The Covid-19 pandemic has led to severe shortages of many essential goods and services, from hand sanitizers and N-95 masks to ICU beds and ventilators. Although rationing is not unprecedented, never before has the American public been faced with the prospect of having to ration medical goods and services on this scale.

Advancements in novel neurotechnologies, such as brain computer interfaces and neuromodulatory devices such as deep brain stimulators, will have profound implications for society and human rights. While these technologies are improving the diagnosis and treatment of mental and neurological diseases, they can also alter individual agency and estrange those using neurotechnologies from their sense of self, challenging basic notions of what it means to be human. As an international coalition of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners, we examine these challenges and make (...) recommendations to mitigate negative consequences that could arise from the unregulated development or application of novel neurotechnologies. We explore potential ethical challenges in four key areas: identity and agency, privacy, bias, and enhancement. To address them, we propose democratic and inclusive summits to establish globally-coordinated ethical and societal guidelines for neurotechnology development and application, new measures, including “Neurorights,” for data privacy, security, and consent to empower neurotechnology users’ control over their data, new methods of identifying and preventing bias, and the adoption of public guidelines for safe and equitable distribution of neurotechnological devices. (shrink)

The past 50 years have seen an accumulation of evidence suggesting that associative learning depends on high-level cognitive processes that give rise to propositional knowledge. Yet, many learning theorists maintain a belief in a learning mechanism in which links between mental representations are formed automatically. We characterize and highlight the differences between the propositional and link approaches, and review the relevant empirical evidence. We conclude that learning is the consequence of propositional reasoning processes that cooperate with the unconscious processes involved (...) in memory retrieval and perception. We argue that this new conceptual framework allows many of the important recent advances in associative learning research to be retained, but recast in a model that provides a firmer foundation for both immediate application and future research. (shrink)

Drugs used to provide improvement of cognitive functioning have been shown to be effective in healthy individuals. It is sometimes assumed that the use of these drugs constitutes cheating in an academic context. We examine whether this assumption is ethically sound. Beyond providing the most up-to-date discussion of modafinil use in an academic context, this contribution includes an overview of the safety of modafinil use in greater depth than previous studies addressing the issue of cheating. Secondly, we emphasize two crucial, (...) but hitherto nearly overlooked, nuances to the issues: the potential for modafinil to decrease inequality and disadvantage in academic settings, and the fact that how modafinil is used dramatically impacts its effects on health, coercion, fairness, authenticity and effort. Finally, we explicitly defend the position that there are no qualitatively morally relevant differences between modafinil use and other enhancement modalities; any such differences are in degree,... (shrink)

It seems to be a fundamental feature of being human to make meaning out of experiences and events by telling stories. We are born into a web of narratives‐to become a self is, it can seem, to hear others' stories about you and, eventually, to insert yourself into those webs and assert your own story. When we teach ethics illustrated by cases, we tell stories. When children and parents talk about how they came to hospital, what they hoped, how things (...) have gone, what worries them about the decisions we ask them to face, we hear stories. Stories often reveal best the meaning a person attaches to his or her experiences, and stories shape the meaning those experiences will come to have for that person or family as the story is told, retold, and refined. I share the belief of narratologists that most of us are, at our core, storytellers. And I can't help but notice that many of those stories contain moral evaluations, explicitly or implicitly. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 24-27.

This book brings together leading international learning and attention researchers to provide both a comprehensive and wide-ranging overview of the current state of knowledge of this area as well as new perspectives and directions for the future. There are coherent themes that run throughout the book, but there are also, inevitably, fundamental disagreements between contributors on the role of attention in learning. Together, the views expressed in this book paint a picture of a vibrant and exciting area of psychological research, (...) and will be essential reading for researchers of learning and attention. (shrink)

An estimated 1.2 to 2.3 million Hindus live in the United States. End-of-life care choices for a subset of these patients may be driven by religious beliefs. In this article, we present Hindu beliefs that could strongly influence a devout person’s decisions about medical care, including end-of-life care. We provide four case examples (one sacred epic, one historical example, and two cases from current practice) that illustrate Hindu notions surrounding pain and suffering at the end of life. Chief among those (...) is the principle of karma, through which one reaps the benefits and penalties for past deeds. Deference to one’s spouse or family is another important Hindu value, especially among Hindu women, which can impact the decision-making process and challenge the Western emphasis on autonomy. In addition, the Hindu embrace of astrology can lead to a desire to control the exact time of death. Confounding any generalizations, a Hindu patient may reject or accept treatments based on the individual patient’s or family’s interpretation of any given tradition. Through an awareness of some of the fundamental practices in Hinduism and the role of individual interpretation within the tradition, clinicians will be better able to support their Hindu patients and families at the end of life. (shrink)

Background To determine whether fetal care paediatric and maternal–fetal medicine specialists harbour differing attitudes about pregnancy termination for congenital fetal conditions, their perceived responsibilities to pregnant women and fetuses, and the fetus as a patient and whether self-perceived primary responsibilities to fetuses and women and views about the fetus as a patient are associated with attitudes about clinical care.Methods Mail survey of 434 MFM and FCP specialists .Results MFMs were more likely than FCPs to disagree with these statements : ‘the (...) presence of a fetal abnormality is not an appropriate reason for a couple to consider pregnancy termination’ ; ‘the effects that a child born with disabilities might have on marital and family relationships is not an appropriate reason for a couple to consider pregnancy termination’ ; and ‘the cost of healthcare for the future child is not an appropriate reason for a couple to consider pregnancy termination’ . 65% MFMs versus 47% FCPs disagreed that their professional responsibility is to focus primarily on fetal well-being . Specialists did not differ regarding the fetus as a separate patient. Responses about self-perceived responsibility to focus on fetal well-being were associated with clinical practice attitudes.Conclusions Independent of demographic and sociopolitical characteristics, FCPs and MFMs possess divergent ethical sensitivities regarding pregnancy termination, pregnant women and fetuses, which may influence clinical care. (shrink)

In this response, we provide further clarification of the propositional approach to human associative learning. We explain why the empirical evidence favors the propositional approach over a dual-system approach and how the propositional approach is compatible with evolution and neuroscience. Finally, we point out aspects of the propositional approach that need further development and challenge proponents of dual-system models to specify the systems more clearly so that these models can be tested.

The Hearts and Minds of Ghana project travels from Boston Children’s Hospital for two weeks each year to provide cardiac surgery to children in Ghana. Of the hundreds of children in need, how to choose who will receive lifesaving surgery?

Hymen reconstruction surgery is a simple procedure to repair a woman’s hymen, requested by women who, for religious and cultural reasons, believe they must appear to have an intact hymen on their wedding night. Debates surrounding possible ethical justification for the procedure are complex and heated. These articles from the Harvard Ethics Consortium present and explore the case of a young woman who asked a young female physician on call for a referral for the procedure.

Creativity is an important quality that has been linked with problem solving, achievement, and scientific advancement. It has previously been proposed that creative individuals pay greater attention to and are able to utilize information that others may consider irrelevant, in order to generate creative ideas (e.g., Eysenck, 1995). In this study we investigated whether there was a relationship between creativity and greater learning about irrelevant information. To answer this question, we used a self-report measure of creative ideation and a blocking (...) task, which involved learning about irrelevant stimuli. We failed to find evidence for this association, with a Bayes Factor indicating support for no relationship between these measures. While it is possible that a different measure of creative ideation, for example one which does not rely on self-report, may produce different results, a more lucrative research direction may be focusing on the link between creativity and cognitive flexibility, in line with suggestions by Zabelina and Robinson (2010). (shrink)

Elephantine Revisited: New Insights in the Judean Community and Its Neighbors. Edited by Margaretha Folmer. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2022. Pp. xix + 187, illus. $149.95.