Emerging neuroscience and technology: multinational enterprises on the 21st century global stage

Published on August 30, 2022   30 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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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.
0:38
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.

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Emerging neuroscience and technology: multinational enterprises on the 21st century global stage

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