Time
January 29, 2007
U.S. Edition
SECTION: A USER'S GUIDE TO THE BRAIN; Pg. 96 Vol. 169 No. 5
HEADLINE: Who Should Read Your Mind?
BYLINE: Francine Russo
HIGHLIGHT:
Brain scanners are becoming more powerful all the time--and privacy experts are
worried
BODY:
Neuroscientists usually scan people's brains looking for tumors or aneurysms or to
localize the extent of physical trauma. But in a series of experiments performed at New
York University a few years ago, scientists went looking for racism. When they showed
subjects pictures of unfamiliar white and black faces and scanned their brains with
functional MRI machines, they could see heightened activity in the amygdala, a part of
the brain that corresponds with emotional arousal. Moreover, the brain activity matched
up with psychological tests designed to measure unconscious racism. "This technology is
probably not ready for prime time yet," says University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist
Martha Farah, but she can foresee a day when police academies, for example, might
scanprospective cadets to weed out racists. "If we could, in fact, define racism," Farah
says, "this would be a potentially useful tool--but with very serious issues of privacy and
informed consent."
Welcome to the exploding new field of neuroethics, the study of the ethical and
philosophical dilemmas provoked by advances in brain science. It's only since a seminal
conference in 2002 that the field has even existed; shortly thereafter, Penn and Stanford
founded the first academic centers for neuroethics in the country. Last year a
multidisciplinary group--including philosophers, lawyers and psychologists--created the
Neuroethics Society to explore the issues in a formal way.
Just in time. As brain science becomes increasingly sophisticated, the moral and legal
quandaries it poses threaten to proliferate into every part of our lives. And as the racism
experiment makes clear, brain imaging has already started to do so. Even in their current
state, brain scans may be able to reveal, without our consent, hidden things about who we
are and what we think and feel. "I don't have a problem with looking into your brain,"
says Alan Leshner, former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and current
head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "But I'm not so sure I
want you looking into mine."
These technologies may become an intimate part of our lives sooner than we think. "It's
not so futuristic," says Stanford neuropsychologist Judy Illes, "to imagine an employer
able to test for who is a good team player, who a leader or a follower." Before such scans
are used, neuroethicists warn, we must understand what they can and cannot do. A device
that might be helpful in personnel testing, for example, might not be rigorous enough to
be used in a criminal trial, where the standard of proof is higher. That's currently the case
with the polygraph. But Farah is afraid that because of the high-tech aura of brain scans,
people may put more faith in them than is warranted.
Perhaps even more critical is the question of who should be allowed to peek into our
brains. Employers? Schools? The government? The answers are far from clear.
Employers, for example, already give psychological tests to job applicants, and schools
test 3- and 4-year-olds to anticipate reading problems. Brain scans may actually give
better results. But brain scans are also much more powerful and far more invasive, and
the law is murky on whether they can be performed without our consent. We may feel
instinctively that we have a right to brain privacy, but feelings have no legal standing.
The courts may soon be forced to address these questions. Columbia University
psychiatry professor Paul Appelbaum points out that current criminal law allows
government agencies to invade bodily privacy when, for example, it lets police draw
blood after a suspected drunk driving accident. But not always. Americans, for example,
can't currently be compelled to give a DNA sample. Nor can they be forced to submit to
an MRI or have electrodes fixed to their skulls without consent or a court order, says
Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor. But it's conceivable that prosecutors might
become much more aggressive in demanding brain scans--"like a search warrant for the
brain," he suggests. "There's little precedent, and we're moving into new and scary
territory."
The technology also has national-security implications. At a Neuroethics Society-sponsored symposium at Tufts University last September, ethicists and policymakers
debated the potential benefits and threats to individual liberty of brain imaging and
stimulation during intelligence gathering, which may be just around the corner. Cephos
Corp., a brain-imaging firm based in Pepperell, Mass., hopes to have a lie-detection scan
with 90% accuracy ready for use by late 2007, according to CEO Steven Laken, who says
the U.S. intelligence community is watching closely. "If someone says, 'I know where bin
Laden is,'" Laken asserts, "the U.S. government could hire us to verify the intelligence."
Intelligence agencies aren't the only customers for such services. A growing number of
firms now offer brain scans to companies and individuals, promising tomeasure such
intangibles as the compatibility of prospective partners, thetruthfulness of a spouse or
even a subject's soft-drink preferences. "We try to identify these hot spots," Illes says,
"and help researchers be aware of how their work may be used, even for nefarious
purposes."
Some companies insist they are determined not to cross ethical lines. Human Bionics, a
neuroimaging firm that sells cognitive-assessment and lie-detection services, has hired
Illes as an adviser and come up with a 180-page ethicspolicy that places limits on what
the company can extract from the scans and whocan access them without a subpoena.
Such ethical questions will eventually invade the home, Greely predicts. Suppose
parents want to grill their teens about sex or drugs under alie-detection MRI? Or try to
make a rebellious kid docile? Ultimately, society will have to decide whether parents may
do these things or whether childprotective services should intervene. As brain science
evolves, these questionswill only get harder.
The answers, neuroethicists say, will come not from any pronouncements they might
make but from the dialogue they are initiating with the public. "We need to keep this
discussion rational," Leshner says, "so that science can advance and society can benefit
from the tremendous potential of being able to look into the brain of a living, breathing,
behaving individual and watch the mind in action."
BOX STORY:
NEUROETHICS
A NEW FIELD OF INQUIRY THAT ADDRESSES THE ETHICAL AND
PHILOSOPHICAL DILEMMAS ARISING FROM ADVANCES IN BRAIN SCIENCE;
IT BEGAN WITH A SMALL CONFERENCE IN 2002 AND HAS GROWN RAPIDLY
BOX STORY:
50 Number, in millions, of Americans who suffer from neurological illnesses
of one kind or another
I don't have a problem with looking into your brain. But I'm not so sure I
want you looking into mine.
ALAN LESHNER, American Association for the Advancement of Science
NOTES: See also cover story on page 56 of same issue.; See also related article
on page 101 of same issue.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: Illustrations for TIME by Jonathon Rosen;
PHOTOGRAPH: HANK WALKER/TIME LIFE PICTURES--GETTY IMAGES
ILLUSTRATION: Jonathon Rosen
ILLUSTRATION: Leigh Wells