ELECTROMAGNETIC ENERGY ALTERING MORAL JUDGMENT

Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets

By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.

By Anne Trafton, MIT News Office - Graphic: Christine Daniloff  -  Originally Posted - March 30, 2010

To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions — an ability known as “theory of mind.” For example, if one hunter shoots another while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the shooter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his fellow hunter for an animal?

MIT neuroscientists have now shown they can influence those judgments by interfering with activity in a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.

Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In the new study, the researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.

The researchers, led by Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, report their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 29. Funding for the research came from The National Center for Research Resources, the MIND Institute, the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, the Simons Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

The study offers “striking evidence” that the right TPJ, located at the brain’s surface above and behind the right ear, is critical for making moral judgments, says Liane Young, lead author of the paper. It’s also startling, since under normal circumstances people are very confident and consistent in these kinds of moral judgments, says Young, a postdoctoral associate in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

“You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,” she says. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”

Thinking of others

Saxe first identified the right TPJ’s role in theory of mind a decade ago — a discovery that was the subject of her MIT PhD thesis in 2003. Since then, she has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that the right TPJ is active when people are asked to make judgments that require thinking about other people’s intentions.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to go beyond fMRI experiments to observe what would happen if they could actually disrupt activity in the right TPJ. Their success marks a major step forward for the field of moral neuroscience, says Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, professor of philosophy at Duke University.

“Recent fMRI studies of moral judgment find fascinating correlations, but Young et al usher in a new era by moving beyond correlation to causation,” says Sinnott-Armstrong, who was not involved in this research.

The researchers used a noninvasive technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to selectively interfere with brain activity in the right TPJ. A magnetic field applied to a small area of the skull creates weak electric currents that impede nearby brain cells’ ability to fire normally, but the effect is only temporary.
In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible).

In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.

In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, the researchers believe that TMS interfered with subjects’ ability to interpret others’ intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcome information to make their judgments.

“It doesn’t completely reverse people’s moral judgments, it just biases them,” says Saxe.

When subjects received TMS to a brain region near the right TPJ, their judgments were nearly identical to those of people who received no TMS at all.

While understanding other people’s intentions is critical to judging them, it is just one piece of the puzzle. We also take into account the person’s desires, previous record and any external constraints, guided by our own concepts of loyalty, fairness and integrity, says Saxe.

“Our moral judgments are not the result of a single process, even though they feel like one uniform thing,” she says. “It’s actually a hodgepodge of competing and conflicting judgments, all of which get jumbled into what we call moral judgment.”

Saxe’s lab is now studying the role of theory of mind in judging situations where the attempted harm was not a physical threat. The researchers are also doing a study on the role of the right TPJ in judgments of people who are morally lucky or unlucky. For example, a drunk driver who hits and kills a pedestrian is unlucky, compared to an equally drunk driver who makes it home safely, but the unlucky homicidal driver tends to be judged more morally blameworthy.

Related?:

Meteor Streaks Across North Texas Sky

NORTH TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) – The FAA has confirmed a meteor likely passed across the sky of the Southwest United States Wednesday night, with many people in the Dallas/Fort Worth area hearing and feeling the sonic boom.

The meteor, which was reported from everywhere from San Antonio to Oklahoma City, was spotted around 8:00 p.m. Wednesday.

Kevin Palivec, a former television photographer in the Abilene area captured video of the meteor on two remote cameras 60 miles apart. Images from the cameras show a bright streak passing overhead. See Video Here and Here.

TUNGUSKA GENETIC ANOMALY AND ELECTROPHONIC METEORS
http://www.actaphys.uj.edu.pl/vol36/pdf/v36p0935.pdf

Advances for Alzheimer's, Outside the Lab

They sit demurely in rows of plastic chairs, hands in their laps, awaiting instructions. They have been dressed carefully by their spouses and relatives in ankle-long frocks or neat cardigans, with crisply knotted ties — the overly formal style of the aged.

Organizing this unlikely choir is Chreanne Montgomery-Smith, who runs support groups for the Newbury branch of Britain's Alzheimer's Society. On cue, the 40 or so Alzheimer's and dementia patients join hands and begin singing in unison — a tentative rendition of Amazing Grace. They remember most of the words and their chorus fills the hall. Montgomery-Smith is certain that the music helps bring her patients' thoughts — ravaged by dissonance and dislocation — into harmony.

"You can see how they become lucid when they sing," says Montgomery-Smith, who has witnessed improvements in sociability and communication during her musical meetings. "The research isn't there to support it at the moment but I'm confident these sessions will one day be shown to slow the progression of Alzheimer's. The benefit [of singing] as a hidden cognitive rehabilitation is evident. You can't keep a good idea down forever."

For now though, Montgomery-Smith has been asked by the Alzheimer's Society not to describe this activity — called Singing for the Brain — as "treatment." The scientific data doesn't even support the term "therapeutic." But there are few other dementia therapies that the evidence can validate — currently only two types of drugs have received government approval in the U.S. to slow the progression of Alzheimer's, but both offer only limited benefits — and many caregivers, desperate to better the lives of their patients, resort to such low-tech, behavior-based solutions as singing.

Medicine has long fought two fronts in the battle against disease — in the research lab and at the bedside. The race toward a treatment for Alzheimer's has focused almost exclusively on research in psychopharmacology, immunology and gene therapy. But as patients and caregivers wait for a cure, the progressive, fatal condition continues to affect some 5 million Americans. Meanwhile, low-tech memory-enhancing devices like diaries, Post-It notes and portable cameras are used increasingly by Alzheimer's caregivers, leading some researchers to contemplate whether the consistent and comprehensive use of bedside solutions may actually slow the progression of the disease. If rudimentary tools have any chance of inhibiting the disease, health-care workers are interested. When it comes to Alzheimer's, even incremental improvements can have a profound effect: a 2004 Australian study found that delaying the onset of dementia by five years would eventually halve the number of people living with the condition.

At Cambridge University's Addenbrooke's Hospital, one pilot program has generated a lot more excitement than any new drug or gene discoveries made at the high-tech labs there. (GlaxoSmithKline and other pharmaceutical companies conduct dementia-related research at Addenbrooke's.) Led by a team of clinical psychologists who specialize in rehabilitating brain-injured patients, the program involves using SenseCam, a digital camera, developed by the nearby Microsoft Research Lab, that hangs from the neck and passively takes photographs every 30 seconds. The pictures can then be played back in sequence.

Addenbrooke's psychologists decided to try the device with their patients with memory loss. They found surprising results. While memory-impaired patients who take pictures with traditional cameras often fail to remember the photographed events or activities, those who used SenseCam, which has a wide-angle lens and takes impromptu rather than staged pictures, found their recall to be greatly enhanced. "This isn't rocket science and the device is quite simple but there's something about its spontaneous, wide-angle photographs that seem to mimic the brain's own episodic memory," says Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist working on the project. In the past few years, several studies conducted at the hospital have shown that, after reviewing the photographs for an hour every other day for two weeks, dementia patients are able to recall photographed activity months later — even without the help of the camera's playback function.

"That's what we find so exciting. Their recall improved by up to 80%, not only when looking at the photos but months after studying the sequence. It raises the possibility of firing up parts of the brain that have become inactive because of the disease," Berry says.

Humans store memories in various regions of the brain, but neuroscientists have pinpointed one section deep within, a seahorse-shaped structure called the hippocampus, as particularly crucial to memory. Studies of patients with brain injury or disease have shown that the hippocampus is where new memories are formed and where recent ones are retrieved; like a librarian, it scans the brain's catalog of bygone information and brings appropriate material to the fore. (But a recent brain-scan study of 15 healthy adults at the University of California, San Diego, found that the hippocampus has less to do with memories from the distant past. It is vital to the recall of recent events, from a year or two ago, but when study participants were asked to recall memories five or 10 years old, scientists recorded less activity in the hippocampus and more in the cerebral cortex.)

In Alzheimer's, the hallmark plaques of the disease are known to target and clog the hippocampus and nearby regions first, which explains why the initial symptoms of the disease involve memory loss — and why early stage patients may have trouble remembering whether they ate breakfast that morning, but can still recognize friends from childhood. Though Berry does not yet have scientific evidence, she strongly believes that low-tech treatments like episodic photography can spark specific and targeted activity in the hippocampus, keeping it active for longer or even regenerating it — and perhaps allowing patients to hold on to new memories.

The Alzheimer's Society's Montgomery-Smith thinks singing sessions may work similarly, by dredging up distant memories associated with the music and stimulating memory-retrieval mechanisms in the brain. But many other Alzheimer's activists warn that putting too much hope in claims of so-called "hidden cognitive rehabilitation" will only distract from the urgent need to find a cure. "There are so many things that you can't overcome with Alzheimer's — we can't get too excited by these low-tech treatments. They can help patient care but they will never deliver a solution," says Susanne Sorensen, head of research for the Alzheimer's Society U.K. "We need more clinical trials [for vaccines and drugs]. There's no substitute."

No one disagrees that more research is necessary. But even if activities such as singing or taking pictures cannot treat Alzheimer's, they may still improve patients' mood and social skills and, at least for a time, raise their quality of life. When the Alzheimer's Association, based in Chicago, surveyed 350 Americans diagnosed with dementia in 2008, many respondents said they felt abandoned by the medical community after diagnosis, and most wished for a greater range of treatment options other than just pills. "Their impression was that the doctor felt their job was done as soon as the diagnoses was made and the prescriptions written," says Shelley Bluethmann of the Alzheimer's Association.

Responding to these concerns, Bluethmann's organization has commissioned various projects in hospitals and rehabilitation centers across the U.S. that are intended to supplement pharmacological treatment — from art and music classes to the development of a board game called "Make Memory Together," designed by Gene Cohen at George Washington University. "Our vision is to work for a cure, but we also have an obligation to support the best quality of life for patients living with the disease now," Bluethmann says.

Bluethmann adds that low-tech activities offer another "hidden" benefit: helping spouses and relatives who care for Alzheimer's patients. Often, caregivers describe the distress and frustration that result from watching a disease slowly rob them of their loved ones as unbearable. They say any reprieve is a godsend. In Newbury, as the group shuffled out after two hours of singing, I asked one man whether he had enjoyed himself. "I liked it very much," he responded. His wife gasped. "He said five words," she said, placing her hand tenderly on his arm, and peering hopefully into his eyes. "He hasn't strung together five words like that in months."

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Source: TrueHealthIsTrueWealth