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IEET > Rights > Neuroethics > Vision > CyborgBuddha

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Cognitive Enhancement Roundup

Posted: Jun 26, 2007

Brian Doherty reviews the insanity defense in Reason The insanity defense is related to the the debate over whether the mentally ill should be allowed to vote (NYT sub reqd) as another area which (a) illuminates the cognitive boundaries of citizenship, and (b) is amenable to voluntary/coercive modification. There have been cases, for instance, where defendents have refused psychiatric medication to keep themselves from being tried as a culpable sane person.
Morse and Hoffman (observe) “even if pure [neurological] mechanism is true…human beings will find it almost impossible not to treat themselves as rational, intentional agents unless there are major changes in the way our brains work. Indeed…there are powerful evolutionary explanations for the causal efficacy of our mental states [that make us think we have free will], states that are the predicates for responsibility. Overcoming what may in fact be neuro-architectural facts of evolution may be only a little less likely than ‘overcoming’ our opposable thumbs.”…

Harvard’s Pinker figures that we can simultaneously believe in a fully caused human being and an ethical system that holds people responsible for their actions by imagining ethics as a “game” that it is useful for us to play for social purposes. In How the Mind Works, he writes that “the ethics game treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its rules are the calculus that assigns moral value to behavior through the behavior’s inherent nature or its consequences. Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable.” The results of that game, he concludes, “can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.”
Nicotine, the Wonder Drug Wired reviews evidence that nicotine is good for immune function, circulation, mood, and brain health, for instance in reducing depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, anger and anxiety. As a consequence firms are developing targeted nicotine analogues as therapeutic drugs, which hopefully will not have some of the addictive potentials. For self-experimentation one can buy a box of nicotine gum for about 16 cents per gram of nicotine.
Long-term Ritalin increases dopamine, reduces potential for addiction to amphetamines At least in rats, as measured with brain-imaging and behavioral research and reported in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. After eight months of methylphenidate brain scans revealed elevated levels of dopamine receptors in treated rats compared with controls, with the higher-dose treatment group showing the highest level of dopamine receptors. In the control group, dopamine receptor levels declined with age. Since low dopamine receptors is associated with likelihood of drug abuse this is apparently why the treated rats were significantly less likely to press a lever to self-administer cocaine, and received fewer self-initiated infusions of the drug following eight months of treatment than the lower-dose group or the control rats. This is consistent with follow-up studies on kids treated with methylphenidate, who are less likely than un-treated ADHD peers to develop drug abuse problems.
George Dvorsky points us to research demonstrating that humans cognitively “uplift” chimpanzees just by interacting with them. A team at Ohio State University report in Animal Cognition that chimps with long-term stable, social interaction with humans understand tools better than those without interaction.
Anxiety degrades memory capacity Or maybe it encourages people to forget. At any rate, people who are easily distressed and have more negative emotions were 40 percent more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment than more easygoing people, according to a study in Neurology.
Simon Baron-Cohen summarizes research on the The Biology of the Imagination in Entelechy Journal.
Since the disability that comprises classic autism is biological in origin, then children with autism are offering us a big clue about the biological basis of the imagination. Of course, when the meta-representational hardware develops normally, biology has done its job. From then on, the content of our imagination, whether we imagine an angry god or a school of wizardry, a mermaid or a devil, owes more to our specific culture than to biology. But the capacity to imagine depends on genes that build brains with a very specific kind of mechanism – one that we take for granted whenever we form relationships or fantasize.
Modafinil relieves chemo-fog Many cancer survivors report permanent cognitive deficits, such as difficulty concentrating, resulting from the neurotoxic effects of chemotherapy drugs. But sixty-eight women who had completed treatment for breast cancer who took modafinil for eight weeks reported major improvements in energy, memory, concentration and learning.
Turning off gene makes mice smarter Building on the 1999 “Doogie” mice research, in which mice were made better maze-runners by manipulating their NR2B gene, researchers have now made smarter mice by suppressing their Cdk5 gene, which controls the expression of NR2B gene. The role of these pathways for memory may lead to therapies for Alzheimers, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and depression.
Lost? Ask a straight woman, or a gay man in a pinch University of Warwick researchers and the BBC used data from almost 200,000 people to demonstrate that men were better at spatial visualization and women are better at verbal dexterity tests and remembering the locations of objects. But they also discovered that sexual orientation was also a correlate of these skills, such that straights of a gender tended to perform on their gender’s preferred skills better than bisexuals and gays of that gender, and gays and bisexuals of the other gender performed better on the skill than the straights of the other gender. For instance in spatial visualization, the skill levels were:
1. Heterosexual men
2. Bisexual men
3. Homosexual men
4. Homosexual women
5. Bisexual women
6. Heterosexual women
Bigger Is Smarter: Overall, Not Relative, Brain Size Predicts Intelligence A study in Brain, Behavior, and Evolution finds that size of the brain, in particular the neocortex, not size of the brain relative to the body, is the best predictor of cognitive skills across species. I was always a skeptical of Mark Walker’s suggestion that we tweak our genes to make our brains bigger. But maybe we all will be egg-heads in the future.
Digital Dementia In Kurt Vonegut’s dark parody of affirmative action “Harrison Bergeron” everyone with IQs above the norm have buzzers in their ears that interrupt their stream of thought, effectively reducing their intelligence. Ironically a growing body of research suggests that wired workers have installed their own IQ-reducers by surrounding themselves with digital interruptions and digital surrogates for gray meat memory. In a recent survey on 2,030 office workers conducted by the firms Incruit and Embrain 63% (1,281 respondents) said they suffer from forgetfulness, and one in five of those workers cited their growing dependence on mobile phones, PCs, and other digital devices as the cause.

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