The more that we understand about the neurobiological basis
of the brain, the greater the implications are for
how we understand personal responsibility for our behaviour.
If our behaviour is the result of changes in our brain,
are we responsible for those behaviours?
Neuroscience is the study of changes in the brain,
that underpin our behaviour, our thoughts and who we are.
As these technologies move from the lab and into the clinic
and then out into society.
These are things not just clinicians and scientists
are going to have to deal with, but people.
And we need people working within the field of ethics,
neuroscience, the law, philosopher’s and the general public
to have an open discussion about
how they want these technologies change their lives.
We can make a better world if we think about the choices
that we’re making and we try to live in accordance
with values that we’ve reflected on.
Our best psychiatrists are still often completely bewildered
when it comes to what’s making people
behave in certain ways and what mental illness consists in.
Our brains have historically in many ways been considered
sort of chemical organs because the drugs that we use
to treat disorders influence brain chemicals.
The brain is really profoundly an electrical organ.
Everything that happens millisecond by millisecond
in the brain occurs because of the electrical firing of nerve cells.
Deep brain stimulation is a technology that allows us to
implant electrodes deep within someone’s brain
to be able to control activity.
Deep brain stimulation is an invasive risky procedure
that is really only being limited to the treatment
of the most treatment refractory illnesses.
Deep brain stimulation is enormously effective in treating
someone’s motor symptoms, it can have really unexpected
impacts on some people’s lives.
Some people almost become addicted to the stimulation.
They’ll turn it off and on
just because they want to get that buzz
and some people have gotten into quite a lot of trouble
with some compulsive behaviours around shopping,
hyper sexuality, people going out buying Porsches and cars.
and behaving in ways that they wouldn’t have done previously.
I think that neurosurgeons would say that they understand
the brain, but one of the challenges around DBS,
is that the ways it affects individual brains
differ profoundly from one person to another
and that’s what’s unknowable.
The state of the art treatment for depression,
which is either you know, give people a drug
that changes their entire brain activity
or you know, zap them with electricity.
This is as though we were repairing a car
by pouring petrol over the engine.
We simply don’t understand what makes the mind work.
When a procedure is presented as a solution,
patients assume that everything is known about
what the effects of that might be.
But we know from DBS that’s not the case
and I think making that clear to people is a really important ethical issue.
We’re seeing the emergence of these,
they’re called no invasive brain stimulation devices
which are essentially putting tiny electrodes
on the surface of your scalp, but we have very little evidence
to show that they actually work.
I think that if you go onto the internet
and find the webpage of a company selling a device
to improve your performance in you know
some shoot em up video game.
It’s not likely that company is going to provide you
with the evidence of the safety of that device.
There are already athletes using types of brain stimulation
to try enhance their performance.
We just don’t know how effective these things are going to be
and what the risks really are when they’re being used long term by healthy individuals.
One of the most exciting things in brain science,
looking forward is the development of what they’re calling brain computer interfaces.
And these are devices which either go on the scalp
or on the cortex of someone’s brain to be able to decode the activity,
and to be able to infer people’s thoughts,
to be able to read their speech.
The huge ethical question is around privacy and confidentiality.
Who has access to our brain data?
Who has access to our thoughts?
And if they have access to it, can they control it?
We already see this with the internet.
We have very little control over our own personal data
and if we add to that, the very essence of who we are,
our brain activity that really opens up a massive Pandora’s box.
So it’s one thing to use these new advances in neuroscience to treat serious illness,
It’s another thing to use them to medicalise social deviance
It’s a little like a Philip K Dick story.
I think one of the interesting things about neuro-law is
it is almost like science fiction but it’s happening now.
Now is the time that we need to be taking steps to work out how to deal with these issues.
How to regulate them in a legal sense,
whether we want to allow these things to affect our society.
How do we hold someone morally responsible
for their behaviours when they’re taking a medication?
That is treating a neurological disorder which they need to be able to function normally
The brain is such a complicated organ,
that the ability to say with any certainty what is going on,
I think is very difficult.
And so while that information is crucially important if you’re talking about treatment of people,
of helping people, that’s a very different context
than when you’re talking about imprisoning people or
detaining them or depriving them of their rights.
And that’s where I have real concern.
I’m quite skeptical that the brain science is going to be able to
predict those who will be likely to offend,
or to identify those who are lying.
There is a risk that the use of brain scans and other neuro-scientific evidence
is progressing too rapidly.
Just because certain colours light up on a scan,
it will tell you that there is blood flow and activity occurring in that part of your brain,
but it doesn’t actually tell you what is actually occurring in the brain.
It’s like a computer feels warm because the central processing unit is creating heat
and there’s a lot of electrical activity in the computer,
but it doesn’t tell you what the computer is doing,
or what the algorithm is running in the computer.
It is using a very crude way of looking what the brain is doing,
but to say that there is activity in the visual cortex, and that means that this person is guilty.
It doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think we will ever get a day where neuro-scientific technology
will allow us to predict with any accuracy, whether a crime will be committed.
Now that’s not to say that people won’t claim that that is possible,
or that the technology won’t be used for those purposes.
I think we’re better off dealing with objective evidence
to decide if someone’s guilty of a crime or not.
I mean really, rather than people’s subjective interpretations.
Two things we know about science,
It enables great progress and improvement in human welfare.
But it is also served as cover for a lot of human rights abuses
and allowed people to dress their bigotry up as medicine or science.
We live in a very complicated world, not everybody understands it.
Scientists don’t know everything and fairly often scientists will say things
that are later shown not to have been true.
I think that we need to be realistic about,
Actually all the knowledge we have about human beings already.
And the limits of insight when it comes to reshaping human behaviour.
It’s definitely not a runaway train.
We’re definitely in control of what impact these technologies have on our lives.
The aim of neuro-ethics is to make sure that we realise all the benefits
that we want from these technologies,
While avoiding some of the pitfalls and unexpected harms.
You don’t want to surrender to the neurosciences altogether,
we want to remain critical, and so we need a distance from them.
And we do want to keep the neuroscientists accountable
to the human dimensions and the social impacts.