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0:00
Hello. I'm Dr. James Giordano,
Professor in the Departments
of Neurology and Biochemistry
and Chief of the Neuroethics
Studies Program at
the Pellegrino Center
for Clinical Bioethics
at Georgetown University
Medical Center
in Washington DC., in
the United States.
Today we'll be discussing
emerging neuroscience
and technology.
The brain sciences and its
tools and applications
as multinational enterprises,
and the needs that these
enterprises foster
for globally relevant
neuroethics.
This is part one of
a two-part series.
We'll be discussing the
science and technology
of the 21st century
multinational stage.
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If we can look at neuroscience
as almost any science
in technological engagement,
what we find is there's
an interesting dance.
A dance in which the
proverbial partners lead.
We begin with tools.
Those tools that are simple,
our own observation,
our own senses, and
what these mean
for our perceptions and
understanding of the world.
From this, we develop theories.
Those theories then
stand the relative test
of the development of new tools.
Not only to test those theories,
but to push the boundaries
of those theories,
gaining ever deeper knowledge
and further insight.
This generates progress.
This relative 'tools to theory'
and 'theory to tools' dance
provides a general heuristic,
a general pattern,
for development and
advancements in a variety of
different fields of
science and the tools,
literally rational
use of those tools,
technologies that they
prompt, generate,
necessitate and
this has certainly
been the case for
the brain sciences.
Taken together, these
tools and methods
provide us with the capability
to access the brain,
assess the brain, and
affect the brain structure
and its neurological functions.
In that way, it
allows us probably as
"low hanging fruit" to
define, evaluate, treat,
and in some cases prevent
pathologies, injuries,
diseases, or the
pathologization of those things
that occur as a consequence
of the human lifespan.
Congenital conditions and
changes in our capabilities,
perhaps as we age.
But at the heart of what it
is we're doing to define,
evaluate, treat, and prevent,
are the actual capabilities.
In other words, the first
principles, the raw truths,
of what these things can do.
These technologies and
our tools provide us with
the capability of not only
assessing the living brain,
in relatively real-time,
on a variety of levels,
from the cellular and
then extrapolating
that all the way to the social,
but also to engage what
it is the brain does
to alter sensations, thoughts,
emotions, decisions, and behaviors.
In other words, what we can
do is access the brain.
By accessing the
brain, we can assess
and affect what the brain does.
Colloquially, that is the mind.
