Brain Injury Said to Affect Moral Choices
Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others’ lives.
The findings are the most direct evidence that humans’ native revulsion to hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that evolved before the higher brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.
The researchers emphasize that the study was small and that the moral decisions were hypothetical; the results cannot predict how people with or without brain injuries will act in real life-or-death situations. Yet the findings, appearing online yesterday, in the journal Nature, confirm the central role of the damaged region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to give rise to social emotions, like compassion.
Previous studies showed that this region was active during moral decision making, and that damage to it and neighboring areas from severe dementia affected moral judgments. The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline. In extreme circumstances, people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives...
Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain
...We recorded brain responses with functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 Tesla while subjects were performing the free-selection task. In order to investigate which cortical regions encode the subject's current intention, we next assessed whether it was possible to decode from the spatial pattern of signals in each local region of the brain which intention the subject was covertly maintaining 11, 12, 13 and 14. For this, we applied multivariate pattern recognition to spatial patterns of brain responses under the two possible intentions (see Experimental Procedures and Figure 2 for details on this analysis). We found that indeed several regions predicted whether the subject was currently covertly intending to perform the addition or subtraction task (Figure 2). The highest decoding accuracy of 71% was achieved in medial prefrontal cortex (T[7] = 4.62, p = 0.001, see Figure 2, “MPFCa”). Importantly, however, decoding in this region was not possible during task execution, suggesting that the intention was encoded in this brain region only during the delay and not during task execution. In contrast, a region more superior and posterior along the medial wall was not informative during the delay, but only during the execution of the freely chosen task (Figure 2, “MPFCp”). Besides medial prefrontal cortex, there were also several regions of lateral prefrontal cortex where decoding accuracy was lower, but still above chance level (Figure 2). Also in these regions, decoding was at chance level during task execution. Interestingly, only a region of anterior-medial prefrontal cortex showed an overall increase of activity during the delay period while subjects had covertly formed a decision but were still waiting to execute the task (Figure S2). As in previous studies 10 and 15, the duration of increased neural activity corresponded to the delay in the current task, with longer delays leading to longer fMRI responses. However, this region with an overall signal increase was more anterior to the region that encoded the subject's intentions. Importantly, there was no difference between the two intentions in the overall level of activity (T[7] = −0.46; p = 0.67) in medial prefrontal cortex, suggesting that the intentions were not encoded in different global levels of activity but in the detailed spatial patterns of cortical responses.
Judge overturns control order on suicidal terror suspect
Staff and agencies
Wednesday April 4, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
The high court today overturned a control order imposed on a terrorist suspect who threatened to kill himself in front of a judge.
Lawyers for the Palestinian refugee Mahmoud Abu Rideh said the severe restrictions imposed on his daily life under the order amounted to "inhuman and degrading treatment" and were affecting his mental health.
Today's ruling is the latest control order to be overturned by the high court, forcing the home secretary, John Reid, to impose less restrictive orders he believes offer the public weaker protection against terrorist suspects.
"Its cumulative effects in my judgment deprive [Mr Abu Rideh] of liberty, and the secretary of state has no power to make such an order," judge Mr Justice Beatson said as he quashed the control order first imposed by Charles Clarke in March 2005 and renewed a year later.
Mr Abu Rideh's restrictions include a 12-hour curfew, no internet access and a ban on visits from anyone the Home Office has not approved...
Guantanamo detainee says torture prompted confession to USS Cole bombing
Gabriel Haboubi at 3:42 PM ET
[JURIST] Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri [DOD profile, PDF page 7], the suspected mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole bombing [JURIST news archive] and a Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainee, said his confession to the attacks was coerced through five years of torture, according to transcripts [text, PDF] released Friday. The transcripts from his Combatant Status Review Tribunal [DOD backgrounder] hearing do not provide any details of the alleged torture, and sections of transcript were redacted, but al-Nashiri did say that his alleged torturers were American and not Yemeni. When asked if he was under any pressure or duress at his hearing, he said "No. Not today." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told the Associated Press that al-Nashiri's allegations of torture would be investigated.
Al-Nashiri has already been convicted and sentenced to death [JURIST report] after a trial in absentia in Yemen [CIA backgrounder], the site of the USS Cole attack. He is one of the 14 "high value" detainees [DNI profiles, PDF] moved from secret overseas CIA prisons [JURIST report]. AP has more.
