Will Neuroscience Destroy Our Conception of Free Will?

Wired magazine very briefly discusses the implications of recent advances in neuroscience for the issue of insanity pleas. Previous legal attempts to blame our genes for bad behavior have failed to persuade juries, but the new challenges from neuroscience may well succeed where those earlier attempts fell short. Will we see a role for philosophers as expert witnesses attempting to explain compatibilist approaches to free will?

Picking Wolpe's Brain

The field of neuroethics is getting hotter and hotter. Trying to determine what ethical issues will emerge from a host of new brain technologies -- psychopharmaceuticals, implantable brain technologies, brain imaging -- will pose the same kinds of challenges as genetics has over the last decade. In an article in Technology Review called "Picking Your Brain," Paul Root Wolpe discusses some of the thornier issues in brain-computer interfaces.

Cosmetic Neurology

It isn't much of a story, nor are the ethics sound bites particularly new, but this was the only news coverage of the major new article by Anjan Chatterjee on cosmetic neurology.