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Record W1977022835 · doi:10.1353/hcr.0.0039

Altering the Brain and Mind

2008· article· en· W1977022835 on OpenAlex
Walter Glannon

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Hastings Center Report · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicNeuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Calgary
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNeuroethicsPsychePsychologyDeep brain stimulationNeuroscienceBrain stimulationPsychosurgeryCognitionPsychotherapistPsychiatryMedicineDiseasePsychoanalysisParkinson's disease

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Altering the Brain and Mind Walter Glannon (bio) Intervening in the Brain: Changing Psyche and Society. Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment, vol. 29. Ed. Reinhard Merkel et al. Springer, 2007. 533 pages. $99.00. Hardcover. Advances in neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry have shown promise of controlling even the most intractable diseases of the brain and mind. Electrical deep-brain stimulation is now considered standard therapy for severe Parkinson disease and is being used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, refractory depression, and other conditions. Neural stem cell transplantation and gene transfer therapies may be able to regenerate damaged brain tissue and possibly reverse some neurodegenerative diseases. Psychopharmacology can not only treat cognitive and affective disorders but also enhance normal cognitive capacities. The new neuroscience also has important ethical, legal, and social implications, as an interdisciplinary group of European neuroscientists, philosophers, and legal theorists has documented in Intervening in the Brain: Changing Psyche and Society. This is one of the most comprehensive empirical and normative discussions to date of the range of issues pertaining to applied neuroscience. A collaborative endeavor led by Reinhard Merkel, Intervening in the Brain shows that the new interventions can have both salutary and deleterious effects on mental states, altering the psyche in unpredictable ways and changing the thought, personality, and behavior that make each person unique. As the authors assert, "Practically no intervention in the structure or functioning of the human brain can be undertaken in complete certainty that it will not affect mental processes, some of which may eventually come to play a key role in a person's self-concept" (p.6). In addition to a nuanced, balanced assessment of the actual and potential benefits and risks of applied neuroscience, Intervening in the Brain also offers mostly well-reasoned recommendations for which brain-affecting drugs and procedures should or should not be used, and for which individuals. Some of the recommendations are more provocative than others. For example, the authors assert that if a brain-invasive treatment for severe psychopathy became available, then we would not only be permitted but obligated to offer it as an alternative to lifelong incarceration. On the other hand, they believe cognitive enhancement should not be publicly funded because it falls outside the responsibility of health care professionals, which is to prevent and treat disease. In addition, children should never be cognitively enhanced, both because of the potential long-term adverse effects on their developing brains and because it can interfere with their right to an open future. Despite their objection to public funding of enhancement, the authors argue that there is no justification for prohibiting enhancement in individual cases. Improving one's cognitive capacities should be allowed, provided that individuals pay for cognition-enhancing drugs and take responsibility for any resulting social costs. This position reflects a mature libertarianism, which holds that individuals have the right to do what they want to their brains provided that they do not thereby harm others. Still, what responsibility for these costs would entail for the individual is not clear. The authors say that there is (and should be) a clear distinction between treatment and enhancement at the macro level of health resource allocation, and they draw this distinction in terms of functional loss and what it would take to restore normal functioning. But they acknowledge that for some conditions, treatment shades into enhancement. When the boundary between treatment and enhancement is fuzzy, a doctor has a greater obligation to inform a patient of the potential side effects of prescribed drugs than in standard forms of therapy. This view sidesteps claims by some that doctors would be in the position of irresponsibly prescribing drugs for the purpose of enhancement. Yet others might insist that, by definition, enhancement means improving normal traits and thus does not properly fall within the goals of medicine. This objection may not have much force, however, given that many people purchase these drugs from the Internet and not within the doctor-patient relationship. The discussion of enhancement in this book is particularly timely in the light of a recent survey in Nature indicating widespread use of methylphenidate (Ritalin) and other drugs among students, academics, and researchers to improve...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.430
Threshold uncertainty score0.540

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.128
GPT teacher head0.322
Teacher spread0.195 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it