This paper explores whether brain images may be admitted as evidence in criminal trials under Federal Rule of Evidence 403, which weighs probative value against the danger of being prejudicial, confusing, or misleading to fact finders. The paper summarizes and evaluates recent empirical research relevant to these issues. We argue that currently the probative value of neuroimages for criminal responsibility is minimal, and there is some evidence of their potential to be prejudicial or misleading. We also propose experiments (...) that will directly assess how jurors are influenced by brain images. (shrink)

Brain imaging technologies are increasingly used to find networks and brain regions that are specific to the functional realization of particular aspects of the self. In this paper, we aim to show how neuroscientific research and techniques could be used in the context of self-formation without treating them as representations of an inner realm. To do so, we show first how a Cartesian framework underlies the interpretation and usage of brain imaging technologies as functional evidence. To illustrate (...) how material-technological inventions and developments can have a significant and lasting impact on views of the self, we show how this framework was influenced by another technology: the camera obscura. Subsequently, we show that brain imaging technologies challenge the idea that privileged access to the self can be obtained merely through introspection, indicating a strong discontinuity between the Cartesian and the current neuroscientific framework. Building on these insights, we reframe the self in terms of self-formation. This view neither regards the brain as an independent realizer of aspects of the self, nor assumes that self-knowledge can be obtained through introspection. From this perspective, self-formation is realized throughcritical self-identification: instead of offering representational knowledge of an ‘inner self,’ the potential use of brain imaging technologies within this framework lies in their capacity to offer what we call ‘extrospective knowledge’ that pragmatically can contribute to self-formation. Brain imaging technologies contribute to this process because they foreground our neurophysiology, which helps to critically integrate biological aspects into self-formation. (shrink)

Brain-imaging technologies have posed the problem of breaching our brain privacy. Until the invention of those technologies, many of us entertained the idea that nothing can threaten our mental privacy, as long as we kept it, for each of us has private access to his or her own mind but no access to any other. Yet, philosophically, the issue of private, mental accessibility appears to be quite unsettled, as there are still many philosophers who reject the idea of (...) private, mental accessibility. I have attempted to refute such rejections and to establish this idea on firmer grounds. My arguments in this paper show that brain imaging allows no access to our mind and that mind privacy is quite different from brain privacy, as the latter can be breached by brain imaging, whereas the former cannot. A reduction of the mind to the body inescapably fails, as there is a categorial difference between mind and body or brain, which is compatible with their inseparability. Brain imaging cannot enable one to “read” the mind or to breach our mental privacy. There is no external access to one’s mind. Each of us has exclusive access to his or her own mind. (shrink)

Since the mid‐1980s, psychologists and neuroscientists have used brain imaging to test hypotheses about human thought processes and their neural instantiation. In just three decades, functional neuroimaging has been transformed from a crude clinical tool to a widely used research method for understanding the human brain and mind. Such rapidly achieved success is bound to evoke skepticism. A degree of skepticism toward new methods and ideas is both inevitable and useful in any field. It is especially valuable in (...) a science as young as cognitive neuroscience and its even younger siblings, social and affective neuroscience. Healthy skepticism encourages us to check our assumptions, recognize the limitations of our methods, and proceed thoughtfully. Skepticism itself, however, also must be examined.In this article, I review the most commonly voiced criticisms of functional neuroimaging. In the spirit of healthy skepticism, I will critically examine these criticisms themselves. Each contains at least a kernel of truth, although I will argue that in some cases the kernel has been overextended in ways that are inaccurate or misleading. (shrink)

I will argue that the fairly common assumption that brain imaging may compromise people’s privacy in an undesirable way only if moral crimes are committed is false. Sometimes persons’ privacy is compromised because of failures of privacy. A normal emotional reaction to failures of privacy is embarrassment and shame, not moral resentment like in the cases of violations of right to privacy. I will claim that if (1) neuroimaging will provide all kinds of information about persons’ inner life and (...) not only information that is intentionally searched for, and (2) there will be more and more application fields of fMRI and more and more people whose brains will be scanned (without any coercion), then, in the future, shame may be an unfortunately common feeling in our culture. This is because failures of privacy may dramatically increase. A person may feel shame strongly and long, especially if his failure is witnessed by people who he considers relatively important, but less than perfectly trustworthy. (shrink)

While philosophers have, for centuries, pondered upon the relation between mind and brain, neuroscientists have only recently been able to explore the connection analytically — to peer inside the black box. This ability stems from recent advances in technology and emerging neuroimaging modalities. It is now possible not only to produce remarkably detailed images of the brain’s structure (i.e. anatomical imaging) but also to capture images of the physiology associated with mental processes (i.e. functional imaging). We (...) are able to see how specific regions of the brain ‘light up’ when activities such as reading this book are performed, and how our neurons and their elaborate cast of supporting cells organize and coordinate their tasks. As demonstrated in the other chapters of this book, the mapping of the human mind (mostly by measuring regional changes in blood flow, initially by positron emission tomography (PET) and recently by functional magnetic resonance imaging or (fMRI)) has provided insight into the functional neuroanatomy of neuropsychiatric diseases. Amazingly, the idea that regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) is related intimately to brain function goes back more than a century. As is often the case in science, this idea was initially the result of unexpected observations. The Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso first expressed the idea while studying pulsations of the living human brain that keep pace with the heartbeat (Mosso, 1881). These brain pulsations can be observed on the surface of the fontanelles in newborn children. Mosso believed that they reflected blood flow to the brain. He observed similar pulsations in an adult with a post-traumatic skull defect over the frontal lobes. While studying this subject, a peasant named Bertino, Mosso observed a sudden increase in the magnitude of the ‘brain’s heart-beats’ when the church bells signalled 12 o’clock, the time for a required prayer. The changes in brain pulsations occurred independently of any change in pulsations in the forearm.. (shrink)

The data discussed strongly suggest that neural imaging does not unduly sway judges and jurors; in fact, it is often counterproductive. The percentage of appellate cases in which the decision was favorable to defendants with brain scan data mirrored those of decisions without such proffered evidence. Moreover, fully two-thirds of the scans admitted were either inconclusive or showed normal brain structures. In decisions referencing brain scans, judges mentioned defendant behavior significantly more often than they referred to the (...) defendant’s brain. Finally, in the actual decisions themselves, judges often ignored relevant imaging data in favor of case precedent or misinterpreted the data so that they would fit with the judges’ initial reactions and opinions. (shrink)

The approach of Revonsuo is criticised as being based on a misplaced emphasis on coupled oscillatory dynamics, as well as on too limited an approach to recent advances in brain imaging. This results in the nature of attention as a basic component in consciousness being ignored, and prevents any attempt to attack the crucial problem for consciousness of inner experience: of ‘what it is like to be’.

This article addresses the question of the relevance of brain imaging to legal criteria that are behavioral, that is, that require evaluation of a defendant's actions or mental states. It begins with the legal standard for the admissibility of scientific and technical evidence. Then it considers the relevance of imaging to behavioral legal criteria. The problem is translating mechanistic neuroscience data into the law's folk psychological standards. It uses examples from the criminal law, but the analysis generalizes to behavioral (...) criteria in the civil law. The central question is, “How, precisely, does the proffered scan or data based on scanning answer the specific legal question it supposedly helps answer?” I conclude that, at present, brain imaging has little relevance to behavioral legal criteria. The final section takes note of a rampant disorder, brain overclaim syndrome, and offers a remedy, cognitive jurotherapy. (shrink)

Posner & Raichle's (1994) exciting, wonderfully illustrated book describes the past successes and future potential of the relatively noninvasive imaging of the nervous systems of living people. The focus has been on cognitive processes but there is no reason why emotional and motivational systems cannot also be tapped. Although the authors do not formally address such contentious issues as consciousness and the private experience of other species, imaging methods may hold promise for helping us to understand these phenomena, as well (...) as to integrate psychological processes into ethological and phylogenetic research in general. (shrink)

In this paper we consider two major issues: conceptual–experimental approaches to the self, and the neuroanatomical substrate of the self. We distinguish content- and processed-based concepts of the self that entail different experimental strategies, and anatomically, we investigate the concept of midline structures in further detail and present a novel view on the anatomy of an integrated subcortical–cortical midline system. Presenting meta-analytic evidence, we show that the anterior paralimbic, e.g. midline, regions do indeed seem to be specific for self-specific stimuli. (...) We conclude that future investigation of the self need to develop novel concepts that are more empirically plausible than those currently in use. Different concepts of self will require novel experimental designs that include, for example, the brain’s resting state activity as an independent variable. Modifications of both conceptual and anatomical dimensions will allow an empirically more plausible account of the relationship between brain and self. (shrink)

The practice of reductionism in science and philosophy includes attempts to essentialize human persons, which can lead to serious social problems. Reductionism is not necessary, as comparative philosophers and alternative-thinking scientists have shown.

Fielding and Marwede attempt to lay down directions for an applied onto-psychiatry. According to their proposal, such an enterprise requires us to accept certain metaphysical and methodological claims about how brain and experience are related. To put it in one sentence, our critique is that we find their metaphysics questionable and their methodology clinically impracticable.A first fundamental problem for their project, as it is expressed in their paper, is that their overall aim is unclear. At least three different aims (...) might be read as motivating their efforts, here listed according to their strength:They aim to develop tools for the development of knowledge representational systems that can be used by .. (shrink)

This article critiques contemporary feminist theory's frequent ocularcentric readings of the anorexic body as a surface of cultural inscription or as a paradigmatic sign of the female body's alienation through sexual difference. In an initial speculative attempt to find a theoretical framework that might sustain a more generative and embodied account of anorexia, I read anorexia through Butler's theory of gender as psychic `incorporation' because she problematizes an interior/exterior topography of the subject. This Butlerian framework proves problematic because, by establishing (...) an association between visibly queer gender and subversion, it effectively designates as hegemonic any sense of gender as a felt interiority. In a second framework, I draw on Prosser's anti-ocularcentric reading of transsexual `body narratives' derived from Anzieu's theory of the `skin ego'. Filtering Butler's theory of melancholia through this skin ego framework, I find a theoretical space for anorexia as a transitional embodied subjectivity which both re-lives and relieves the melancholic trauma of gender. (shrink)

The ability to image the human brain has provided a new perspective for neuropsychologists in their efforts to understand, diagnose, and treat insults to the human brain that might occur as the result of stroke, tumor, traumatic injury, degenerative disease, or errors in development. These new ®ndings are the major theme of this special issue. In our article, we consider brain networks that carry out the functions of attention. We outline several such networks that have been studied (...) in normal and pathological states. These include networks for orienting to sensory stimuli, for maintaining the alert state, and for orchestrating volitional control. (shrink)

Our understanding of the cognitive functions of the human brain has tremendously benefited from the population functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies in the last three decades. The reliability and replicability of the fMRI results, however, have been recently questioned, which has been named the replication crisis. Sufficient statistical power is fundamental to alleviate the crisis, by either “going big,” leveraging big datasets, or by “going small,” densely scanning several participants. Here we reported a “going small” project implemented in (...) our department, the Bergen breakfast scanning club (BBSC) project, in which three participants were intensively scanned across a year. It is expected this kind of new data collection method can provide novel insights into the variability of brain networks, facilitate research designs and inference, and ultimately lead to the improvement of the reliability of the fMRI results. (shrink)

Recent functional neuroimaging data, acquired in studies of religious experience, have been used to explain and justify religion and its origins. In this paper, we critique the move from describing brain activity associated with self-reported religious states, to explaining why there is religion at all. Toward that end, first we review recent neuroimaging findings on religious experience, and show how those results do not necessarily support a popular notion that religion has a primitive evolutionary origin. Importantly, we call into (...) question an assumption—key to that account of religion—concerning a conceptual relation between 'religion' and 'religious experience'. Then, we examine the conditions that must be met in order to explain religion on the basis of brain imaging findings. Moreover, we list principled reasons to be sceptical of explanations of religion in terms of the neural underpinnings of experiences. We conclude that the data from neuroimaging studies are not suited for an explanation of religion. (shrink)

If we assume that consciousness is a natural biological phenomenon in the brain, should we expect the current brain sensing and imaging methods to somehow ‘discover’ consciousness? The answer depends on the following points: What kind of level of biological organization do we assume consciousness to be? What would count as the discovery of this level? What are the levels of organization from which the currently available research instruments pick signals and acquire data? Single-cell recordings, PET, fMRI, EEG (...) and MEG pick different types of signals from different levels of organization in the brain. However, it seems they do not manage to pick signals that would allow the direct visualization and reconstruction of the higher levels of electrophysiological organization that are crucial for the empirical discovery and theoretical explanation of consciousness. The message of the present paper is twofold: On the one hand, we should be aware of the practical limitations of the currently available methods of cognitive neuroscience and not read too much into the images produced by them. On the other hand, the present limitations could be overcome by more sophisticated methods in the future. Therefore, contrary to what several philosophers have argued, the empirical discovery of consciousness in the brain is not impossible in principle. (shrink)

Deception is an all-too-common human activity, one that succeeds because we cannot always detect it in others. It complicates all sorts of human decision-making, including attributing guilt for criminal offenses. The law relies on human fact-finders to determine whether criminal defendants claiming innocence, as well as witnesses testifying about a case, are telling the truth. But the fallibility of human lie detection has fueled the search for a more accurate replacement. Scientists have developed new approaches to lie detection that use (...) a brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to evaluate whether someone is lying. In experimental settings, researchers have found .. (shrink)

The article addresses the potential impact of functional brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron-emission tomography) on surrogate end-of-life decision-making in light of varying state-law definitions of consciousness, some of which define awareness behaviorally and others functionally. The article concludes that, in light of admonitions by neuroscientists that functional brain imaging cannot yet replace behavioral evaluation to determine the existence of consciousness, state legislatures, courts and drafters of written advance healthcare directives should consider treating behavior, not function, (...) as the touchstone for end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

As one of the most compelling technologies for imaging the brain, functional MRI (fMRI) produces measurements and persuasive pictures of research subjects making cognitive judgments and even reasoning through difficult moral decisions. Even after centuries of studying the link between brain and behavior, this capability presents a number of novel significant questions. For example, what are the implications of biologizing human experience? How might neuroimaging disrupt the mysteries of human nature, spirituality, and personal identity? Rather than waiting for (...) an ethical agenda to emerge from some unpredictable combination of the concerns of ethicists and researchers, the attention of journalists, or after controversy is sparked by research that cannot be retracted, we queried key figures in bioethics and the humanities, neuroscience, media, industry, and patient advocacy in focus groups and interviews. We identified specific ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) that highlight researcher obligations and the nonclinical impact of the technology at this new frontier. (shrink)

To maximize brain plasticity after stroke, several rehabilitation strategies have been explored, including the use of intensive motor training, motor imagery, and action observation. Growing evidence of the positive impact of virtual reality (VR) techniques on recovery following stroke has been shown. However, most VR tools are designed to exploit active movement, and hence patients with low level of motor control cannot fully benefit from them. Consequently, the idea of directly training the central nervous system has been promoted by (...) utilizing motor-imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). To date, detailed information on which VR strategies lead to successful functional recovery is still largely missing, and very little is known about how to optimally integrate BCI and VR paradigms for stroke rehabilitation. The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a BCI-VR system using a MI paradigm for post-stroke upper limb rehabilitation on functional assessments, and related changes in MI ability and brain imaging. To achieve this, a 60 years old male chronic stroke patient was recruited. The patient underwent a 3-week intervention in a clinical environment, resulting in 10 BCI-VR training sessions. The patient was assessed before and after intervention, as well as on a one-month follow-up, in terms of clinical scales and brain imaging using functional MRI (fMRI). Consistent with prior research, we found important improvements in upper extremity scores (Fugl-Meyer) and identified increases in brain activation measured by fMRI that suggest neuroplastic changes in brain motor networks. This study expands on the current body of evidence as more data are needed on the effect of this type of interventions not only on functional improvement but also through brain imaging to study the effect of the intervention on plasticity. (shrink)

Brain imaging is a persuasive visual rhetoric by which neuroscience is articulated as relevant to the construction and maintenance of desirable selves. In this essay, I describe how “brain-based self-help” literature disseminates neuroscientific vocabularies to public audiences. In this genre, brain images are an authoritative visual resource for translating neuroscience into a comprehensive program for living. I use Foucault’s discussion of biopower to describe the ways in which brain-based self-help literature enables self-constitution in a biosocial (...) age where health is a central means of communicating personal worth, social value and political order. The implications of this continuous self-fashioning are not limited to the personal realm but have important political consequences. (shrink)

A central question in neuroscience and psychology is how the mammalian brain represents the outside world and enables interaction with it. Significant progress on this question has been made in the domain of spatial cognition, where a consistent network of brain regions that represent external space has been identified in both humans and rodents. In rodents, much of the work to date has been done in situations where the animal is free to move about naturally. By contrast, the (...) majority of work carried out to date in humans is static, due to limitations imposed by traditional laboratory based imaging techniques. In recent years, significant progress has been made in bridging the gap between animal and human work by employing Virtual Reality (VR) technology to simulate aspects of real-world navigation. Despite this progress, the VR studies often fail to fully simulate important aspects of real-world navigation, where information derived from self-motion is integrated with representations of environmental features and task goals. In the current review, we provide a brief overview of animal and human imaging work to date, focusing on commonalties and differences in findings across species. Following on from this we discuss VR studies of spatial cognition, outlining limitations and developments, before introducing mobile brain imaging techniques and describe technical challenges and solutions for real-world recording. Finally, we discuss how these advances in mobile brain imaging technology, provide an unprecedented opportunity to illuminate how the brain represents complex multifaceted information during naturalistic navigation. (shrink)

Revonsuo argues that current brain imaging methods do not allow us to ‘discover’ consciousness. While all observational methods in science have limitations, consciousness is such a massive and pervasive phenomenon that we cannot fail to observe its effects at every level of brain organization: molecular, cellular, electrical, anatomical, metabolic, and even the ‘higher levels of electrophysiological organization that are crucial for the empirical discovery and theoretical explanation of consciousness’ . Indeed, the first major discovery in that respect was (...) Hans Berger's finding that scalp EEG is massively different between waking and deep sleep, already seven decades ago. We now have perhaps a dozen sophisticated methods for monitoring consciousness-related activity at multiple levels of brain observation. Theoretical progress has come quite rapidly. Recently, E.R. John and colleagues have made fundamental findings using Quantitative EEG, showing consistent brainwide changes as a result of several types of general anaesthetics . John has proposed a neuronal ‘field theory’ to account for those results. Another promising new method involves frequency-tagging of competing stimuli, allowing us to follow the activity of billions of neurons synchronized to particular conscious stimuli, always compared to very similar unconscious input . A fundamental theoretical account of such results has been provided by Tononi & Edelman . Such results and theory are in broad agreement with the cognitive theory proposed by Baars. (shrink)

A unifying theory of general anesthetic-induced unconsciousness must explain the common mechanism through which various anesthetic agents produce unconsciousness. Functional-brain-imaging data obtained from 11 volunteers during general anesthesia showed specific suppression of regional thalamic and midbrain reticular formation activity across two different commonly used volatile agents. These findings are discussed in relation to findings from sleep neurophysiology and the implications of this work for consciousness research. It is hypothesized that the essential common neurophysiologic mechanism underlying anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is, as (...) with sleep-induced unconsciousness, a hyperpolarization block of thalamocortical neurons. A model of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is introduced to explain how the plethora of effects anesthetics have on cellular functioning ultimately all converge on a single neuroanatomic/neurophysiologic system, thus providing for a unitary physiologic theory of narcosis related to consciousness. (shrink)

Revonsuo makes a provocative and interesting claim: that currently available neurophysiological recording techniques will be unable to discover the neural basis of consciousness in the brain. Although the title refers exclusively to functional brain imaging, Revonsuo considers MEG, EEG, ERP and measurements of firing rate in single cell electrophysiology all in principle incapable of discovering consciousness in the brain. This conclusion is reached by assuming that only one particular type of physical entity constitutes awareness.

Children seem to have a profound implicit knowledge of human behaviour, because they laugh at Bugs Bunny cartoons where much of the humour depends on animals behaving like humans and our intuitive recognition that this is absurd. Scientists, on the other hand, have problems defining what this 'human difference' is. I suggest these problems are of cultural origin. For example, the industrial revolution and the protestant work ethic have created a world in which work is valued over play, object intelligence (...) over social intelligence, and science and technology over the arts. This may explain why we have so many imaging studies of tool-use and object manipulation, but only four studies of dance, two of pretend play, and one of role-play. Yet in order to understand child development, the evolution of the brain, and the emergence of human self-consciousness, we need to look at social displays-- such as dance, song, image-making and role-play-- which underpin human culture, cooperation and the arts. I will discuss recent brain imaging research on playful versus instrumental behaviour and show how, in conjunction with archaeological data, we can use this to make sense of human evolution. (shrink)