Trends in thought about consciousness, the mind, and the brain at the turn of the century were surprisingly similar to major trends in thinking about these topics today. For instance, some psychiatrists as well as physiologists considered all actions of the human mind, as well as all behaviours, entirely the product of the electrochemical actions of nerve cells, while others emphasized the importance of consciousness, free will, and even the soul. The action of nerve cells, and thus the brain itself, (...) was understood largely in terms of electrical activity, energy, and resistances, all leading to views of mental health and pathology based on energy and the loss of energy. Modern metaphors for understanding the brain, and along with them mental health and illness, emphasize information processing and neurochemistry. Such differences are reflected in the differences between typical treatments at the turn of the century and today. (shrink)

Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a brain stimulation technique currently being researched as an alternative or complimentary treatment for various neurological disorders. There is little knowledge about experiences of the participants of tDCS clinical research, especially from pediatric studies. Methods An interview study with typically developing minors (n = 19, mean age 13,66 years) participating in a tDCS study, and their parents (n = 18) was conducted to explore their views and experiences and inform the ethical analysis. Results (...) Children (10–13 years old) and adolescents (14–18 years old) reported good experiences with the stimulation. Next to financial incentives, main motives to participate in the study were curiosity and the possibility to help develop treatments for children affected by neurological disorders. They could also see a potential of using tDCS in a non-medical setting, especially regarding the provision of equal opportunity, e.g. in education. Parents also presented a positive attitude towards tDCS and their children participation in the basic research study. Nevertheless, their understanding of tDCS was rather poor. Even though many of them understood the techniques, they often did not see the link between the (current) lack of side effects and an absence of longitudinal studies. Parents were also cautious about using tDCS for non-medical/enhancement purposes. Conclusions The study findings show a need for more transparent information about the state of the art of tDCS, its function and what it might be able to offer, especially considering the good acceptability of tDCS. (shrink)

Typically, the determination of death by neurological criteria follows a very specific protocol. An apnea test is performed with further confirmation as necessary, and then mechanical ventilation is withdrawn with the consent of the family after they have had an opportunity to “say goodbye,” and at such a time to permit organ retrieval (with authorization of the patient or consent of the next of kin). Such a process maximizes transparency and ensures generalizability. In exceptional circumstances, however, it may be necessary (...) to deviate from this protocol in order to spare family members unnecessary suffering and to reduce moral distress felt by clinical staff. It may also be appropriate, we argue, to refrain from even inquiring about organ donation when the next-of-kin is not only certain to refuse, but lacks the decision-making capacity to potentially consent. The case described in this article calls into question generally reliable assumptions about determination of death by neurological criteria, where the best the clinical team could do for the patient and his family was “the least bad option.”. (shrink)

Ethical concerns regarding the conceptual framework for the determination of death by neurological criteria, including several clinical and diagnostic practices, are addressed. The significance of a diagnosis of brain death, diagnostic criteria, and certain technical aspects of the brain-death exam are presented. Standard and ancillary tests that typically help achieve prudential certitude that an individual has died are indicated. Ethical concerns surrounding interinstitutional variability of testing protocols are evaluated and considered, as are potential apnea-testing confounders such as hypotension, hypoxemia, hypercarbia, (...) and penumbra effects during ancillary testing. Potential adjustments to apnea-testing protocols involving capnography, thoracic impedance monitors, or spirometers to assess respiratory efforts are discussed. Situations in which individuals determined to be brain dead “wake up,” or fail to manifest the imminent cessation of somatic functioning typically seen when supported only by a ventilator, are also briefly reviewed. (shrink)

Recent neuroscientific evidence brings into question the conclusion that all aspects of consciousness are gone in patients who have descended into a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Here we summarize the evidence from human brain imaging as well as neurological damage in animals and humans suggesting that some form of consciousness can survive brain damage that commonly causes PVS. We also raise the issue that neuroscientific evidence indicates that raw emotional feelings (primary-process affects) can exist without any cognitive awareness of those (...) feelings. Likewise, the basic brain mechanisms for thirst and hunger exist in brain regions typically not damaged by PVS. If affective feelings can exist without cognitive awareness of those feelings, then it is possible that the instinctual emotional actions and pain "reflexes" often exhibited by PVS patients may indicate some level of mentality remaining in PVS patients. Indeed, it is possible such raw affective feelings are intensified when PVS patients are removed from life-supports. They may still experience a variety of primary-process affective states that could constitute forms of suffering. If so, withdrawal of life-support may violate the principle of nonmaleficence and be tantamount to inflicting inadvertent "cruel and unusual punishment" on patients whose potential distress, during the process of dying, needs to be considered in ethical decision-making about how such individuals should be treated, especially when their lives are ended by termination of life-supports. Medical wisdom may dictate the use of more rapid pharmacological forms of euthanasia that minimize distress than the de facto euthanasia of life-support termination that may lead to excruciating feelings of pure thirst and other negative affective feelings in the absence of any reflective awareness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seeking the Everyday Meaning of Autonomy in Neurologic DisordersGeorge J. Agich (bio)The Socratic aphorism that the unexamined life is not worth living and dictums like "Know thyself" remind us of the centrality of self-understanding in the history of philosophical reflections on autonomy. These traditional concerns with autonomy may seem far removed from the neurologic impairments to which Joel Anderson and Warren Lux draw our attention. Nonetheless, Anderson and Lux (...) have provided an important discussion that links the traditional philosophical commitment to self-knowledge with an account that parses these concepts in the context of neurologic disorders. Theirs is a potentially productive approach for improving our understanding of autonomy, one that Emilio Mordini and I advocated in a paper entitled, "Autonomy and the Ethics of Neurosurgery" (Agich and Mordini 1998, 54). We argued that the focus of bioethics on issues such as informed consent misses the more challenging and potentially fruitful collaboration that neurosurgery and neurology affords for advancing the philosophical understanding of the conditions of autonomy. The challenge is in the integration of concepts used in one context of meaning with other domains of discourse. A good example of the challenges embedded in pursuing this kind of project can be found in Anderson and Lux's discussion of the concept of accurate self-assessment.Anderson and Lux argue that accurate self-assessment is a requirement for one to act autonomously. On first hearing, this phrase sounds unsurprising and consistent with standard approaches that assume a higher degree of awareness of one's capacities. Their characterization, however, derives from their observations of cases involving severe neurologic impairments, which point to more basic processes than the reflective awareness or knowledge that is often assumed. Paradoxically, the language of accurate self-assessment sounds remarkably like an intellectual function. It appears to fall squarely within the traditional philosophical tendency to define autonomy in terms of ego-centered, intellectual functions involving relatively high-level reflective capacities. Despite their terminology, Anderson and Lux stress that their account requires a type of reflexivity that is not the same as self-conscious reflection understood in the highest degree. They stress this in a number of places. For example, they see the neurologic concept of executive function as involving basic feedback mechanisms that are "broadly isomorphic with capacities associated [End Page 295] with autonomy;" these include anticipation, goal seeking, planning, initiation, sequencing, monitoring, error detection, self-correction, as well as initiation of novel responses, a clearly heterogenous set of capacities (Anderson and Lux 2004, 285). These capacities are not capacities of the "mind," but basic neurologic functions of the intact embodied agent who is actively engaged in the world. Thus, these concepts capture or express a practical (or clinical) as opposed to a theoretical understanding of the basic conditions or capacities defining autonomy. Similarly, their talk of "self-assessment" does not need to be understood as explicit or conscious; rather, it typically operates in the background (Anderson and Lux 2004). They term this character of self-assessment "mundane" (Anderson and Lux 2004, 289), which strikes me as exactly the right way to characterize this key feature of autonomy (Agich 1995). Their phenomenological and clinically based insights are quite sound, but the reader struggles with a terminology that seems to run in a different direction. To be sure, they stress that they intend their language of "autonomy" and "accurate self-assessment" to involve ordinary, background, and everyday functions that do not require high levels or significant capacities for reflective self-assessment, but their very insistence underscores the problem inherent in this terminology.Anderson and Lux argue that the capacity for self-assessment has a task-relative dimension that requires a degree of "accuracy." They characterize accuracy in a way that may promote rather than forestall misunderstanding. They state that "an adequate degree of precision" (281) is required in such assessment. For example, in assessing whether one is able to jump a hurdle, they say "one must accurately estimate not only the strength of one's legs but also the height of the hurdle" (Anderson and Lux 2004, 281). They further characterize their account of "accuracy" as involving an epistemological externalism, which might lead some readers to assume... (shrink)

In popular culture, death is typically presented as clear and binary- someone is either walking and talking and alive, or very obviously still and dead. Reality is more complicated than the movies,...

BackgroundGait Analysis of healthy people, imitating pathological conditions while walking, has increased our understanding of biomechanical factors. The influence of the pelvis as a biomechanical constraint during gait is not specifically studied. How could mimicking a pelvic attitude influence the dynamic mechanical interaction of the body segments? We proposed an investigation of the pelvic attitude role on the gait pattern of typically developed people when they mimicked pelvic anteversion and posteroversion.Materials and methodsSeventeen healthy volunteers were enrolled in this study. They (...) simulated a pelvic anteversion and posteroversion during walking, exaggerating these postures as much as possible. 3D gait analysis was conducted using an optoelectronic system with eight cameras and two force plates. The kinematic, kinetic, and spatio-temporal parameters were compared between the three walking conditions.ResultsIn Pelvic Anteversion gait we found: increased hip flexion, increased knee flexion during stance, and reduction of ankle flexion-extension Range of Motion compared with Pelvic Normal gait. In Pelvic Posteroversion gait compared with PN, we found: decreased hip flexion-extension RoM with a tendency to hip extension, decreased knee maximum extension in stance, and increased ankle maximum dorsiflexion in stance.ConclusionThe configuration of PA contains gait similarities and differences when compared with pathologic gait where there is an anteversion as seen in children with Cerebral Palsy or Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Similarly, attitudes of PP have been described in patients with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Syndrome or patients who have undergone Pelvic Osteotomy. Understanding the dynamic biomechanical constraints is essential to the assessment of pathological behavior. The central nervous system adapts motor behavior in interaction with body constraints and available resources. (shrink)

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input (...) language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third‐person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro‐drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD. (shrink)

Autism is a widely researched area and much emphasis has been placed in research on the differences between the autistic and non-autistic populations. Such research commonly draws on proposed deficits within people with autism in order to explain differences. This paper seeks to present an alternative understanding of differences and draws on writings of people with autism in such a discussion. The construction of ‘Neurologically Typical syndrome’ (NT) will be presented as an inverted construction of diagnosis, which serves (...) to challenge the dominant position of ‘NTs’ and ‘NT traits’ over autistic traits. It will be argued that such an alternative representation of people with and without autism has important implications for our construction of and understanding of autism. (shrink)

Typical approaches to resolving the sorites paradox attempt to show, in one way or another, that the sorites argument is not paradoxical after all. However, if one can show that the sorites is not really paradoxical, the task remains of explaining why it appears to be a paradox. Our approach begins by addressing the appearance of paradox and then explores what this means for the paradox itself. We examine the sorites from the perspective of the various brain systems that (...) are intuitively comfortable with the key features of the premises of the sorites argument. We suggest that the explicit and implicit cognitive systems are separately responsible for the initial plausibility of the categorical and inductive premises. The appearance of paradox is a function of our brain’s architecture and arises from the conflicting interactions of neurologically distinct systems. (shrink)

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an agent (...) responsible for bringing about bad than for bringing about good side effects that the agent is indifferent about (Knobe 2003). Elsewhere, we have presented an analysis of the everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, and accounts for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. -Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. -Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI -Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions, Noûs 41:4, 663-685. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind typically conduct their discussions in terms of mental events, mental processes, mental properties, mental states – but rarely in terms of minds themselves. Sometimes this neglect is explicitly acknowledged. Donald Davidson, for example, writes that ‘there are no such things as minds, but people have mental properties, which is to say that certain psychological predicates are true of them. These properties are constantly changing, and such changes are mental events’.2 Hilary Putnam agrees, though for somewhat different reasons: (...) The view I have long defended is that the mind is not a thing; talk of our minds is talk of world-involving capabilities that we have and activities that we engage in. As Dewey succinctly put it, “Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situation in which we find ourselves. Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated mind as an independent entity which attends, purposes, cares and remembers”. But the traditional view, by treating mental states as states of the “underlying substance”, makes them properties of something “inside”, and, if one is a materialist philosopher, that means properties of our brains. So the next problem naturally seems to be: “Which neurological properties of our brains do these mental properties ‘reduce’ to?” For how could our brains have properties that aren’t neurological? And this is how materialist philosophers saw the problem until the advent of such new alternatives in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language as Functionalism and Semantic Externalism. (shrink)

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which a single stimulus typically associated with one sensory modality automatically and involuntarily produces sensations not typically associated with that modality. I argue that synesthesia elucidates how two naturalistic theories of representation and phenomenal experience conflict. Strong representationalism holds that what an experience is like is determined by the experience’s representational content. Informational semantics holds that representational content is determined by causal co-variation between a representation and an external object or property. I argue that (...) according to informational semantics, synesthetes and normal perceivers represent the same content in different ways. However, according to strong representationalism, two experiences with the same content must be represented in the same way. Therefore, if strong representationalists want to account for synesthesia, they cannot hold onto informational semantics as a theory of mental content. (shrink)

A central question in the current neurolegal and neuroethical literature is how brain-reading technologies could contribute to criminal justice. Some of these technologies have already been deployed within different criminal justice systems in Europe, including Slovenia, Italy, England and Wales, and the Netherlands, typically to determine guilt, legal responsibility, or recidivism risk. In this regard, the question arises whether brain-reading could permissibly be used against the person's will. To provide adequate legal protection from such non-consensual brain-reading in the European legal (...) context, ethicists have called for the recognition of a novel fundamental legal right to mental privacy. In this paper, we explore whether these ethical calls for recognising a novel legal right to mental privacy are necessary in the European context. We argue that a right to mental privacy could be derived from, or at least developed within in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, and that introducing an additional fundamental right to protect against brain-reading is not necessary. What is required, however, is a specification of the implications of existing rights for particular neurotechnologies and purposes. (shrink)

The Consensus Statement of the Third International Congress on Concussion in Sport in November 2008 defined concussion as a “complex pathophysiologic process affecting the brain, induced by traumatic biochemical forces.” Definitions of concussion vary slightly between various professional organizations of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and orthopedic surgeons, but all share the common characteristics of trauma affecting the head or body resulting in transient neurologic deficits or symptoms. Underlying the symptoms of concussion is a complex pathophysiologic process at the cellular level. While concussion (...) is typically thought of as resulting from a direct impact to the head, a concussion can also be sustained as a result of an impact to the body causing the force of the impact to be transmitted to and absorbed by the brain. (shrink)

In 1895 in the Project for a Scientific Psychology Freud tried to integrate psychology and neurology in order to develop a neuroscientific psychology. Since 1880 Freud made no distinction between psychology and physiology. His papers from the end of the 1880s to1890 were very clear on this scientific overlap: as with many of its contemporaries, Freud thought about psychology essentially as the physiology of the brain. Years later he had to surrender, realizing a technological delay, not capable to pursue its (...) ambitious aim, and until that moment psychoanalysis would have to use its more suitable clinical method. Also, he seemed skeptical about the phrenology drift, typical of that time, in which any psychological function needed to be located in its neuroanatomical area. He could not see the progresses of neurosciences and its fruitful dialogue with psychoanalysis, occurred also thanks to the improvements in the field of neuroimaging, which has made possible a remarkable advance in the knowledge of the mind-brain system and a better observation of the psychoanalytical theories. After years of investigations, deriving from research and clinical work of the last century, the discovery of neural networks, together with the free energy principle, we are observing under a new light the psychodynamic neuroscience in its exploration of the mind-brain system. In this narrative review we summarize the important developments of the psychodynamic neuroscience, with particular regard to the free energy principle, the resting state networks, especially the Default Mode Network in its link with the Self; finally we suggest a discussion by approaching the concept of Alpha Function, proposed by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, trying to speculate about the connection with neuroscience. (shrink)

The locked-in syndrome is a state of profound paralysis with preserved awareness of self and environment who typically results from a brain stem stroke. Although patients in LIS have great difficulty communicating, their consciousness, cognition, and language usually remain intact. Medical decision-making by LIS patients is compromised, not by cognitive impairment, but by severe communication impairment. Former systems of communication that permitted LIS patients to make only “yes” or “no” responses to questions was sufficient to validate their consent for simple (...) medical decisions but not for consequential medical decisions such as whether to refuse further life-sustaining therapy. Emerging technologies including computer-tracking assistance of retained partial motor function and brain-computer interfaces promise to improve the communication ability of LIS patients and, when better developed, will allow them to fully exercise their right to actively participate in consequential medical decisions about their own medical care. Although so-called “covert cognition” patients clinically diagnosed as vegetative state that are shown to be aware by functional neuroimaging maybe metaphorically considered locked-in, it is nosologically more coherent not to categorize them formally as LIS. (shrink)

There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing “treatment”—for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When asked whether a healthy individual may undergo the same intervention for the purpose of enhancing their capacities (i.e., “enhancement”—for example, use of a psychostimulant as a “study drug”), people often express greater (...) hesitation. Building on prior research in moral philosophy and cognitive science, in this work, we ask why people draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement. In two experiments, we provide evidence that the accessibility of health-related interventions determines their perceived descriptive or statistical normality (Experiment 1), and that gains in descriptive normality for such interventions weaken the moral distinction between treatment and enhancement (Experiment 2). In short, our findings suggest that the tendency to draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement is driven, in part, by assumptions about descriptive abnormality; and raise the possibility that normalizing novel biomedical interventions by promoting access could undermine people’s selective opposition toward enhancement, rendering it morally comparable to treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 35-41 [Access article in PDF] The Rationality of Psychosis and Understanding the Deluded Matthew R. Broome Campbell's important and influential paper (Campbell 2001) has framed the debate that Bayne and Pacherie (2004) most explicitly, and Klee (2004) and Georgaca (2004) more implicitly, engage in. Campbell has offered two broad ways of thinking about explanations of delusions—the empirical and the rational. He offers some (...) criticism of the former and an endorsement of the latter. Campbell uses examples from clinical psychopathology to illustrate his argument and Bayne and Pacherie in turn employ these. Campbell discusses the eponymously named delusions of Capgras and Cotard—the former a subtype of delusional misidentification and the latter a delusion whose content is colored predominantly with nihilistic and possibly hypochondriacal themes. Campbell, Bayne and Pacherie, and Klee discuss the empirical data in relation to such delusions and as an aid to discussing the empirical model more generally. It does seem a little unfortunate that these delusions, which are less than typical, become the focus of Campbell's paper, and Bayne and Pacherie's criticism of his work. Delusions are remarkably heterogeneous; this indeed may be part of the reason why there is so much difficulty in reaching a definition as Klee discusses, and occur in a wide variety of mental and neurological illnesses. The most common delusions are those of persecution and reference (World Health Organization [WHO] 1973) and typically occur in schizophrenia. By contrast, delusional misidentification occurs most commonly in patients with dementia, delirium, and focal cognitive impairment, but can occur in other functional psychoses such as an affective or schizophrenic psychosis. The most common form of delusional misidentification is not that of either the exotic Capgras or Fregoli syndromes but delusional misidentification for place; thus, although Bayne and Pacherie's arguments against Campbell may still hold, delusional misidentification tends to occur in the context of a patient believing that they are at home or on holiday rather than in hospital and may not necessarily involve close family members or other intimate relationships. Similarly, Cotard's syndrome tends to occur in the context of a severe depressive illness with mood-congruent psychotic symptoms, typically in an elderly individual. It does not have to have the content that the deluded is dead, but can include beliefs, for example, that the world no longer exists or that their internal organs are not present. Thus, a patient with either Capgras' or Cotard's syndrome is likely to differ from patients with delusions of persecution. They would [End Page 35] have different diagnoses, probably be older, and have a greater likelihood of structural abnormalities of the brain on imaging and consequent neuropsychological dysfunction. That is not to say that patients with schizophrenia have normal cerebral anatomy and neuropsychology, but rather that the Capgras' and Cotard's patients are likely to have neurological quality to their presentation that is clinically relevant, rather than what commonly the case in schizophrenia and the other functional psychoses, where the neurological abnormalities are only currently important at the level of academic research. Empirical Models of Delusion Formation Different delusions may not have that much in common, nor may the patients who believe in them. This in turn relates to the empirical paradigm that both Campbell and Bayne and Pacherie discuss. It is true that current research, and indeed the clinical practice of cognitive behavioral therapy for psychosis, is indebted to the work of Maher and it is within his legacy which we work. This, however, is not to say that we think his initial formulation was correct. Maher's (1988, 1992) work focused attempts in explaining delusions—both to support and refute his thesis that delusions are the consequence of normal cognitive mechanisms seeking to explain an anomalous sensory experience. Such a view initially led to work demonstrating delusions in the absence of anomalous perceptions, the presence of reasoning biases in the deluded population, and the possibility that abnormal sensory experience may be consequent upon biased cognitive processes (Garety and Freeman 1999). More recent work has demonstrated the prevalence of... (shrink)

Piccinini and Craver (Synthese 183:283–311, 2011) argue for the surprising view that psychological explanation, properly understood, is a species of mechanistic explanation. This contrasts with the ‘received view’ (due, primarily, to Cummins and Fodor) which maintains a sharp distinction between psychological explanation and mechanistic explanation. The former is typically construed as functional analysis, the analysis of some psychological capacity into an organized series of subcapacities without specifying any of the structural features that underlie the explanandum capacity. The latter idea, of (...) course, sees explanation as a matter of describing structures that maintain (or produce) the explanandum capacity. In this paper, I defend the received view by criticizing Piccinini and Craver’s argument for the claim that psychological explanation is not distinct from mechanistic explanation, and by showing how psychological explanations can possess explanatory force even when nothing is known about the underlying neurological details. I conclude with a few brief criticisms about the enterprise of mechanistic explanation in general. (shrink)

Any attempt at consciousness assessment in organoids requires careful consideration of the theory of consciousness that researchers will rely on when performing this task. In cognitive neuroscience and the clinic, there are tools and theories used to detect and measure consciousness, typically in human beings, but none of them is neither fully consensual nor fit for the biological characteristics of organoids. I discuss the existing attempt relying on the Integrated Information Theory and its models and tools. Then, I revive the (...) distinction between global theories of consciousness and local theories of consciousness as a thought-provoking one for those engaged in the difficult task of adapting models of consciousness to the biological reality of brain organoids. The “microconsciousness theory” of Semir Zeki is taken as an exploratory path and illustration of a theory defending that minimal networks can support a form of consciousness. I suggest that the skepticism prevailing in the neuroscience community regarding the possibility of organoid consciousness relies on some assumptions related to a globalist account of consciousness and that other accounts are worth exploring at this stage. (shrink)

For the last thirty years, cognitive scientists have attempted to describe the cognitive architecture of typically developing human beings, using, among other sources of evidence, the dissociations that result from developmental psychopathologies such as autism spectrum disorders, Williams syndrome, and Down syndrome. Thus, in his recent defense of the massive modularity hypothesis, Steven Pinker insists on the importance of such dissociations to identify the components of the typical cognitive architecture (2005, 4; my emphasis): This kind of faculty psychology has (...) numerous advantages (...). It is supported by the existence of neurological and genetic disorders that target these faculties unevenly, such as a difficulty in recognizing faces (and facelike shapes) but not other objects, or a difficulty in reasoning about minds but not about objects or pictures. Similarly, Simon Baron-Cohen writes (1998, 335; my emphasis; see also Temple, 1997): I suggest that the study of mental retardation would profit from the application of the framework of cognitive neuropsychology (…). In cognitive neuropsychology, one key question running through the investigator’s mind is “Is this process or mechanism intact or impaired in this person?” When cognitive neuropsychology is done well, a patient’s cognitive system is examined with specific reference to a model of the normal cognitive system. And, not infrequently, evidence from the patient’s cognitive deficits leads to a revision of the model of the normal system. However, in recent years, the use of developmental psychopathologies to identify the components of the typical cognitive architecture has come under heavy fire. In a series of influential articles, neuropsychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith has argued that findings about the pattern of impairments and preserved capacities in people with developmental psychopathologies say nothing about the cognitive architecture of.. (shrink)

Locked-in syndrome (LIS) is a severe neurological condition that typically leaves a patient unable to move, talk and, in many cases, initiate communication. Brain Computer Interfaces (or BCIs) promise to enable individuals with conditions like LIS to re-engage with their physical and social worlds. In this paper we will use extended mind theory to offer a way of seeing the potential of BCIs when attached to, or implanted in, individuals with LIS. In particular, we will contend that functionally integrated BCIs (...) extend the minds of individuals with LIS beyond their bodies, allowing them greater autonomy than they can typically hope for in living with their condition. This raises important philosophical questions about the implications of BCI technology, particularly the potential to change selves, and ethical questions about whether society has a responsibility to aid these individuals in re-engaging with their physical and social worlds. It also raises some important questions about when these interventions should be offered to individuals with LIS and respecting the rights of these individuals to refuse intervention. By aiding willing individuals in re-engaging with their physical and social worlds, BCIs open up avenues of opportunity taken for granted by able individuals and introduce new ways in which these individuals can be harmed. These latter considerations serve to highlight our emergent social responsibilities to those individuals who will be suitable for, and receive, BCIs. (shrink)

On September 27, 2016 people across the world looked down at their buzzing phones to see the AP Alert: “Baby born with DNA from 3 people, first from new technique.” It was an announcement met with confusion by many, but one that polarized the scientific community almost instantly. Some celebrated the birth as an advancement that could help women with a family history of mitochondrial diseases prevent the transmission of the disease to future generations; others held it unethical, citing medical (...) tourism and consequences for the future of the therapy. The child in question was actually born a few months earlier on April 6, 2016, but the research was published a few months later in the October edition of Fertility and Sterility. The mother carries DNA that could have given the baby Leigh Syndrome, a severe neurological disorder characterized by psychomotor regression that typically results in death between ages two and three.[1] Also known as subacute necrotizing encephalomyelopathy, Leigh Syndrome is caused by genetic mutations in mitochondrial DNA, which causes defective oxidative phosphorylation. Because people with this condition cannot re-form ATP, “demyleniation, gliosis, necrosis, spongiosis, or capillary proliferation”[2] can occur, thereby producing bilateral lesions across the central nervous system. The 36-year-old mother previously had four miscarriages and successfully birthed two children, both of whom survived less than six years due to the syndrome. For religious reasons, the mother opted for Spindle Nuclear Transfer instead of Pronuclear Transfer,[3] which many religious organizations oppose because it entails the destruction of fertilized eggs.[4] In Pronuclear Transfer, both the parent and donor egg are fertilized. The parent’s nuclear material is then removed from the egg containing mutated mitochondria and inserted into the fertilized donor egg—from which the original nuclear material has been removed and destroyed. Spindle Nuclear Transfer, on the other hand, removes the mother’s nuclear material from the egg with unhealthy mitochondria, then implants it into a donor’s egg. The newly created egg is then fertilized with the father’s sperm. This Spindle Nuclear Transfer was performed in Mexico by a team of doctors led by Dr. John Zhang, the founder of the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City. In their report, the doctors outline that five oocytes were successfully reconstituted, four of which developed into blastocysts. Only one was euploid: containing 46 XY chromosomes. Researchers then biopsied that blastocyst and found that the transmission rate of maternal mtDNA was, “5.10 ± 1.11% and the heteroplasmy level for 8993T>G was 5.73%.”[5] This indicates that at the blastocyst stage, around five percent of the mitochondria are from the original maternal egg with the mutation for Leigh Syndrome. After birth, they biopsied different tissues and found that they had an average of less than 1.60 ± 0.92% of transmitted mtDNA from the original maternal egg. The baby is reportedly doing well and the team of doctors concluded that “[h]uman oocytes reconstituted by SNT are capable of producing a healthy live birth. SNT may provide a novel treatment option in minimizing pathogenic mtDNA transmission from mothers to their babies."[6] Even when considered theoretically, Spindle Nuclear Transfer is controversial. Many doctors believe that the risks at this stage of research are too great. Dr. Trevor Stammers, a bioethicist at St. Mary’s University in London, points out: “We do not yet have a clear picture of the interaction between nuclear DNA and mitochondria.”[7] Others hold that faulty mitochondrial DNA can still be transferred during the procedure. Still more argue this technology could create problems because of germline modification.[8] Dr. Paul Knoepfler, a cell biologist at the UC Davis School of Medicine, explains: “Since this is uncharted territory and the children born from this technology would have heritable genetic changes, there are also significant unknown risks to future generations.”[9] However, proponents counter these arguments. They say the benefits outweigh the risks, as “mitochondrial replacement techniques [like Spindle Nuclear Transfer] would eliminate maternal transmission of mitochondrial disease… allowing a woman with a family history of mitochondrial diseases to ensure her children would not be affected.”[10] Additionally, experts say that no symptoms will occur if less than 20% of the transferred mitochondrial DNA is faulty.[11] And while opponents see potential germline modification as a problem, advocates answer that this could stop a family history of mitochondrial disease, which they deem a more serious concern. In this case specifically, however, there are more issues at hand. While the team of doctors did eliminate the possibility of germline modification by selecting a male embryo, there are other ethical concerns. Some argue that this case could be described as “medical tourism.” While New Hope Medical Clinic does maintain a branch in Mexico, Dr. Zhang stated that Mexico has “no rules.”[12] It is a country with underdeveloped regulations, making it difficult to confirm that doctors adhere to widely-held medical and ethical standards. Furthermore, while it is highly unlikely that the child will develop Leigh’s Syndrome, Dr. Dietrich Egli of the New York Stem Cell Foundation says the 5% mitochondrial transfer rate indicates that the technique “was not carried out well.”[13] He points to studies of embryos where the rate of mtDNA transfer was almost ten times lower. Spindle Nuclear Transfer is currently legal in the UK,[14] and many are hoping to see it legalized in the US, although Congress currently prohibits the FDA from considering applications that would entail trials in people.[15] While Dr. Zhang’s work is arguably revolutionary, many wonder if the manner in which this study was performed—in Mexico and with a high mitochondrial transfer rate—will impact the technology’s future in the US. Last week, Dr. Zhang presented the report to scientists gathered in Salt Lake City, saying that while science isn’t a race, it is “in a sense, a race for the family to find a cure, to find hope.”[16] Only time will tell if this study set back other families racing and hoping for a cure. References 1. "Leigh Syndrome." Genetics Home Reference, US National Library of Medicine, 25 Oct. 2016. Accessed 26 Oct. 2016. 2. McKusick, Victor A., and Ada Hamosh. "LEIGH SYNDROME; LS." Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, Johns Hopkins University, 20 Jan. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 3. Zhang, J, H Liu, S Luo, A Chavez-Badiola, and Z Liu. "First live birth using human oocytes reconstituted by spindle nuclear transfer for mitochondrial DNA mutation causing Leigh syndrome." Fertility and Sterility, vol. 106, no. 3, 2016, pp. e375-76. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 4. Sample, Ian. "‘Three-parent’ babies explained: what are the concerns and are they justified?" The Guardian, 2 Feb. 2015. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 5. Zhang, et al. 6. Ibid. 7. Knapton, Sarah. "Three-parent babies: the arguments for and against." The Telegraph, 3 Feb. 2015. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. "Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy FAQs." New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute, New York Stem Cell Foundation. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 11. Reardon, Sara. "‘Three-parent baby’ claim raises hopes — and ethical concerns." Nature, 28 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 12. Hamzelou, Jessica. "Exclusive: World’s first baby born with new “3 parent” technique." New Scientist, 27 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 13. Reardon, Sara. "‘Three-parent baby’ claim raises hopes — and ethical concerns." Nature, 28 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 14. "3-Person IVF: A Resource Page." Center for Genetics and Society, 24 Oct. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 15. Ritter, Malcolm. "Baby born with DNA from 3 people, first from new technique." Associated Press, 27 Sept. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. 16. Chen, Daphne. "Controversy swirls around first three-parent baby." Deseret News, 19 Oct. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. Works consulted Swetlitz, Ike. "FDA urged to approve ‘three-parent embryos,’ a new frontier in reproduction." STAT, 3 Feb. 2016. Accessed 30 Oct. 2016. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Still Life Is Really a Moving LifeThe Role of Mirror Neurons and Empathy in Animating Aesthetic ResponseCarol S. Jeffers (bio)IntroductionIn the Western aesthetic canon, the still life enjoys a certain prestige; its place in the museum and on the pages of the art history text is secure. Art aficionados who appreciate the character of Cezanne's apples help to ensure the lofty standing of the still life, as do (...) students who admire the dewdrops still glistening on flowers picked and painted in the nineteenth century. For some students, however, it is difficult to understand such veneration. Despite the coaxing of dedicated art or museum educators, these students find apples nestled among drapery folds or translucent petals in a spring bouquet to be "boring." No matter how compelling the apples, how exquisitely rendered the blossoms, the still life is much too static, offering little more than the lifelessness of inanimate objects.In my experience, even the most unappreciative of students can be persuaded to take a closer look at the inanimate—not by me or any strategies I may have devised but rather by classmates who have chosen still life paintings to serve as their personal metaphors. When shared during the courses I teach, these still lifes and their depicted objects acquire special meanings that are uniquely associated with the individual students who chose them. Reflecting on these class presentations, converted students offered these thoughts: "I related myself with the metaphors and the way my classmates felt"; and "What really stayed with me were the stories and the way my classmates connected with their paintings—how they connected to the art emotionally." Still another wrote: "I really liked the way their presentations went because I got to know [my classmates] a little bit more." Through these connections to still life and other genres, students explored [End Page 31] their concepts of self within a community of others and began to experience the power of empathy.Empathy, typically defined as "the intellectual or emotional identification with another,"1 is a human capacity that, according to the noted neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, allows us to understand the world of objects as well as the world of others.2 With the recent discovery of the mirror neuron system in the human brain, Gallese and other investigators around the world have identified the neurological basis of empathy.3 Subsequent studies of the remarkable properties of mirror neurons have yielded potent new understandings of the connections between empathy, objects of art and material culture, and intrapersonal relationships among human beings. Interestingly, these twenty-first-century findings tend to confirm a nineteenth-century connection between aesthetics and empathy, or more precisely, Einfuhlung ("in-feeling," or "feeling into"), a term coined by the philosopher Robert Vischer in 1873 to describe the projection of human feeling onto art objects.4 As Vischer himself described this phenomenon, "I transport myself into the inner being of an object and explore its formal character from within, as it were."5These insights, whether gained through the use of state-of-the-art brain imaging technologies or dusty volumes in a German library, have led Gallese to consider some interesting implications, such as, for example, those involving the still life—its bottles, apples, even its brushstrokes—and to claim that "a still life is really a moving life" when understood from the perspective of neuroscience.6 To explore this claim and its relevance to classroom and museum practices, this article examines the relationship between mirror neurons, empathy, and aesthetic response as it developed among preservice teachers who presented metaphorical works of art in two teacher education courses. A brief synopsis of research results highlighting the workings of the mirroring mechanism is presented and then applied to two student presentations: one given by Molly about Cezanne's Still Life with Apples (1893-94) and the other by Deborah about Fantin-Latour's White and Pink Mallows in a Vase (1895). The stories told by Molly, Deborah, and their classmates allow additional insights with implications for art and museum education.Mirror Neurons: Some Research ResultsSome fifteen years ago, what Gallese characterizes as a "strange class" of neurons was discovered, first... (shrink)

Many studies have argued for distinct but complementary contributions from each hemisphere in the control of movements to visual targets. Investigators have attempted to extend observations from patients with unilateral left- and right-hemisphere damage, to those using neurologically-intact participants, by assuming that each hand has privileged access to the contralateral hemisphere. Previous attempts to illustrate right hemispheric contributions to the control of aiming have focussed on increasing the spatial demands of an aiming task, to attenuate the typical right (...) hand advantages, to try to enhance a left hand reaction time advantage in right-handed participants. These early attempts have not been successful. The present study circumnavigates some of the theoretical and methodological difficulties of some of the earlier experiments, by using three different tasks linked directly to specialized functions of the right hemisphere: bisecting, the gap effect, and visuospatial localization. None of these tasks were effective in reducing the magnitude of left hand reaction time advantages in right handers. Results are discussed in terms of alternatives to right hemispheric functional explanations of the effect, the one-dimensional nature of our target arrays, power and precision given the size of the left hand RT effect, and the utility of examining the proportions of participants who show these effects, rather than exclusive reliance on measures of central tendency and their associated null hypothesis significance tests. (shrink)

What is attention? How does it go wrong? Do attention deficits arise from genes or from the environment? Can we cure it with drugs or training? Are there disorders of attention other than deficit disorders? The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research on the subject of attention. This research has been facilitated by advances on several fronts: New methods are now available for viewing brain activity in real time, there is expanding information on the complexities of the biochemistry (...) of neural activity, individual genes can be isolated and their functions identified, analysis of the component processes included under the broad umbrella of "attention" has become increasingly sophisticated, and ingenious methods have been devised for measuring typical and atypical development of these processes, from infancy into childhood, and then into adulthood. In this book, Kim Cornish and John Wilding are concerned with attention and its development, both typical and atypical, particularly in disorders with a known genetic etiology or assumed genetic linkage. Tremendous advances across seemingly diverse disciplines - molecular genetics, pediatric neurology, child psychiatry, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and education - have culminated in a wealth of new methods for elucidating disorders at multiple levels, possibly paving the way for new treatment options. Cornish and Wilding use three specific-yet-interlinking levels of analysis: genetic blueprint, the developing brain, and the behavioral-cognitive outcomes, as the basis for charting the attention profiles of six well-documented neurodevelopmental disorders: ADHD, autism, fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, and 22q11 deletion syndrome. Their overarching aim in this book is to provide the most authoritative and extensive account to date of disorder-specific attention profiles and their development from infancy through adolescence. (shrink)

What is attention? How does it go wrong? Do attention deficits arise from genes or from the environment? Can we cure it with drugs or training? Are there disorders of attention other than deficit disorders? The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research on the subject of attention. This research has been facilitated by advances on several fronts: New methods are now available for viewing brain activity in real time, there is expanding information on the complexities of the biochemistry (...) of neural activity, individual genes can be isolated and their functions identified, analysis of the component processes included under the broad umbrella of "attention" has become increasingly sophisticated, and ingenious methods have been devised for measuring typical and atypical development of these processes, from infancy into childhood, and then into adulthood. In this book, Kim Cornish and John Wilding are concerned with attention and its development, both typical and atypical, particularly in disorders with a known genetic etiology or assumed genetic linkage. Tremendous advances across seemingly diverse disciplines - molecular genetics, pediatric neurology, child psychiatry, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and education - have culminated in a wealth of new methods for elucidating disorders at multiple levels, possibly paving the way for new treatment options. Cornish and Wilding use three specific-yet-interlinking levels of analysis: genetic blueprint, the developing brain, and the behavioral-cognitive outcomes, as the basis for charting the attention profiles of six well-documented neurodevelopmental disorders: ADHD, autism, fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, and 22q11 deletion syndrome. Their overarching aim in this book is to provide the most authoritative and extensive account to date of disorder-specific attention profiles and their development from infancy through adolescence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian GrayJoseph CarrollSince the advent of the poststructuralist revolution some thirty years ago, interpretive literary criticism has suppressed two concepts that had informed virtually all previous literary thinking: (1) the idea of the author as an individual person and an originating source for literary meaning, and (2) the idea of "human nature" as the represented subject and common frame of (...) reference for literary depictions. Under the tutelage of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, literary critics learned to speak of authors, characters, settings, and plots not as individuals situated in a natural world but as discursive formations constituted by the circulation of linguistic, cultural, and ideological energies. In the three decades during which poststructuralism has dominated academic literary study, a different kind of revolution—evolutionary, Darwinian, and naturalistic—has been transforming the social sciences. Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology, behavioral ecology, cognitive archaeology, and behavioral genetics do not all agree with one another in every respect, but they are all nonetheless aspects or phases of a common research program. The central working hypothesis in this program is that the human species, like all other species, has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment and that as a consequence it has a distinct, genetically transmitted, species-typical set of characteristics—anatomical, physiological, hormonal, neurological, and behavioral. That set of characteristics is what in common language is meant by "human nature." Literature has always given us subjectively evocative depictions of human nature, and Darwinian social science is now giving us a more comprehensive and scientifically precise account of it. The sense of [End Page 286] individual agency is one crucial aspect of human nature, and that aspect is now being explored in complementary ways by personality psychology and by cognitive neuroscience.1Over the past decade or so, a scattered handful of literary scholars has broken away from the dominant poststructuralist paradigm and has sought to make use of the new scientific information on human nature.2 The simplest and most obvious way to use this information is to examine the behavior depicted in literary texts and to correlate that behavior with "human universals," that is, with forms of behavior that appear in every known culture and that thus appear to be embedded in the nature of the species. Seeking depictions of universals has produced valuable results for literary study, but this first move in Darwinian criticism does not exhaust the range of possibility in the analysis of literary meaning. Human nature is complex and sometimes divided against itself; individuals vary, and some variations depart from species-typical patterns, even in the most adaptively crucial aspects of survival and reproduction. Moreover, literary meaning involves more than the represented subject matter. Authors imbue texts with meanings and affects peculiar to themselves; authors engage in communicative transactions with audiences; and texts have formal and aesthetic properties that are not reducible to represented subject matter. All of these aspects of the total literary situation are part of literary meaning, and all of them can and should fall within the range of analysis available to Darwinian literary study.3Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is. Wilde does not develop his themes in Darwinian terms, but the novel can still be read [End Page... (shrink)

Background Traditionally, palliative care has focused on patients suffering from life-threatening somatic diseases such as cancer or progressive neurological disorders. In contrast, despite the often chronic, severely disabling, and potentially life-threatening nature of psychiatric disorders, there are neither palliative care units nor clinical guidelines on palliative measures for patients in psychiatry. Main text This paper contributes to the growing literature on a palliative approach in psychiatry and is based on the assumption that a change of perspective from a curative to (...) a palliative approach could help promote patient-centeredness and increase quality of life for severely ill patients in psychiatry as well as in somatic medicine. To exemplify this, we offer three different clinical scenarios: severe and enduring anorexia nervosa, treatment-refractory schizophrenia, and chronic suicidality and persistent self-injury in borderline personality disorder. Conclusion We emphasize that many typical interventions for treatment-refractory psychiatric disorders may indeed be of a palliative nature. Furthermore, introducing traditional features of palliative care, e.g. so-called goals of care conversations, could aid even further in ensuring that caregivers, patients, and families agree on which treatment goals are to be prioritized in order to optimize quality of life in spite of severe, persistent mental disorder. (shrink)

Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) represent the most abundant class of RNA molecules in the cell and are key players during protein synthesis and cellular homeostasis. Aberrations in the extensive tRNA biogenesis pathways lead to severe neurological disorders in humans. Mutations in the tRNA splicing endonuclease (TSEN) and its associated RNA kinase cleavage factor polyribonucleotide kinase subunit 1 (CLP1) cause pontocerebellar hypoplasia (PCH), a heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders, that manifest as underdevelopment of specific brain regions typically accompanied by microcephaly, profound motor (...) impairments, and child mortality. Recently, we demonstrated that mutations leading to specific PCH subtypes destabilize TSEN in vitro and cause imbalances of immature to mature tRNA ratios in patient‐derived cells. However, how tRNA processing defects translate to disease on a systems level has not been understood. Recent findings suggested that other cellular processes may be affected by mutations in TSEN/CLP1 and obscure the molecular mechanisms of PCH emergence. Here, we review PCH disease models linked to the TSEN/CLP1 machinery and discuss future directions to study neuropathogenesis. (shrink)

Fourteen healthy children (13.8±2.2 years, range 10 to 16; M:F=5:9) received 30 Hz intermittent theta burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (iTBS) with a stimulation intensity of 70% of resting motor threshold (RMT) with a total of 300 (iTBS300) pulses. All volunteers were free of neurologic, psychiatric and serious medical illnesses, not taking any neuropsychiatric medications, and did not have any contraindications to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Changes in the mean amplitudes of motor-evoked potentials from baseline following iTBS were expressed as a ratio (...) and assessed from 1 to 10 minutes (BLOCK1) and 1 to 30 minutes (BLOCK2) using repeated-measures analysis of variance. All 14 subjects completed iTBS300 over the dominant primary motor cortex (M1) without any clinically reported adverse events. ITBS300 produced significant M1 facilitation (F5,65=3.165, p=0.01) at BLOCK1 and trend level M1 facilitation at BLOCK2 (F10,129=1.69, p=0.089). Although iTBS300 (stimulation duration of 92 seconds at 70% RMT) delivered over M1 in typically developed children was well-tolerated and produced on average significant facilitatory changes in cortical excitability, the post-iTBS300 neurophysiologic response was variable in our small sample. ITBS300-induced changes may represent a potential neuroplastic biomarker in healthy children and those with neuro-genetic or neuro-psychiatric disorders. However, a larger sample size is needed to address safety and concerns of response variability. (shrink)

Research on human subjects aims to obtain knowledge of vital importance for human health and functioning. Neuroscientific research specifically is understood as oriented towards three goals: the maintenance of neurological health, the treatment of neurological diseases or syndromes, and the enhancement of neurological functioning. Most guidelines or regulations for pediatric research (whether in the U.S. or elsewhere) require that if a research intervention exposes subjects to more than minimal risk, a prospect of direct benefit is required—along with some other important (...) criteria. It is also required for any research project, that the methods and design will yield scientifically valid knowledge. This is typically met via placebo-controlled trials. This chapter presents an argument to the effect that more than minimal risk research on pediatric subjects cannot meet both ethical requirements. The basic idea is that either the subjects in the control or experimental arm will receive a prospect of direct benefit, but not both. This chapter also argues that the ethical weight or importance of this dilemma is very acute for neuroscientific research given the complexity of the brain’s functioning and the correlated difficulty of judging whether there is a “prospect” of direct benefit. The second half responds to this argument via a case study in neuroscientific research. The solution recapitulates a type of component analysis according to which different ethical principles apply to different activities of a research study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian GrayJoseph CarrollSince the advent of the poststructuralist revolution some thirty years ago, interpretive literary criticism has suppressed two concepts that had informed virtually all previous literary thinking: (1) the idea of the author as an individual person and an originating source for literary meaning, and (2) the idea of "human nature" as the represented subject and common frame of (...) reference for literary depictions. Under the tutelage of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, literary critics learned to speak of authors, characters, settings, and plots not as individuals situated in a natural world but as discursive formations constituted by the circulation of linguistic, cultural, and ideological energies. In the three decades during which poststructuralism has dominated academic literary study, a different kind of revolution—evolutionary, Darwinian, and naturalistic—has been transforming the social sciences. Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology, behavioral ecology, cognitive archaeology, and behavioral genetics do not all agree with one another in every respect, but they are all nonetheless aspects or phases of a common research program. The central working hypothesis in this program is that the human species, like all other species, has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment and that as a consequence it has a distinct, genetically transmitted, species-typical set of characteristics—anatomical, physiological, hormonal, neurological, and behavioral. That set of characteristics is what in common language is meant by "human nature." Literature has always given us subjectively evocative depictions of human nature, and Darwinian social science is now giving us a more comprehensive and scientifically precise account of it. The sense of [End Page 286] individual agency is one crucial aspect of human nature, and that aspect is now being explored in complementary ways by personality psychology and by cognitive neuroscience.1Over the past decade or so, a scattered handful of literary scholars has broken away from the dominant poststructuralist paradigm and has sought to make use of the new scientific information on human nature.2 The simplest and most obvious way to use this information is to examine the behavior depicted in literary texts and to correlate that behavior with "human universals," that is, with forms of behavior that appear in every known culture and that thus appear to be embedded in the nature of the species. Seeking depictions of universals has produced valuable results for literary study, but this first move in Darwinian criticism does not exhaust the range of possibility in the analysis of literary meaning. Human nature is complex and sometimes divided against itself; individuals vary, and some variations depart from species-typical patterns, even in the most adaptively crucial aspects of survival and reproduction. Moreover, literary meaning involves more than the represented subject matter. Authors imbue texts with meanings and affects peculiar to themselves; authors engage in communicative transactions with audiences; and texts have formal and aesthetic properties that are not reducible to represented subject matter. All of these aspects of the total literary situation are part of literary meaning, and all of them can and should fall within the range of analysis available to Darwinian literary study.3Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is. Wilde does not develop his themes in Darwinian terms, but the novel can still be read [End Page... (shrink)

In the debate over moral bioenhancement, some object that biochemical, genetic, and neurological interventions aiming at enhancing moral agency threaten the autonomy of persons, as they compromise moral deliberation and motivation. Opponents of this view argue that such interventions may actually enhance autonomy itself, thereby increasing a person's capacity for moral agency. My aim is to explore the various senses of autonomy commonly appealed to in such controversies and to expose their limitations in resolving the central disputed issues. I propose (...) that a Kantian conception of autonomy is more effective in addressing these issues, as it specifies the key features that inform an intelligible account of moral worth and moral law. A consideration of these features is typically lacking in the arguments advanced by contenders in these debates. Guided by a Kantian framework, I argue that moral bioenhancement projects directed at affecting moral autonomy are not as promising as they appear, for both metaphysical and empirical reasons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Back to the Future:Obtaining Organs from Non-Heart-Beating CadaversRobert M. Arnold (bio) and Stuart J. Youngner (bio)Organ Transplantation requires viable donor organs. This simple fact has become the Achilles' heel of transplantation programs. Progress in immunology and transplant surgery has outstripped the supply of available organs. Between 1988 and 1991, for example, the number of transplant candidates on waiting lists increased by about 55 percent, while the number of donors (...) increased only about 16 percent.1 By the end of March 1993, more than 30,000 potential recipients awaited transplantation (United Network for Organ Sharing Database (UNOS) 1993). Every day six of these patients die prior to receiving a heart or liver transplant, while patients needing kidney transplants must tolerate a lower quality of life on dialysis (Grenvik 1992; Evans, Orians, and Ascher 1992).This scarcity is likely to get worse. As transplantation becomes more successful, it is being offered to sicker and older patients. Attempts to transplant other solid organs, such as small bowel and pancreas, will only fuel the demand for donors. However, the current source of organs is unlikely to grow. Most organs come from patients who have been declared dead by neurologic criteria (commonly referred to as "brain dead" or heart-beating cadaver donors (HBCDs) because their hearts are beating at the time of procurement). Estimates of the potential pool of HBCDs have been revised downward from 20,000-27,000 to roughly 10,000-12,000 (Nathan et al. 1991). Improvements in automobile safety and handgun legislation will likely lead to further reductions. Moreover, the rate of procurement from HBCDs has remained relatively flat despite extensive public awareness campaigns and legislation requiring hospitals to routinely request donation from families of dead patients (Caplan et al. 1992).If organ transplantation is going to continue to flourish, alternative [End Page 103] sources of organs must be found. Recently the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) proposed procuring organs from patients who have been declared dead by traditional cardiopulmonary rather than brain-oriented criteria after they or their families have decided to forgo life-sustaining treatment—hereafter referred to as the Pittsburgh protocol (UPMC Policy 1993). These patients are typically referred to as non-heart-beating cadaver donors (NHBCDs) because their hearts are no longer beating at the time of organ procurement.Although NHBCDs were a major source of transplantable kidneys prior to the institution of death by neurologic criteria, their usefulness was limited by "warm ischemia time." This term refers to the injury to tissues that occurs when the blood supply is interrupted and before the organs are cooled and reperfused. Under the Pittsburgh protocol, therapy is withdrawn in the operating room where a waiting surgical team removes organs immediately after death is declared. By controlling the place and time of death, it has been possible to minimize warm ischemia time and thus solve the technical problems previously associated with procurement from NHBCDs.The potential contribution of NHBCD organs is significant. Nathan (1992), using data from Delaware Valley Transplant Program, concludes that the use of severely brain injured, but not "brain dead" patients, would increase the donor pool by 20-25 percent. Moreover, unpublished data from the Pittsburgh organ procurement organization, the Center for Organ Recovery and Education (CORE), suggests that these organs, particularly kidneys, function as well as those procured from HBCDs (Broznick 1993).This volume is devoted to the ethical, psychosocial, and public policy implications of procuring organs from non-heart-beating cadaver donors after a discussion to forgo life-sustaining treatment. The genesis of this volume was a project in which we invited leading experts in transplantation, ethics, and public policy to use the Pittsburgh protocol as a starting point for exploring a broad range of issues associated with attempts to procure organs from NHBCDs. The issues raised by NHBCDs turned out to have important implications about the fundamental conceptual and moral assumptions underlying organ procurement.Although each of the papers in this volume can be read separately, we intend the volume to be read as a whole. Many of the latter pieces on the ethical implications of the policy are best understood in light of the earlier background papers... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wilhelm Griesinger: Psychiatry between Philosophy and PraxisKatherine Arens (bio)AbstractThis essay discusses Wilhelm Griesinger’s seminal work on mental illness, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics (1867, trans. 1882), in the context of transcendental idealism, as an outgrowth of the work of Kant, Herbart, and Hegel. Griesinger drew on an adaptation of Hegel’s dialectical model of history and science to offer both a new way to interpret mental illness as a product of (...) an individual’s long-term interactions with both nature and culture and a new norm for therapeutic practice based on the patient’s role in his community and history.Mental Pathology and Therapeutics rests on Griesinger’s adaptation of the Hegelian dialectic to the context of pragmatic science, first by adopting its model of the mind, then by describing the etiology of mental disease and a taxonomy of its forms. Griesinger’s work thus stands in a largely unacknowledged tradition alive as late as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.KeywordsGriesinger, history of psychiatry/psychology, idealism, Hegel, dialecticIn the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Griesinger (1817–68) emerged as a leader in a range of fields: modern-day psychiatric clinical practice, neuropathology, and diagnostics of mental diseases. 1 Griesinger was a theoretician, a clinician, a textbook author, and the founding editor of major professional organs in his field during the political and social ferment in the German-speaking world that allowed new, more socially responsible institutional practices to be considered by intellectual communities. As a consequence of 1849 German civil reforms, theory and practice became mutually enlightening, actually allowing Griesinger to implement his theories into concrete institutional reforms in the German mental health system.Wilhelm Griesinger’s education and career were in many ways typical for his generation. He enrolled at the University of Tübingen in 1834 as a medical student; there, he became politically active (as a member of a forbidden fraternity), and, like many of his contemporaries, became familiar with Hegelian philosophy. After holding several private positions, he was appointed an associate professor (ausserordentlicher Professor) for pathology, “materia medica” and history of medicine at Tübingen in 1847. In 1848, he was called to Kiel; in 1850, to Egypt. Tübingen reappointed him as a full professor for clinical medicine and head of the university clinic in 1854. By 1860, he had moved to Zurich in a professorship for the medical clinic, where, starting in 1863, he was a key person in the planning of a new clinic for mental diseases—the Burghölzli, where Jung later worked. By 1865, he went to Berlin, as director of the Charité (mental institution), among other positions, and he wrote extensively about reform in asylum practice until his premature death in 1868.To a degree, the eminence of this career is contradicted today by his reputation. Contemporary wisdom describes Griesinger as a synthesizer [End Page 147] rather than an innovator, a man who mixed medical psychology with psychology and psychiatric practice, allowing neurology to take a major role in the treatment of mental disease. 2 In one version, Griesinger simply pulled the clinic and the laboratory together, and so bridged Romanticism (i.e., speculative natural philosophy) and materialism (i.e., empirical science) while failing to effect crucial modern reforms. 3 In other descriptions, Griesinger is identified as an activist (Doerner 1981), a key player in the debates between the Hegelian left and right about the reformulation of public institutions (cf. Verwey 1985), 4 or a typical (but effective) member of the intellectual elite of his age. 5 None of these options explains the attractive or threatening aspects of his clinical practice, or suggests why a psychiatrist of his rank could have been so thoroughly refuted after his death. 6The discussion which follows will try to remedy this lack by setting Griesinger’s approach to mental illness in the context of a transformation of a model from philosophy into medical practice. Griesinger’s scientific context strongly combined philosophical theorizing and empirical practice, a synthesis that later generations tended to denigrate as a “speculative” approach to a branch of medicine that required a more empirical foundation. Drawing on an adaptation of Hegel’s dialectical model of history and... (shrink)

Dramatic modern advances in emergency and resuscitation medicine, starting perhaps with the development of effective mechanical ventilators in the mid-20th century, have created a large class of persons who in earlier times would almost certainly have died, but who can now go on existing, suspended at least temporarily in a state somewhere between death and the conscious life they formerly pursued. A very wide range of brain injuries lead first to coma, in which the patient shows no sign of conscious (...) awareness, or even of wakefulness, in which eye openings and closings indicate the presence of a sleep/wake cycle unconsciously mediated by structures in the brain stem. Following emergence from coma, which may take days to months or more if it happens at all, patients typically show signs of wakefulness without conscious awareness – they are then in a so-called vegetative state (VS). For many this state becomes permanent, but some go on to a more recently described condition called the minimally conscious state (MCS), in which signs of conscious awareness can be detected by careful neurological examination (see Laureys & Tononi, 2009, chapter 14). A very few such persons ultimately progress to more or less full recovery, but another and particularly horrifying possible outcome is the “locked-in” state, in which a patient is fully conscious but has extremely little or no capacity for voluntary motor action. A famous modern example is that of Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, who suffered a stroke to his upper brainstem and awakened 20 days later to find himself fully conscious but capable only of blinking his left eye. A tiny fraction of surgical patients find themselves in similarly terrifying conditions caused by the combination of muscle relaxants with insufficient levels of anesthetic agents (Kelly et al., 2007, p. 387 n. 18). (shrink)

The clinical clerkships in medical school are the first formal opportunity for trainees to apply bioethics concepts to clinical encounters. These clerkships are also typically trainees’ first sustained exposure to the “reality” of working in clinical teams and the full force of the challenges and ethical tensions of clinical care. We have developed a specialized, embedded ethics curriculum for Vanderbilt University medical students during their second year to address the unique experience of trainees’ first exposure to clinical care. Our embedded (...) curriculum is centered around core “ethics competencies” specific to the clerkship: for Medicine, advanced planning and end-of-life discussions; for Surgery, informed consent; for Pediatrics, the patient-family-provider triad; for Obstetrics and Gynecology, women’s autonomy, unborn child’s interests, and partner’s rights; and for Neurology/Psychiatry, decision-making capacity. In this paper, we present the rationale for these competencies, how we integrated them into the clerkships, and how we assessed these competencies. We also review the additional ethical issues that have been identified by rotating students in each clerkship and discuss our strategies for continued evolution of our ethics curriculum. (shrink)

Despite the burgeoning research in recent years on what is called analogical reasoning and transfer, the problem of how similarity or invariant relations are fundamentally accessed is typically either unrecognized, or ignored in componential and computational analyses. The access problematic is not a new one, being outlined by the paradox found in Plato’s Meno. In order to understand the analogical-access problematic, it is suggested that the concepts of analogical relations including the lexical concept metaphor, isomorphic relation in mathematics, homology in (...) biology, stimulus generalization in psychology, transfer of learning in education, and transposition phenomena in perception, be reconceptualized as subsets of a higher-order domain as all share the problem of how invariance relations are generated and accessed. A solution is suggested based on two specific evolutionary and neurological models, coupled with findings regarding the cognitive importance of knowledge-base. The paper constitutes a reciprocal complementarity analysis of a previous paper on metaphor. A higher-order form of analogical reasoning called analogical progression is introduced. Implications for research are discussed that indicate the need for a paradigm shift. The paper concludes with a four-stage model of analogical access. (shrink)

Charles Babbage began the quest to build an intelligent machine in the nineteenth century. Despite finishing neither the Difference nor the Analytical engine, he was aware that the use of mental language for describing the functioning of such machines was figurative. In order to reverse this cautious stance, Alan Turing postulated two decisive ideas that contributed to give birth to Artificial Intelligence: the Turing machine and the Turing test. Nevertheless, a philosophical problem arises from regarding intelligence simulation and make-believe as (...) sufficient to establish that programmed computers are intelligent and have mental states, especially given the nature of mind and its characteristic first-person viewpoint. The origin of Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly linked to the accounts that inspired John Searle to coin the term strong AI ―or the view that simply equates computers and minds. Especially emphasising the divergence between algorithmic processes and intentional mental states, the Chinese Room thought experiment shows that, since the mind is embodied and able to realise when linguistic understanding takes place, mental states require material implementation, a point that directly conflicts with the accounts that reduce the mind to the functioning of a programmed computer. The experience of linguistic understanding with its typical quale leads to other important philosophical issues. Searle’s theory of intentionality holds that intentional mental states have conditions of satisfaction and appear in semantic networks; thus people know when they understand and what terms are about. In contrast, a number of philosophers maintain that consciousness is only an illusion and that it plays no substantial biological role. However, consciousness is a built-in feature of the system. Moreover, neurological evidence suggests that conscious mental states, qualia and emotions enhance survival chances and are an important part of the phenomenal side of mental life and its causal underpinnings. This renders an important gap between simulating a mind and replicating the properties that allow having mental states and consciousness. On this score, the Turing test and the evidence it offers clearly overestimate simulation and verisimilar make-believe, since such evidence is insufficient to establish that programmed computers have mental life. In summary, this dissertation criticises views which hold that programmed computers are minds and minds are nothing but computers. Despite the arguments in favour of such an equation, they all fail to properly reduce the mind and its first-person viewpoint. Accordingly, the burden of proof still lies with the advocates of strong AI and with those who are willing to deny fundamental parts of the mind to make room for machine intelligence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Know-How of Musical PerformanceStephen DaviesMusicians make music; that is, the performance of music involves applied knowledge or know-how. Can we attain a discursive understanding of what the musician does, and does the attempt to achieve this put at risk the very art it aims to capture? In other words, what can be said of the nature of performance and does what we say turn a living practice into (...) a dead object? In this discussion, I aim to clarify the issues in terms of which these questions can be developed.Consider acquired practical knowledge or'knowing how.'1 It involves a learned skill or capacity to do something-typically, to perform an action-as in "I know how to ride a unicycle."2 'Knowing how'can be subdivided into types. A first variety is always conscious. For most people, mental arithmetic is of this kind. It is not mental arithmetic they are doing if they do not follow an appropriate rule, algorithm, procedure, or principle, even if they fluke the right answer. Many practical skills are of this sort. I know how to fill in tax forms, immigration documents, and hire purchase agreements. In all these cases, the working of the skill and the steps through which it is exercised are held inevitably before my mind. A second type of 'knowing how' might be termed "retrievable." I know how to drive a car. Most of the time, I am not aware of the processes, judgments, and procedures that are [End Page 154] involved. I do not have to think about my driving as I drive. Nevertheless, if I reflect on what I do, I can describe the steps or routines I go through. A third type of 'knowing how' is cognitively impenetrable. Cognitively impenetrable processes are opaque to introspection. Some bit of neurological hardware receives an input, processes it, and outputs some result, but the nature of that processing is not retrievable by consciousness. The skill is learned but the many computational, muscular, kinaesthetic, or other activities involved in the skill's application or execution are not available to the agent's awareness. From my own case, typical examples are of knowing how to walk, how to pick up a glass, and how to speak English.3 When a person intends to perform an action of this kind, he aims at it directly, as it were. He intends to turn his skateboard to the left, say, not to flex this muscle here and so. He can intend to produce a certain action as output, but the intermediate steps and movements involved in this, to the extent that they are controlled in an irretrievable fashion, are not what he can intend. Similarly, where 'knowing how' is retrievable but automatic, the action is intended directly. The intermediary steps and movements are not what are intended so long as the action remains automatic.In what ways is practical knowledge acquired? In some cases it can be learned from verbal descriptions of the appropriate basic actions and their sequences-"put the left leg in and shake it all about"-or of the relevant rules or algorithms-"multiply by π r2." In others, learning is by example, copying, or experimenting. Some procedures work better for some skills than others. Generally speaking, when we encourage children and stroke victims to walk we do not provide them with examples. By contrast, language skills are often conveyed via paradigm instances. And while it is possible to learn to drive a plane from an instruction manual alone, one is more likely to be successful by following and being assisted by an instructor. Always conscious skills are often acquired by memorizing the procedure or rule that must be kept in mind, whereas automatic but retrievable skills, because their application is unconscious, are usually acquired through physical repetition until the routine becomes unthinking. Nevertheless, even cognitively impenetrable skills might be learned by first following written instructions. What makes the skill impenetrable is not the method by which it is acquired but the inability to recall or describe the relevant steps, rules, or procedures when the skill is entrenched.4A given skill might be cognitively impenetrable for... (shrink)

Knowledge can be acquired through the processes of listening or reading testimonies of other agents. How and, particular, to whom, one ascribes trustworthiness when listening or reading a testimony is of special interest in this paper, especially in terms of societal-epistemic deviations that appear in the form of epistemic injustice. Neurotypicals, individuals with typical neurological states and developmental pathways, perceive individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder as an aberration from neuro-normativity, unable to contribute on an equal basis to the pool (...) of epistemic resources and shared meanings. The latter is related to the stereotypes of the unreliability of autistic persons’ testimonies about their own experiences and conditions. Given that atypical social and behavioural conditions autistics share are clinically classified as a disorder, the question of whether we can justify the failure to extend trust to the autistics arises. (shrink)

Postpartum mood disorders develop shortly after childbirth in a significant proportion of women and have severe effects. Two evolutionary explanations are currently available. The first is that poor postpartum mental health is a consequence of an evolutionary trade-off – a compromise of neurological changes in the maternal brain during pregnancy which, on the one hand, maintain pregnancy, and on the other, increase the likelihood for postpartum women to develop psychopathology. The second explanation is that poor postpartum mental health is a (...) disease of civilization. This theoretical paper demonstrates that both explanations ignore the crucial event of childbirth. I elaborate on environmental features of childbirth, a physiological process that is substantially different in the current versus evolutionary childbirth and postpartum setting, and argue that maternal brain neuroplasticity and biochemical alterations are not an evolutionary trade-off, but an adaptation. Additionally, the incidents of poor postpartum mental health are better viewed as a maladaptation of the typical modern environments – an evolutionary mismatch. Thus, the potential to suffer from poor mental health in postpartum is an external, contingent happening, dependent on contemporary childbirth and postpartum environments, and not due to any essential property women possess as a result of evolutionary compromise. In fact, women are probably adapted to feel like superwomen right after birth, a state of mind that is an aid in adapting to motherhood. Distinguishing between evolutionary concepts in the context of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood is vital for developing more accurate preventions and interventions. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in the 1930s and 1940s. It became a highly successful and highly controversial psychometric tool. In professional terms, psychometric tools such as the MMPI transformed psychology and psychiatry. Psychometric instruments thus readily fit into the developmental history of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology; they were a significant part of the narrative of those fields’ advances in understanding, intervening, and treating people with mental illnesses. At the same time, (...) the advent of such tools also fits into a history of those disciplines that records the rise of obsessional observational and evaluative techniques and technologies in order to facilitate patterns of social control that became typical during the Progressive Era in the United States and after. It was those patterns that also nurtured the resistance to psychometrics that emerged during the Vietnam War and after. (shrink)

Williams Syndrome is a developmental disorder that is characterized by cardiovascular problems, particular facial features and several typical behavioral and neurological abnormalities. In Williams Syndrome patients, a heterozygous deletion is present of a region on chromosome 7q11.23 (the Williams Syndrome critical region), which spans approximately 20 genes. Two of these genes encode proteins that regulate dynamic aspects of the cytoskeleton of the cell, either via the actin filament system (LIM kinase 1, or LIMK1), or through the microtubule network (cytoplasmic (...) linker protein of 115 kDa, or CLIP‐115). The recent findings that knockout mice lacking LIMK1 or CLIP‐115 have distinct neurological and behavioural phenotypes, indicates that cytoskeletal defects might play a role in the development of neurological symptoms in Williams Syndrome patients. In this review, we discuss the properties of LIMK and CLIP family proteins, their function in the regulation of the actin and microtubule cytoskeletal systems, respectively, and the relationship with neurodevelopmental aspects of Williams Syndrome. BioEssays 26:141–150, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this paper I put forward a reconstruction of the evolution of certain explanatory hypotheses on the neural basis of association and learning that are the premises of connectionism in the cybernetic age and of present-day connectionism. The main point of my reconstruction is based on two little-known case studies. The first is the project, published in 1913, of a hydraulic machine through which its author believed it was possible to simulate certain essential elements of the plasticity of nervous connections. (...) The author, S. Bent Russell, was an engineer deeply influenced by the neurological hypotheses on nervous conduction of Herbert Spencer, Max Meyer and Edward L. Thorndike. The second is the project, published in 1929, of an electromechanical machine in which the author, the psychologist J.M. Stephens, believed it was possible to embody Thorndike's law of effect. Thus both Bent Russell and Stephens referred to the principles of learning that Thorndike defined as connectionist . Their attempt was that of simulating by machines at least certain simple aspects of inhibition, association and habit formation that are typical of living organisms. I propose to situate their projects within the frame of thediscovery of a simulative (modelling) methodology which I believe might be considered an important topic of the Culture of the Artificial . Certain more recent steps toward such a methodology made by both connectionism of the 1950s and present-day connectionism are briefly pointed out in the paper. (shrink)

Eliminative materialism is a popular view of the mind which holds that propositional attitudes, the typical units of our traditional understanding, are unsupported by modern connectionist psychology and neuroscience, and consequently that propositional attitudes are a poor scientific postulate, and do not exist. Since our traditional folk psychology employs propositional attitudes, the usual argument runs, it too represents a poor theory, and may in the future be replaced by a more successful neurologically grounded theory, resulting in a drastic (...) improvement in our interpersonal relationships. I contend that these eliminativist arguments typically run together two distinct capacities: the folk psychological mechanisms which we use to understand one another, and scientific and philosophical guesses about the structure of those understandings. Both capacities are ontologically committed and therefore empirical. However, the commitments whose prospects look so dismal to the eliminativist, in particular the causal and logical image of propositional attitudes, belong to the guesses, and not necessarily to the underlying mechanisms. It is the commitments of traditional philosophical perspectives about the operation of our folk psychology which are contradicted by␣new evidence and modeling methods in connectionist psychology. Our actual folk psychology was not clearly committed to causal, sentential propositional attitudes, and thus is not directly threatened by connectionist psychology. (shrink)

Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a ‘typical’ dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light—a different light—on philosophical debates on the laws of nature. (...) In the explanation of such patterns, the specific form of the underlying dynamics is almost irrelevant. The constraints required, given a free state-space evolution, suffice to account for the coarse-grained lawful behaviour. An analysis of such constraints might thus provide a different account of how regular behaviour can occur. This paper focuses on drawing attention to this type of explanation, outlining it in the diverse areas of physics in which it appears, and discussing its limitations and significance in the tractable setting of classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)