The NeuroThinker: the gift given to Martha Farah in gratitude for such a tremendous 10 days! (click to see larger image).
A little
weary (okay, probably a lot weary), we climbed up to the fourth floor of
the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science this morning for our final day
of boot camp. It turned into a day of big-idea questions, culminating in a
wide-ranging discussion this afternoon of the implications of neuroscience for
the law and society.
Where did
the conversation end up? To borrow a phrase from my constitutional law
professor, it appears that both the law and neuroscience’s contribution to it
are “foggy, fluid, and conflicted.” This is not to say that there aren’t a
number of exciting possibilities, some of them already in motion. But there are
no settled answers to questions such as: “Neuroscience is just telling us
things we already know. Yes or no?” “What aspects of neuroscience get lost in
translation to judges and juries?” “Will neuroscience change the law (or other
academic disciplines) or public policy?” Anyone have the answer? (Click
below to continue).
I.
Play-by-Play
This
morning we heard our final two lectures, with Joe Kable
covering individual differences and David Wolk talking
about aging of the brain. We broke for lunch, and then had breakout sessions:
- Adolescent brain development
and its legal implications, led by Jennifer Drobac
- Gender differences:
Implications for law and policy, led by Amy Wax
- The gracefully aging brain:
Risk and protective factors, led by David Wolk
- Social development in
infancy, led by Lauren
Cornew
- Species differences:
Cognition in the African Grey Parrot, led by Irene
Pepperberg
We spent
the second half of the day wrapping up, and thinking about the applications of
neuroscience in many of our professional work and personal lives. Boot camp
members talked about how much more they wanted to know; and how we might be at
the start of major paradigm shifts in the legal system (and the counter point
that this might be just another false-start challenge). We ended the day with a
wonderful reception and dinner in Houston Hall.
II. Important
Lessons
The
lecture on aging today dovetails nicely with the lectures yesterday on
disorder, so I’ll hit on a few high points covered by David Wolk. The big
picture story is that over time, our brains begin to decrease in cortical
volume and in white matter integrity. As a result, our neural networks run a
bit slower, especially on some tasks.
Given
this degeneration, an important question for researchers is: what promotes more
optimized cognitive health? And translated into the clinical context, what
might we be able to do to ease the effects of decreasing cognitive health over
time? There are three potential mechanisms by which we might be able to produce
some positive changes. First, we might directly modulate the neurobiology of
brain changes or Alzheimer’s pathology. Aging and Alzheimer’s are both
neurobiological and neurochemical processes, and we might be able to alter the
biology/chemistry in the brain such that we directly change the way that the
aging or Alzheimer’s processes work.
The
second mechanism, and this is what most current Alzheimer’s drugs do, is to
directly enhance cognitive function. In this mechanism, we’re not actually
slowing down the actual degeneration due to age or Alzheimer’s, but we are
dampening its effect on cognitive ability by enhancing that cognition through
other means. A third approach is to increase
your cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve can be thought of as a type of resilience
to age-related brain changes (though the specific contours are not yet well
known).
While the
connections are still being made between a number of factors that might work
through these different pathways, Dave mentioned the following possibilities as
factors that may be correlated with the likelihood or timing of Alzheimer’s:
physical exercise, mental stimulation, educational attainment, reduction of cerebrovascular
risk factors, psychosocial factors such as social networks (good) and stress
(bad), dietary factors, and cognitive training.
III.
Who’s at boot camp with me?
Yesterday
I mentioned the lawyers, and today I’ll mention the many philosophers who have
been asking big questions all week. Philosophers in attendance include Tom Buller of the
University of Alaska, Anchorage, Tamar Gendler of Yale, Erik
Parens of The Hastings Center, Susan Schneider of the
University of Pennsylvania, John Teehan
of Hofstra University, and Gideon
Yaffe of the University of Southern California.
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