The New Brain Sciences

The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects Paperback – December 6, 2004

Author: Dai Rees | Language: English | ISBN: 0521537142 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects – December 6, 2004
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From Scientific American

What are the legal, ethical and moral implications of research in "the new brain sciences"? Rees and Rose, two distinguished British academics, invited the contributors to this collection of essays to ask hard questions about these subjects. Their answers will make you stop and think. You might hope, for example, that decades of progress in psychiatry and psychology would be helping courts assess guilt, innocence and appropriate punishments. But contributor Stephen Sedley, a British judge who spent six years presiding over homicide cases, finds experts to be of little value. He admires the jury system because "of the rapidity with which twelve lay people were generally able to grasp and apply to a live problem before them principles of law." As for the testimony of psychiatrists, however, he says that he and the jury are typically left "peering into a very deep pool indeed with very little help about what was to be found there." Perhaps the most visible of the new brain sciences is psychopharmacology, which has brought us drugs now taken by millions of people every day. John Cornwell, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, writes from a courtroom in Louisville, Ky., describing a jury faced with "Prozac on trial."

Weeks of neuroscientists’ testimony left them baffled when they had to decide the case of a workplace killer who was on the antidepressant. But it is the elementary schoolroom, not the courtroom, that is the scene of today’s largest-scale experiment in psychopharmacology. Over 2 percent of American schoolchildren now receive medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, writes Paul Cooper, a teacher and psychologist. "Medication should not be the default mode," he notes, yet increasingly it is, and in many cases, the drug serves to "treat" children who merely "experience difficulty conforming to the kinds of behavioral expectations that are common in schools." Yet these thorny issues pale next to vexing medical issues that the new brain research may raise. Readers are reminded that a neurologist won a Nobel Prize in 1949 for pioneering the lobotomy and that between the 1940s and 1960s surgeons cavalierly severed critical brain tissue in thousands of patients. Yadin Dudai, an Israeli neurobiologist, decries what he calls a new "lobotomy attitude" in neuroscience today, with researchers working toward "genetic manipulations, brain transplantations, even neurosilicon hybrids." He counsels "humbleness and patience" in view of how little we yet understand.

Jonathan Beard

Review

"Selected from two international conferences, the papers are remarkable for their high quality in substance and style. It is hard to think of anyone who would not have some interest in this work." CHOICE May 2005

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• Paperback: 316 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; First Edition edition (December 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805854924
• ISBN-13: 978-0805854923
• ASIN: 0521537142
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,306,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This is a fascinating book that has been assembled by two of the intellectual powerhouses of British medicine and biology.

In the introduction, Steven Rose, who has been a Professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at the Open University since 1969, calls the neurosciences "that final terra incognita, the nature of consciousness itself." He proposes that developments in neurology, molecular biology and other neurosciences have been isolated from their sociological and economic context and have instead been dominated by a reductionist search for quick genetic and pharmacological quick solutions.

The book is based on two meetings that explored neuroscience and neuroethics and it is divided into five sections and sixteen chapters followed by a good list of references and potted biographies of the authors.

Part I. Introduction: The new brain sciences: Stephen Rose

Part II. Freedom to Change
1. Do we ever really act?: Mary Midgley
2. The definition of human nature: Merlin Donald
3. Consciousness and the limits of neurobiology: Hilary Rose
4. Mind metaphors. Neurosciences and ethics: Regine Kollek
5. Genetic and generic determinism. A new threat to free will?: Peter Lipton

Part III. Neuroscience and the Law
6. Human action, neuroscience and the law: Alexander McCall Smith
7. Responsibility and the law: Stephen Sedley
8. Programmed or licensed to kill? The new biology of femicide: Lorraine Radford
9. Genes, responsibility and the law: Patrick Bateson

Part IV. Stewardship of the New Brain Sciences
10. The neurosciences: the danger that we will think we have understood it all: Yadin Dudai
11.

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