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Lawrence Hrubes

Can Brain Science Be Dangerous? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/...can-brain-science-be-dangerous

TOK science neuroscience brain poverty social studies human sciences ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The idea that poverty can change the brain has gotten significant attention recently, and not just from those lay readers (a minority, according to recent research) who spend a lot of time thinking about neuroscience. Policy makers and others have begun to apply neuroscientific principles to their thinking about poverty — and some say this could end up harming poor people rather than helping. At The Conversation, the sociologist Susan Sered takes issue with “news reports with headlines like this one: ‘Can Brain Science Help Lift People Out Of Poverty?’” She’s referring to a June story by Rachel Zimmerman at WBUR, about a nonprofit called Crittenton Women’s Union that aims to use neuroscience to help get people out of poverty. Elisabeth Babcock, Crittenton’s chief executive, tells Ms. Zimmerman: “What the new brain science says is that the stresses created by living in poverty often work against us, make it harder for our brains to find the best solutions to our problems. This is a part of the reason why poverty is so ‘sticky.’”
  • “The new neuroscience offers wonderful possibilities regarding Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, brain injuries and much more,” writes Dr. Sered. “But scientific knowledge always develops and is utilized within social contexts.” She and others fear that, used incorrectly, neuroscience might spread the view that poor people are lesser than others, that they are irrevocably debilitated by their experiences with poverty — or, conversely, that if they fail to respond to programs that science says will help them, it must be their own fault.
  • Ms. Williams writes that many of today’s child-development ideas are very similar to those of the psychiatrist John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory. But, she notes, he developed his ideas through psychological observation, not brain scans. And she quotes Sebastian Kraemer, a psychiatrist: “If John Bowlby were alive today, he would say, this [neuroscience] does not add anything. People are just more persuaded by it, by the facts and the pictures.” People do seem to find neuroscience extremely persuasive, even when it’s wrong. And this may be part of what critics fear — that images and facts about the brain are so powerful, they can make us believe things we really shouldn’t.
markfrankel18

Is the World More Depressed? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-great-depression.html

TOK psychology depression

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Yet there is reason to believe that mental illness is indeed increasing around the world, if only because urbanization is increasing. By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities. Cities are places of possibility: They are, as E. B. White said of New York, “the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.” But cities also break traditions and fracture families, and they breed psychiatric illness. In a city you are more likely to be depressed, to fall ill with schizophrenia, and to use alcohol and drugs. Poverty and rapid urbanization sharpen these effects.
markfrankel18

The Lifespan of a Thought Experiment: Do We Still Need the Trolley Problem? - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...409732

TOK ethics technology emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • By the late ‘90s, trolley problems had fallen out of fashion. Many philosophers questioned the value of the conclusions reached by analyzing a situation so bizarre and specific.
  • It wasn’t clear trolleys could ever find a life out of the pages of academic journals until one philosophy graduate student, Joshua Greene, revived them with the modern techniques of neuroscience.
  • The ethicist Peter Singer cites Greene's research to support some of his positions about why we ought to make greater sacrifices for problems that may seem distant, like world poverty or a disease raging halfway around the globe.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But recently, trolley problems have found new life in a more realistic application: research on driverless cars.
  • He explained that many of the situations driverless cars will face involve conflicting priorities. When a vehicle has no option but to have a collision, which collision is it going to have? This is where trolleys come in.
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