Posts tagged Neuroscience

My Case Against Einfühlung 

First, I’m with thoughtfulcynic. I’m not a fan of dichotomy when speaking about emotions/behaviors that pepper an entire spectrum. I suppose we can talk about social reluctance to do this another time, but investigating empathy, like other spectrumocities, (n. the state of being on a spectrum. K, I’m making up words, but I think I’ve earned that..I …I just think I’ve earned that.)

…LIKE other spectrumocities, our understanding of it may suffer if not investigated in a manner that allows us to look at multiple facetes under appropriate conditions. I can talk about this now since I’ve changed labs and not longer working under ridiculous oppressive secrecy… but how often are we hearing about the two types of empathy? Or potential 7 models of them? Not enough which leads most to think you have it or you don’t…so thoughtfulcynic hits the nail when she mentions critical thinking. What we have are cognitive and affective empathy or the capacity to perceive others’ thoughts and/or feelings, respectively. I always maintained these are 2 separately dynamic, systems that run via feedback from each other since neurally - they are independent but mutually supportive. As such, what we can have is a full matrix of varying degrees of the total possible experience of empathy at any given time. I never got to test it, but that’s my stamp. Anyhoo, and as a result, what’s driven my work for a while now is what Bloom refers to “being pulled in the wrong direction by empathy”:

This dynamic regularly plays out in the realm of criminal justice. In 1987, Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had been released on furlough from the Northeastern Correctional Center, in Massachusetts, raped a woman after beating and tying up her fiancé. The furlough program came to be seen as a humiliating mistake on the part of Governor Michael Dukakis, and was used against him by his opponents during his run for President, the following year. Yet the program may have reduced the likelihood of such incidents. In fact, a 1987 report found that the recidivism rate in Massachusetts dropped in the eleven years after the program was introduced, and that convicts who were furloughed before being released were less likely to go on to commit a crime than those who were not. [via]

Obviously, not an isolated event. Altruistic punishment and manipulated empathy over data, tell me how that feels.

H/T@ thoughtfulcynic

Badness, madness and the brain – the late 19^th-century controversy on immoral persons and their malfunctioning brains

In the second half of the 19^th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based explanations via five historical cases of immoral persons. (…) The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning. [via,IMG]

Same as it ever was.

“The narcissistic self and its psychological and neural correlates: an exploratory fMRI study”

The concept of narcissism has been much researched in psychoanalysis and especially in self psychology. One of the hallmarks of narcissism is altered emotion, including decreased affective resonance (e.g. empathy) with others, the neural underpinnings of which remain unclear. (…) 

Psychological and neuroimaging data indicate respectively higher degrees of alexithymia and lower deactivation during empathy in the insula in high narcissistic subjects. Taken together, our preliminary findings demonstrate, for the first time, psychological and neuronal correlates of narcissism in non-clinical subjects. This might stipulate both novel psychodynamic conceptualization and future psychological-neuronal investigation of narcissism.

Obvious next round, unhealthy subjects then ID 2 types of empathy circuits in both. boom. Also? When is the insula and ACC not involved? mmmm mm.

Presenting research at West Point with my co-author.

I’ll be sharing some neuroscience at Westpoint Military Academy next week that’s what I’ve been up to.

There remains a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice, a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system.

The body and pain are not the ultimate objects of [the law’s] punitive action, thus warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, and educationalists have taken over from the executioner. -M. Foucault [img]

Whispery boom.

Neuroimages in court: not as bad as we thought

So what I usually get from the lawyers I corner speak with about using brain scans as evidence, it’s mostly hell to the no, because A) we’d need an expert B) experts are expensive C) client is broke. Another response is jurors won’t get it and it will just complicate things. The consensus is jurors can’t handle a brief fMRI lecture to understand it’s meaning and limitations so they’ll just figure it’s all hard science, self evident to the argument being made and treat it like photographic proof.  dun dun.

Until recently, a couple of really big studies supported this notion and everyone at the cool table got on board. Brain porn in the court became a thing and whispering sexy hard-sciencey neurobabble in your ear is what it did seducing you with its pretty colored blobs. Then it kinda fell into a place like tween technology can, where we can’t trust it running the streets alone without a decent explanation, some background and a curfew. But new research contradicts this concept “prompting a rethinking of the ‘threat’ of neuroscience in the courtroom”. dun dun. (ok I’ll stop.)

The deal is the initial studies didn’t look at the effect of using the images with mock jurors in. a. full. mock. trial. Srsly, methodologies? Anyway, this article (+1 for the multidisciplinary collabo) gives a detailed overview of 3 new studies that are show findings contradictory to the neurolaw safety dance that’s so trendy. No reason for that link except, it’s the only chance it will ever have. …k, moving on.

I’m all for being cautious, but we are tip toeing, slow poking and dumbing down when what we need is just a little explanation, insight and mostly more experiments designed to replicate a real world trial experience. Showing images and peppering it with a scientific summary is like convicting by confession alone without seeing the interrogation. It turns out:

…in experiments with crimes ranging from homicide to unintentional assault, the authors found no evidence that neuroimages influenced jurors’ decisions about criminal liability or sentences. Convictions and punishments were, however, related to the level of perceived control by the defendant, and this was affected by the presence and kind of expert testimony – but not by neuroimages. -Gurley and Marcus

The next study danced a similar jig when looking at the use of neuroimages in an insanity defense, “Gurley and Marcus did not dissociate the effects of the neuroimage from those of the neurological expert testimony. Schweitzer and Saks did, and found no impact of neuroimages over and above the effects of verbal neuroscience testimony.” Further work can go beyond culpability and look at sentencing as well.  

Three recent studies (the 3rd unpublished) have all suggested testimony weighed heavier in juror decision making (exculpatory fashions) than brain scans … and may have me thinking I’ll reopen my expert witness biz. Giddyup.

wnyc:

Is There A Place For The Mind In Physics?

So I want you to do something for me. I want you to think of a blue monkey. Are you ready? OK, go! Visualize it in your head. Any kind of monkey will do (as long as it’s blue). Take a moment. Really, see the little blue dude! Got it? Great. Now, here is the question: Where did that thought fit into reality? How was it real? Where was it real?

Another way to ask this question is: Was the “blue monkey thought” just the electrical activity of your neurons? Was that all there was to it? If not, might your private internal screening of the blue monkey be something altogether different? Was it, perhaps, part of something just as fundamental as quarks and Higgs bosons?

This is the fundamental question behind philosopher Thomas Nagel’s controversial book: ”Mind & Cosmos: Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”. I’ve been slowly making my way through Nagel’s short (though, at points, dense) volume for a few months now. Back in October our own most excellent philosopher of Mind, Alva Noe, presented his own take on Nagel’s work. Yesterday, Tania Lombrozo extracted some real-world questions out of Nagel’s philosophy. Today I want to begin thinking a bit about what and where the Mind might be in relation to my own science of physics. CONTINUED. 

UmYuss. But not really. 

“To BD or not to BD: functional neuroimaging and the boundaries of bipolarity”

Bipolar disorders are major mood disorders defined by the presence of discrete episodes of depression and either mania, in bipolar I disorder, or hypomania, in bipolar II disorder. There is little contention that both are serious psychiatric conditions or that they are associated with substantial suffering, disability, risk of suicide and cost to the community. Recently, focus has shifted away from classic manic-depressive illness toward a ‘bipolar spectrum’ model, which allows for much softer presentations to be conceptualized as bipolarity, but the boundaries of this concept remain contentious. In this article, we will consider the contribution of neuroimaging to delineating the bipolar phenotype and differentiating it from similar disorders. [via]

Prediction: this model will be the case one day with psychopathy and other one card shark conditions, maybe not the next revision of the DSM…but eventually.