Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld is guest blogging in the Washington Post, along with psychiatrist Sally Satel of the American Enterprise Institute, about neuroscience and the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The trial is now in the penalty phase after Tsarnaev was found guilty in the Boston Marathon bombing. Following is an excerpt from today's article by Lilienfeld and Satel:
"By saying that Tsarnaev possessed an 'immature teen brain,' the defense is citing a well-established neuroscientific finding that the killer’s brain, like all teenage brains, was still in a formative stage. Indeed, researchers have shown that the human brain is not fully developed until the mid-20s.
"The 'immature brain' and its implications for reduced culpability has become a staple of the juvenile justice movement. The National Juvenile Justice Network has asserted that brain science 'gives advocates and lawyers working on behalf of juveniles scientific proof for their claims.'
"At least five percent of all murder cases that go to trial feature the introduction of neuroscience evidence, according to Nina Farahany, professor of law at Duke University. Ten years ago, that percentage was less than 0.01 percent. Fully 24 percent of capital cases invoke neuroscience as part of a mitigation strategy."
Graduating senior Hal Zeitlin is set to begin a one-year internship with The Levy Centers for Mind-Body Medicine and Human Potential. He then plans to join the Houston Teach for America corps.
To graduate with honors from the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, students must complete an honors thesis, a comprehensive project that involves months of original research and analysis on a topic of their choice under the guidance of a faculty adviser. The result is a final paper and an oral defense of their thesis to a faculty committee.
Hal Zeitlin's thesis is entitled: "Silent Economics: The Cooperative Effects of Hypnotic Meditation." His adviser was Kelli Lanier, instructor of economics.
"I examined the impact of meditation alone versus the same meditation preceded by hypnotic relaxation procedures on the economic cooperative behavior of 160 undergraduates," Zeitlin explains. "Hypnotic meditation is used to relax a meditator before they practice any scientifically valid form of meditation. There was a significant change of relaxation within the hypnotic group, greater than the change in the meditation-only group. The meditation-only group maintained cooperative behavior for two of three rounds, and the hypnotic group for all three. Since these results could be attributed to random variation, I recommend that the study be repeated with a larger sample."
A growing amount of scientific evidence has revealed that certain meditation practices can positively change the human brain. "I am interested in helping to introduce scientifically valid meditation practices into American schools, for the benefit of youth," Zeitlin says. "My thesis experience provided me an opportunity to begin a professional investigation into meditation and its effects on pro-social behavior."
The recent news that China is trying to “edit” the genes of human embryos, in a way that would permanently alter their DNA, was met with alarm by many in the scientific community. Researchers from the United States were among those who called for a halt to such experiments until the safety and ethical implications are fully considered.
“We’re at the point where we can manipulate life in ways that have great promise to cure some of our most dreaded diseases, expand agriculture and clean up the environment,” says Paul Root Wolpe, director of Emory’s Center for Ethics. “But the ability to create new forms of life also holds the potential to cause disease or create organisms that could be environmentally toxic. So we need to be really careful when we’re trying to change some of these basic building blocks of life that we do so thoughtfully. We need to have boundaries around what should and shouldn’t be done.”
The Center for Ethics is hosting a major international summit in Atlanta May 17 to 19, to discuss both aspirations and guidelines for the era of synthetic biology. Biotechnology and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit (BEINGS), will bring together delegates from the top 30 biotechnology producing countries of the world.
Heading up the discussions will be a faculty of 25 distinguished scholars, including leaders in science, law, ethics, industry, philosophy, religion and the arts and humanities. Among the luminaries: Novelist Margaret Atwood, synthetic biologist George Church and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker.
The public is also encouraged to register and attend BEINGS. “The kinds of decisions that we need to make about biotechnology should not just be made by scientists,” Wolpe says. “I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to participate in this conversation.”
Regulations have not kept pace with rapid advances in biotechnology, he says. “We are currently dealing with a kind of regulatory chaos, not only among different countries but even within the United States. Different states, for example, have different standards for how to use stem-cell research.”
BEINGS 2015 will kick off with a key question: What are the major goals of biotechnology?
“We want to articulate the most important aspirational principles of biotechnology and how it can contribute to human flourishing,” Wolpe says. “Once we agree on where we want to go, then I think it becomes easier to talk about how we create boundaries to get there safely.”
In the months following the summit, the delegates will work on developing an international consensus document for biotechnology guidelines, the first of its kind. “Our hope is that it will serve as a kind of touchstone, and a model for ethical principles and policy standards worldwide,” Wolpe says.
As a winner of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for 2015, Emory English professor Benjamin Reiss will spend the upcoming academic year working on his third book, a cultural and literary study of modern sleep and its almost-obsessive management by society and the medical profession.
Reiss's Guggenheim project is "Thoreau's Bed: How Sleep Became a Problem in the Modern World," a book whose idea germinated in a course Reiss co-taught with Emory neurologist David Rye on "Sleep in Science and Culture." The book "asks how sleep became a nightly ordeal in need of micromanagement, medical attention and pervasive worry."
In his Guggenheim proposal, Reiss states, "Far from a simple biological constant, sleep actually is one of the most rule-bound and tightly regimented activities of our society — and yet the rules we adhere to (sleep in one unbroken stretch for roughly eight hours; do so in a private, sealed room with at most one other consenting adult; train your children to sleep alone through the night from a very young age) seem particularly maladaptive to the waking worlds we inhabit."
While teaching a course on Thoreau's "Walden," Reiss says he realized the book was "a rich record of sleeping and waking."
"When I began to pull out that thread of sleep in his writing, his understanding of what had gone wrong with sleep seemed very contemporary to me," Reiss says.
"In 'Walden,' there is a famous chapter, 'Where I Lived and What I Lived For,' in which he says 'I have never met a man who was quite wide awake.' He also talks about people being addicted to news and gossip, writing 'Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?' as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.'
"Part of what he was witnessing was the birth of the modern world and he was recording how that affected people's rhythms."
"Thoreau's Bed" is scheduled to be published in 2017, the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth.
Commander David Scott emerges from a hatch during the Apollo 9 mission. The 10-day flight in 1969 provided vital information on the operational performance, stability and reliability of lunar module propulsion and life support systems. NASA photo.
“When I was a kid, I didn’t think flying into space was a big deal. All my friends’ dads went into space,” says Tracy Scott, senior lecturer in sociology and director of Emory’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP).
The goal of Emory’s QEP topic, “The Nature of Evidence,” is to empower students as independent scholars capable of supporting arguments with different types of evidence. Scott’s interest in the topic was formed while growing up immersed in the culture of NASA.
Her father, Commander David Scott, was an astronaut who flew on Gemini 8, Apollo 9 and Apollo 15. He’s one of only 12 people who’ve ever set foot on the moon.
“The thing that was exciting for me was the chance to discover new evidence on the moon,” Scott recalls of her father’s lunar trip. “Here was a new environment that humans had never experienced before and there was a huge amount of knowledge to be gained. My dad took a lot of time before the Apollo 15 mission to explain the scientific goals to me. And particularly the experiment he was going to do on the moon. He helped to find new evidence to confirm a very old theory.”
Watch the video, above, to see Commander Scott conduct his famous hammer and feather experiment while standing on the moon. In a vacuous space, without air resistance, they fell at the same rate, just as Galileo predicted in 1589. It was a striking visual demonstration of what we now know as the equivalence principle: The influence of gravity and the influence of inertia are exactly the same.
“I thought it was really cool that my dad was able to do an experiment that linked all the way back to Galileo,” Scott says. “Learning about the power of evidence when I was a child inspired me. I developed a keen sense of seeking out evidence to deepen what I was being taught, and to support my own arguments and to create new knowledge.”
