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Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering

Posted by timothy on from the your-jar-is-due-to-be-changed dept.

palegray.net writes "Wired brings us a look into the world of neuroengineering, the science of hacking the brain to improve its function. Dr. Ed Boyden is the director of MIT's Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, focusing on innovative methods of physically altering neuroanatomy for various purposes. As useful as discoveries in the field may be, the work certainly raises moral and ethical questions. From the article: '"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews of The Berman Institute of Bioethics. "We place ourselves in the mind and therefore the brain. (Mood-altering surgery) feels like fundamentally modifying who a person is."'"

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting, but call back in 20 years by Felgerkarb · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As interesting as this article was -- especially as he got into this from studying the neuroscience of bird song, something I was involved with years ago -- I think it's a stretch to call this 'engineering'.

    It is an interesting take on an old technique. Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.

    It's a proof of technology, but nothing more. Engineering the brain would imply we understand how it works, which, more or less, we still don't. Not really at a cellular level, not really at a systems level, not even really at a gross level either. We know an order of magnitude more than we did even a decade ago, but we are no closer to altering behavior than we were when the lobotomy was invented...the first 'neuroengineering'.

    I think it is much more likely that we will first have engineered modules, either synthetic neuronal or otherwise, that will process independently and then 'plug into' our pre-existing sensory input pathways, rather than direct brain modification.

  2. Surgically or electrically vs chemically: diff = ? by jonaskoelker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core,"

    Really?

    If we drug up someone so as to flatten their emotional responses, don't we change their Neuroticism level (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)? Is that not changing their personality?

    We probably don't want to do that for its own sake, but suppose it happens as a side-effect.

    How's this different?

  3. Re:Whay about psychiatruic drugs? by ShadeOfBlue · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Step 1 - introduce Stranger A to your friend Alice, when Alice is having a bad day.

    Step 2 - introduce Stranger B to your friend Alice, when Alice is having a good day.

    Step 3 - ask Strangers A and B to describe Alice's personality. Ding ding ding! They describe different personalities.

    But wait, you say, one person's description based on purposely limited evidence is not a complete picture of Alice's personality, the old 3-blind-men-feeling-an-elephant-and-describing-it problem. Indeed this is true. A complete picture of someone's personality would account for the variation in their behaviors, as well as the distribution of those various modes, and anti-depressants could clearly alter that distribution.

    If anti-depressants perceptibly alter one's distribution of behavior, I see no reason to say they don't alter one's personality. Of course, it's conceivable someone could feel better internally but not act any different, but that doesn't seem to be what you're saying. You seem to be saying that different behavior != different personality, and I'm asking, well why not?

    One could point out that situations affect behavior without affecting personality. If your dog died, you lost your wallet, broke a bone, and your girl-friend broke up with you in the span of a couple weeks, you'd probably be feeling pretty shitty in a way that would affect your behavior. However, this kind of feeling-shitty, unlike with depression, is directly caused by shitty-stimuli and leads to feeling-shitty-behavior. If it were the environmental stimuli of taking anti-depressants that directly lead to more-optimistic-personality-behavior, then I would counter that taking the placebo would provide the exact same environmental stimuli, and hence should lead to the same behavioral changes. However, it doesn't, so I don't think it's unfair to label an anti-depressant as possibly personality-altering.

  4. Re:Haves and Have-Nots by interkin3tic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Every human (who lives long enough) will go through puberty. Not every human will be able to afford 'enhancements.' So, should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?... don't you think we ought to talk about it a little?

    Given that we already have disparities among many lines, healthcare being one of them, I think we have sufficently covered it here just now.

    These are not superman enhancements, it's still at the question asking phase. We're not using this to make people or even rats smarter. And I have to think even if we do manage that, how would that be different than what we have now? You can't tell me that a refugee in a 3rd world country is on equal footing in almost any respect to your average CEO here. If he has a machine rigged into his head to cure his depression instantly, that won't change things significantly. Heck, if we make him smarter, he might see the problems with such inequity and may change things for the better. Unlikely, but the bottom line is that this is far from real right now and wouldn't seem to be a unique problem anyway.