Ethics

Two further indictments of the media in reporting on neuroethics (Reiner)

By Peter Reiner

Fiorenzo Conti & Gilberto Corbellini have responded to the ongoing discussion of cognitive enhancement with an interesting tidbit of correspondence that appears in this week's issue of Nature.  In their letter, they direct the readers to the results of a survey that they conducted, querying 703 members of the Italian Society for Neuroscience (the english language version of the results can be found here.)  Many of the results are fairly predictable, but the one that stood out for me was question 8 which asked "Are the ethical implications of Neuroscience correctly addressed by the Italian media?"  Remarkably, of the 70 respondents, none felt that the media was doing a good job, while over 86% felt the media was not correctly addressing neuroethical issues.

These results are timely, especially on the heels of an article in today's issue of Slate in which Daniel Engber takes CNN to task for yet another example of bad neuropunditry.  Using a set of tools developed by Lucid Systems, CNN asked 8 (that's right, n=8) undecided voters to watch the leading political candidates, and compared their verbal responses with movement of forehead muscles,  galvanic skin response, and, what appears to be multipoint EEG.  The resulting video clip is as remarkable for its glib acceptance of the power of Lucid Systems' technology.  Engber sums up the situation nicely in his final paragraph:

This is far from the worst neuropunditry to hit the mainstream media this election season. Other marketing firms, like FKF Applied Research, have been much more freewheeling in their interpretation of ambiguous brain-imaging data. Lucid Systems deserves some credit for sticking to venerable research methods with well-known strengths and limitations. But that doesn't let CNN off the hook: The network shamelessly inflated this rather old-fashioned study with the image of a mind-reading computer that can predict tonight's outcome at the polls. "Call it a neurological lie detector test," says Kaye at the end of the segment. "It may prove to be better than polling at determining what a voter does in the voting booth."

Tip of the hat to Hank Greely and Emily Murphy for alerting me to the piece in Slate

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on February 06, 2008 (boomark / email).