By this time, you’ve learned a great deal about your brain and how complicated it is. The preceding chapters have mostly looked at the brain as a part of a thinking, behaving, and feeling individual.
But you rarely live your life as an isolated individual. In fact, you probably interact with a wide variety of people every day, from bus drivers to store clerks to your best friend. Those interactions, along with the interactions of people around you, form the basis of our society. It makes sense that what you’ve learned about the brains of individuals can help you understand groups of individuals — human societies — and how they function.
Neuroscientists constantly discover new things about the forces that drive the brain. If insights into questions like “How do I make decisions?” or “What causes addiction?” can change one person’s life, they can have an even greater influence on groups of people, sometimes even inspiring them to transform the societies in which they live.
Many questions require critical thinking about how the human mind works: “Who decides what the law should be?” “What makes laws fair?” “How can we design the economy, and what groups of people does it leave behind?” Answering these questions requires a thoughtful understanding of the workings of the human mind. Neuroscience can provide evidence-based arguments for how to build a society, rooted in a solid understanding of brain science.
It might sound like science fiction, but the more we discover about the brain, the greater its potential to transform human society. Scientists need to grapple with the ethical dimensions of their work, engaging in conversations with sociologists, lawyers, politicians, economists, and philosophers to determine the best ways to build on their groundbreaking revelations about the human brain.
NEUROLAW
In earlier chapters, you learned all about decision-making, but many decisions have more drastic consequences than whether to buy a taco or stir fry for lunch. Behind every crime that makes the news is a decision — or a series of decisions — that may have individuals facing the legal consequences of breaking the law. As with so many things (including the brain), the more closely you look at this issue, the more complicated it gets.
Take addiction, for example. In the last few decades, the American prison population has grown by about 500 percent, largely because of drug-related arrests. In this book, you’ve learned how drug use affects the brain and is associated with significant changes to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a part of the brain that oversees impulse control and suppressing cravings. Those changes in the PFC make resisting drug use much more difficult. Seen this way, ongoing drug use looks less like a bad decision and more like a symptom of a disease: addiction.
Now lawyers, judges, and scientists have to decide how drug users should be treated by the criminal justice system. Should they continue to be jailed, as a punishment for their decision to break the law? Or should they receive therapy or rehabilitation to treat, and help them recover from their altered brain states? Or should they receive some combination of both? What is the perfect balance?
Many examples muddy the waters of decision-making and punishment. In one famous case, an individual who had brain surgery to remove a tumor suddenly developed a compulsion to view child pornography. During his trial, the man’s doctor provided evidence that the surgery had damaged a part of the brain that typically suppresses such dark urges. Personality changes after brain surgeries are not uncommon — was it possible that his terrible fixation was a side effect of his life-saving surgery? If so, what should his punishment be? If the behavior wasn’t his “fault,” what does a just society owe his victims?
The more neuroscience reveals to us, the more we must accommodate our social structure to the ramifications of these new discoveries.
These are not easy questions to answer. They require us to temper our notions of fairness and justice with new scientific knowledge. The more neuroscience reveals to us about the mechanisms underlying memory, personal responsibility, and behavior, the more we must accommodate our social structure to the ramifications of these new discoveries.
For another example, consider eyewitness testimony, a common tool in the courtroom. Studies have found that the testimony of people who actually witnessed a crime is very convincing to juries — more convincing than many types of forensic evidence. But recent research has shown that human memory is far from perfect, especially as time passes after a crime. As witnesses recall their memories, they introduce errors, which are then reconsolidated into new memories. This is true of even the most memorable events. In a study of New York City residents one year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, their memories of the event differed in 40 percent of the details. This doesn’t mean that eyewitness testimony is useless, but neuroscience has demonstrated that it is far from infallible. Judges and lawyers must now come to terms with this change of perspective.
Nor is this the first time that neuroscience has helped to change the way the courts work. Polygraph tests, once a staple of television crime dramas, have been rejected in many courts (including the United States Supreme Court) as being unreliable. This decision was based on the work of many scientists, who showed that the physiological reactions measured by polygraph tests (sweating, increased heart rate, etc.) are not definitively linked to guilt or lying. After all, dragging an innocent person to the police station to submit to a lie detector test might produce the same symptoms. Reliable lie detection technology might exist one day, but that day is too far in the future to affect current court decisions.
NEUROECONOMICS
You are constantly making financial decisions for yourself. Should you stock up on all of your favorite snacks now that you are at the grocery store, or come back later for the items when there is a big sale? Are you saving enough for college? Do you like that new sports car enough to put up with its poor gas mileage? In recent years, economists and neuroscientists have begun collaborating to investigate the brain processes behind these decisions. This field, called “neuroeconomics,” has the potential to significantly alter the way people think about the economy.
A driving force behind modern capitalism is the belief that individuals make rational purchasing decisions — that everyone acting in their own self-interest creates a system in which resources will be distributed as fairly as possible. Yet that theory doesn’t explain why so many economic decisions are irrational, or based on gut instinct and rationalized later. Neuroeconomics is especially interested in those situations where choices are less clear-cut or rational and involve unknown (or unacknowledged) factors and risk.
To learn more about these decisions, scientists have measured brain activity as people complete economic tasks — for example, running brain scans as people play a simple double-or-nothing game. When a player decides to risk it all to double winnings, activity increases in a part of the brain called the insular cortex. Scientists hypothesize that networks of the insular cortex interact with other brain areas, including parts of the limbic system that function in learning, memory and emotion, to let the player picture the negative consequences of taking such a risk. Suddenly risking a mortgage payment at the blackjack table might not look so appealing.
Scientists have also discovered that our hormones play a role in economic decisions. In one case, some participants in an investment game were given a dose of oxytocin, a hormone long associated with social bonding. Those who received the oxytocin boost were more trusting with their money and invested larger amounts with a broker. However, if they made investments through a computer program rather than a person, the oxytocin had no effect on their investment strategy. These results suggest that social and neurobiological factors interact to play a role in such decisions, and these kinds of effects are at the heart of many economic decisions. More research in this area could lead to more rational investment strategies.
Research into reward pathways and the way your brain promotes impulsive behavior can help prevent making purchases and decisions that you would regret.
Another study of male stock traders looked at levels of the hormones testosterone and cortisol. Researchers took saliva samples from a small group of traders every day during a work week, before and after the bulk of their work was done. On days when the traders had higher testosterone levels than average, they took larger risks. However, higher-than-average levels of cortisol (a hormone associated with stress) correlated with risk-averse behavior. With millions of dollars on the line, hormones could be making the difference between a good day at the market and a very bad one.
Neuroscience can change our current thoughts about the economy in many other ways. Research on autism spectrum disorders is discovering promising treatments, but also revealing opportunities for workplaces to employ the unique abilities of neurodiverse people. Research into reward pathways and the way your brain promotes impulsive behavior can help prevent making purchases and decisions that you would regret. Scientists are also studying unconscious biases and discrimination, in an effort to help eliminate negative prejudices in hiring and employment. These are only a few of the practical applications of neuroscience, and more are anticipated. Sometime in the near future, neuroscience could have all the tools needed to design a better, and more inclusive, economic system.
ETHICS AND THE FUTURE OF NEUROSCIENCE
Modern science has the potential to change some of the most fundamental beliefs of our society. Brain science, in particular, has raised many ethical issues. Consider the history of brain research, where early attempts to understand the brain started or exacerbated practices such as phrenology, eugenics, forced sterilization, and unnecessary lobotomies. When the ethical frameworks of science fail, it can incur consequences that affect not only individuals, but society as a whole.
In the future, new technologies that are already on the horizon will raise serious ethical questions. Genetics is one area under intense scrutiny. As you’ve read in this book, you’ve seen that many brain diseases have their roots in your genetic code, and scientists are now able to screen for some of these diseases while children are in the womb. Emerging technologies might soon help us identify potential problems and alter a child’s genes to prevent it. But is it ethical to alter an unborn child’s genetics to cure autism? Other genetic diseases, like Huntington’s, will only manifest much later in life. Is it acceptable to “pre-treat” this disease with genetic alterations? What about making children smarter or increasing their chance of getting a perfect math score on their SATs? Some people believe that all children have the right to be genetically enhanced, while others insist that they retain the right not to be enhanced.
And who would have access to these enhancements? Will they only be available to children of the rich and powerful, leaving most of us behind? Similar questions can be asked of other therapies, like drugs or devices like transcranial stimulation, which alter the brain in order to treat it.
In the past, these questions were often posed by authors of science fiction. But with the startling technological advances of recent decades, these real-world challenges might be closer than you think. In fact, many scientists and doctors already deal with serious ethical quandaries created by neuroscience. For example, scientists can detect specific biomarkers for disorders such as depression, psychosis, and certain types of chronic pain. Are medical professionals obligated to take steps to treat a disease or disorder that currently shows no symptoms and might never actually materialize? When is the right time to intervene?
There are even thornier questions to consider: When getting permission to treat the brain in some way, the organ that gives consent is the same as the organ being treated. How does that affect the idea of “informed consent” in cases like Alzheimer’s disease or a debilitating brain tumor? Should a doctor proceed with treatment when the patient (that is, his or her brain) might not have had the ability to properly consent?
The questions raised in this chapter have no easy answers. Your responses could depend on your religion, your socioeconomic class — and, yes, on the activity of your hormones, your neurotransmitters, and the progressive maturation and aging of your nervous system. The brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe, and investigating its mysteries seems to produce as many questions as answers — and these questions are scientific, ethical, legal and social. But the progress of science has always stirred up “inconvenient” questions about ethical behavior, social conventions, and the proper use of our institutions. Asking those questions early will help researchers and the public work together to create strong ethical frameworks for our evolving society.
Science is an ongoing process. Neuroscience has made many beneficial advances, but facts are also evolving as discoveries emerge. We are only on the very cusp of understanding the billions of cells and trillions of connections that form the human brain. Stay curious about the neuroscience you read in the news, keeping in mind what you have learned in this book to give you context behind the headlines. You are part of science, too. Dialogues between scientists are as vital as dialogues between neuroscientists and society. Creating a forum for debate and discussion holds out the best hope of answering questions in ways that advance our society now and in the future. 