focus.
- lurking Cartesian dualism — “In the way we think about people’s actions and describe the effect of diseases or drugs, there is frequently a lurking dualism there. We say, ‘oh it wasn’t his fault, his brain did that.’ Well, who else could it have been? Where else could those thoughts and feeling or plans have come from, except in the brain? This idea that the brain and the mind are separate is part of what makes these images so remarkable. Wow look! Here’s a part of the brain that’s more active when you’re feeling romantic love or not! That’s just astounding to folks who would have thought romantic love was outside the brain, in the heart or the soul and far away.” (Photo: Near infrared spectroscopy imaging slide/GK Aguirre)
- illusion of inferential proximity — “It doesn’t automatically follow that a brain imaging technology is going to give you greater inferential leverage on a question than just talking to somebody. There’s an illusion that somehow you’re getting much closer to the behavior you want to measure, just because you’re measuring a brain image. That might not be the case.”
- ease of imaging — Many hospitals have brain scanners and researchers can use them and free imaging software to create impressive images. “If you have an internet connection and a scanner, you can be a cognitive neuroscientist and publish a paper. Lots of the variance in the lousy scientific papers over these years can be explained this way. What will come out will be a well-formed brain image that will give the impression you must be a very good scientist because you created something that looks very polished.”
Aguirre said that brain scans might be able to identify pedophiles by showing they are excited by pictures of children. “Does having that response to seeing kids in underwear lead to an increased risk of you actually going out and molesting kids?” he asked. “It could be the case that this population of people now divides into two subgroups, one that can control that impulse and one that cannot.” It would be hard to base a policy on who to put in jail on the basis of such brain images, he said.
Another example would be a study into people who lose their temper. “So I do a study of people who are enraged and can find that activity within the right insula is associated with a sense of rage. I have explained the sense of rage,” he said. “But since we all strongly suspected that the sense of rage was derived from events taking place in our nervous system, what have we learned?” The study could say what happens in the brain during rage but still not explain why the person flew off the handle.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to say, Pete. HOWEVER! Just because there is increased activity in this or that area of the brain, we still don’t know if that activity is a _cause_ or an _effect_ of the decisions we make. You cannot use these findings to say that people are not responsible for their actions, that their brains _made_ them do things, that our actions are pre-determined and we are just victims of the chemicals in our brains.
That’s lame. We’re just beginning to understand the astonishing magnificence of our brains, and it is simply premature to make leaping conclusions about human morality or psychology or spirituality (for that matter) from watching which areas of the brain light up at certain times.
Cognitive science gaining ground in U.S. academic religion studies
The academic study of religion has come a long way from the days when knowledge of scripture, history and a few ancient languages were the main qualifications a scholar needed. Psychology, sociology and other social sciences have been applied to the field for over a century. Over the past 20 years, cognitive science has been edging into the field, especially with the explosion of neuroscience research. Some of the hottest research into religion is now being done with brain scanners searching for data on what happens inside believers’ heads when they pray or feel a special connection to God.
Among the participants at the University of Pennsylvania’s Neuroscience Boot Camp I’m attending this week and next is John Teehan, an associate professor in the religion department at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. He’s seen how cognitive science has brought new tools and insights to the study of religion and may eventually challenge the ways religions justify their beliefs. He is writing a book about how many moral teachings in the Bible fit with the moral psychology that cognitive science says evolved naturally. I asked Teehan for an overview of what’s happening in the religion studies field in the United States.
“At the end of the 19th century, there was a real interest in looking at religion from a psychological perspective,” he said. “Sigmund Freud and William James were the major figures. The Freudian paradigm was not a scientific one, even though Freud thought it was, and our understanding of the mind and the brain was primitive then compared to what we have now. What’s happening now is that the science of the mind has advanced to the point that we’re actually developing a scientific understanding of the mind. With the cognitive revolution involving cognitive science, neurological science and evolution studies, a more empirical approach to understanding the mind and morality is developing. Over the last 20 years, some of these scholars have started to look more particularly at religion. This field of the cognitive science of religion started in the early ’90s looking at religious behavior and rituals and how emotions mediate or reinforce religious experience.”
Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie‘s book Faces in the Clouds (1993) played an important part in turning religious studies towards cognitive science, Teehan said. Guthrie’s thesis was that people naturally tend to believe events are caused by a conscious agent and this belief was an important evolutionary tool. “If you live in a very uncertain and dangerous environment, as humans did for most of their history, it’s very important to be able to make sense of what you’re hearing and seeing. Guthrie points out the best rule of thumb is, when in doubt, overinterpret. If you hear a rustling in the bush, it could be the wind but it’s much more useful to interpret that as a snake or a possible predator. If you’re wrong and it’s just the wind, you’ve lost nothing. But if you think it’s the wind and it turns out to be a snake, you’re in danger. Guthrie argues this is an ingrained mental predisposition. There has since been lots of empirical work to show how easy it is to get people to think in terms of agents… Religions are built out of that and those we have today continue to tap into that.”
Teehan stressed the empirical work being done to test this thesis is not restricted to testing religious people. Researchers have found people in various situations respond the same way. Other new research into religion involves studying how people process information, how they make moral decisions and why they punish people who act against the community’s generally accepted morality.
“A lot of work in morality shows cooperation can develop among groups of strangers, but all the studies seem to show those effects only in very small communities. But humans have incredibly complex and large systems of cooperation. How do we get from one to the other? It seems that religion plays a complicated role here. A major role is the belief in a moral God who serves as the overseer of the community. One of the problems with complex societies is that it’s easy to benefit from society without contributing, the “free rider” problem. That problem is solved or improved if there is a common belief that all cheating is being observed. Behavioral economics has developed various games to test peoples’ willingness to cooperate and be generous in anonymous situations. When those situation are observed by somebody, people tend to be more generous… So part of the proposition is that part of the development of religion was an adaptation to help community cohesion and help communities develop into larger units.”
Religion also seems to play a role in drawing lines between an in-group and an out-group. “There is evidence that we are much more morally sensitive to people we identify with in our in-group than in an out-group,” Teehan said. “One study shows neurological evidence of how people respond to faces of in-group versus out-group members. One thing to be done is to see how religious identification or symbols or rhetoric may impact on those studies.”
Compared to the stereotype person of faith, I guess I am a strange bird, and some might challenge whether I should in fact call myself a person of faith. First, I do not believe in miracles or a spiritual world in the traditional sense. I believe God has a perfected and immortal body of flesh and bone. I believe that God resides and presides in a parallel universe. I believe that miracles, and matters of the spirit, are of a physical nature, and subject to universal laws of physics, which we do not yet comprehend and/or are not yet capable of identifying by current scientific knowledge.However, over our 6000 years of recorded history, I would propose that the keystone of man’s advancement of knowledge is to make inspirational leaps from the known to the yet unknown, but imaginary, or visionary, concept. The architectural designs of Leonardo da Vinci are a primary example of my meaning.With this being said, I declare that I believe God hears our prayers, knows our thoughts, and recognizes our needs. Therefore, I have voluntarily made myself a student of cognitive neuroscience, not to prove or disprove the relevance of religion versus science, but to learn the working of the organ of our body which contains the communication link with the parallel universe of God, as well as with those elements in our world typically dumped into the category of parapsychology. Moreover, recognizing the two primary components on either side of the equation, I am seeking to envision the physical formula that allows x+y=z. We have our drafting tools, and if we agree on what the concept of a helicopter is, can we then draft the theoretical mechanisms that illustrate the process of its operation? Would anyone like to join me in the effort?
God on the brain at Penn’s Neuroscience Boot Camp
Neurotheology – the study of the link between belief and the brain – is a topic I’ve hesitated to write about for several years. There are all kinds of theories out there about how progress in neuroscience is changing our understanding of religion, spirituality and mystical experience. Some say the research proves religion is a natural product of the way the brain works, others that God made the brain that way to help us believe. I knew so little about the science behind these ideas that I felt I had to learn more about the brain first before I could comment.
If that was an excuse for procrastination, I don’t have it anymore. For all this week and half the next, I’m attending a “Neuroscience Boot Camp” at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This innovative program, run by Penn’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Director Martha Farah (photo below), aims to explain the latest research in neuroscience to 34 non-experts from fields such as law, business, philosophy and religious studies (as well as to a few journalists). The focus is not only on religion, but faith and issues related to it are certainly part of the discussion.
After only two of 8-1/2 days of lectures, one takeaway message is already clear. You can forget about the “God spot” that headline writers love to highlight (as in “‘God spot’ is found in Brain” or “Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’ in Human Brain”). There is no one place in the brain responsible for religion, just as there is no single location in the brain for love or language or identity. Most popular articles these days actually say that, but the headline writers continue to speak of a single spot.
“There isn’t a separate religious area of the brain, from what we can tell from the data,” said Dr. Andrew Newberg, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the Penn university hospital and author of several books on neuroscience and religion. “It’s not like there’s a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody thinks of God. When you look at religious and spiritual experiences, they are incredibly rich and diverse. Sometimes people find them on the emotional level, sometimes on an ideological level, sometimes they perceive a oneness, sometimes they perceive a person. It depends a lot on what the actual experience is.”
In their research, Newberg and his colleagues have scanned the brains of Buddhist monks and contemplative Catholic nuns to see if their long experience of meditation and prayerhad left its mark on their brains. One thing they noticed was that their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain linked to concentration and decision making, seemed to be more active than usual even in a resting state, and more active still while meditating. Some studies showed it was even larger in long-term meditators than other people. “It’s almost like a muscle,” he said. “If you exercise it every day through meditation, you enhance and increase its function.”
Rather than being located in separate areas, religious and spiritual phenomena “tend to be built upon the existing framework of how the brain works”, said Newberg (photo left). “So if we have an experience of the love of God, there is an underlying biology of that experience that is probably the same as how you feel love for your wife, for example. On the other hand, what we also tend to find is that there seems to be a larger network of structures that do tend to get involved. The data seem to suggest that (faith) probably activates these structures to a slightly stronger degree.
“If you’re doing math, your frontal lobe turns on. If you’re doing meditation, your frontal lobe turns on. But if you’re solving math, the frontal lobe turns on and that’s about it, you solve the math problem and then you’re done. With meditation, the frontal lobes turn on, but based on our research, then there’s activation in the temporal lobes, the parietal lobes are changing, and then it starts to activate the limbic system, the emotional drivers of your brain. So a lot more is happening.
Excellent article. It provides compelling reasons to believe that spirituality is a higher order function of the brain and that the brain has evolved towards this capability.
D J Wray
Packaged Evolution: The Intelligent Universe
http://www.atotalawareness.com/documents /packagedevolution.pdf
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