Personhood and neuroscience: Naturalizing or nihilating?

American Journal of Bioethics

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 37-48

  Farah, Martha J ^a   Heberlein, Andrea S ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AWARENESS; BIOETHICS; BRAIN; CONCEPT FORMATION; CONSCIOUSNESS; EGO; ETHICAL THEORY; HISTOLOGY; HUMAN; HUMAN CHARACTERISTIC; INTELLIGENCE; MEMORY; METAPHYSICS; MORALITY; NEUROSCIENCE; PATTERN RECOGNITION; PERCEPTION; PERSONHOOD; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGY; REVIEW; THINKING;

AWARENESS; BIOETHICAL ISSUES; BRAIN; COGNITIVE SCIENCE; CONCEPT FORMATION; CONSCIOUSNESS; EGO; ETHICAL THEORY; HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS; HUMANS; INTELLIGENCE; MEMORY; METAPHYSICS; MORAL OBLIGATIONS; MORALS; NEUROSCIENCES; PATTERN RECOGNITION, VISUAL; PERSONHOOD; SOCIAL PERCEPTION; THINKING;

EID: 33847016967     PISSN: 15265161     EISSN: 15360075     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/15265160601064199     Document Type: Review

References (75)

1. Adolphs, R. 2003. Cognitive neuroscience of human social behaviour. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 165-78.
2. Adolphs, R., F. Gosselin, T. W. Buchanan, D. Tranel, P. Schyns, and A. R. Damasio. 2005. A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage. Nature 433: 68-72.
3. Beauchamp, T. L., and J. F. Childress. 2001. Principles of biomedical ethics. 5th ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
4. Bloom, P. 2004. Descartes' baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human. New York, NY: Basic Books.
5. Brooks, R. A. 2002. Flesh and machines. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
6. Brothers, L. 1990. The social brain: A project for integrating primate behavior and neurophysiology in a new domain. Concepts in Neuroscience 1: 27-51.
7. Castelli, F., C. D. Frith, F. Happé, and U. Frith. 2002. Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. Brain 125: 1839-1849.
8. Castelli, F., F. Happé, U. Frith, and C. Frith. 2000. Movement and mind: a functional imaging study of perception and interpretation of complex intentional movement patterns. NeuroImage 12: 314-325.
9. Critchley, H. D., E. M. Daly, E. T. Bullmore, et al. 2000. The functional neuroanatomy of social behaviour: changes in cerebral blood flow when people with autistic disorder process facial expressions. Brain 123: 2203-2212.
10. Dennett, D. 1978. Brainstorms: Philosophical essays on mind and psychology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
11. Downing, P. E., D. Bray, J. Rogers, and C. Childs. 2004. Bodies capture attention when nothing is expected. Cognition 93: B27-B38.
12. Downing, P. E., Y. Jiang, M. Shuman, and N. Kanwisher. 2001. A cortical area selective for visual processing of the human body. Science 293:2470-2473.
13. Edelman, D. B., B. J. Baars, and A. K. Seth. 2005. Identifying hallmarks of consciousness in non-mammalian species. Consciousness and Cognition 14: 169-187.
14. Engelhardt, H. T. J. 1986. The foundations of bioethics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
15. Farah, M. J. 2000. The cognitive neuroscience of vision. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
16. Farah, M. J. 2004. Visual Agnosia. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
17. Farah, M. J., K. L. Levinson, and K. L. Klein. 1995. Face perception and within-category discrimination in prosopagnosia. Neuropsychologia 33: 661-74.
18. Farah, M. J., C. Rabinowitz, G. Quinn, and G. Liu. 2000. Early commitment of the neural substrates of face recognition. Cognitive Neuropsychology 17: 117-123.
19. Farah, M.J., K.D. Wilson, H.M. Drain, and J.R. Tanaka. 1995. The inverted face inversion effect in prosopagnosia: Evidence for mandatory, face-specific perceptual mechanisms. Vision Research 35: 2089-2093.
20. Feinberg, J. 1980. Abortion. In Matters of life and death, ed. T. Regan, 188-189. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
21. Feinberg, T. E., R. J. Schindler, E. Ochoa, P. C. Kwan, and M. J. Farah. 1994. Associative visual agnosia and alexia without prosopagnosia. Cortex 30: 395-411.
22. Fellows, L. K., and M. J. Farah. 2005. Dissociable elements of human foresight: A role for the ventromedial frontal lobes in framing the future, but not thinking about future rewards. Neuropsychologia 43: 1214-1221.
23. Fletcher, J. 1979. Humanhood: Essays in biomedical ethics. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
24. Fletcher, P. C., F. Happe, U. Frith, S. C. Baker, R. J. Dolan, R. S. Frackowiak, and C. D. Frith. 1995. Other minds in the brain: a functional imaging study of "theory of mind" in story comprehension. Cognition 57: 109-128.
25. Gallagher, H., F. Happe, N. Brunswick, P. Fletcher, U. Frith, and C. Frith. 2000. Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: An fMRI study of 'theory of mind'. Neuropsychologia 38: 11-21.
26. Gallagher, H. L., A. I. Jack, A. Roepstorff, and C. D. Frith. 2002. Imaging the attentional stance in a competitive game. NeuroImage 16: 814-821.
27. Gertler,G. B. 1986. Brain birth:Aproposal for defining when a fetus is entitled to human life status. Southern California Law Review 59: 1061-1078.
28. Goel, V., J. Grafman, N. Sadato, and M. Hallett. 1995. Modeling other minds. Neuroreport 6: 1741-1746.
29. Green, R. M. 2002. Part III: Determining moral status. American Journal of Bioethics 2: 20-30.
30. Grossman, E., M. Donnelly, R. Price, et al. 2000. Brain areas involved in perception of biological motion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12: 711-720.
31. Guthrie, S. E. 1995. Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
32. Happé, F., S. Ehlers, P. Fletcher, U. Frith, M. Johansson, C. Gillberg, R. Dolan, R. Frackowiak, and C. Frith. 1996. 'Theory of mind' in the brain. Evidence from a PET scan study of Asperger syndrome. Neuroreport 8: 197-201.
33. Happé, F. G. 1994. An advanced test of theory of mind: understanding of story characters' thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped, and normal children and adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 24: 129-154.
34. Haring, B. 1972. Medical ethics. Slough, MN: St. Paul Publications.
35. Heberlein, A. S., and R. Adolphs. 2004. Impaired spontaneous anthropomorphizing despite intact perception and social knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 101: 7487-7491.
36. Heider, F. 1944. Social perception and phenomenal causality. Psychological Review 51: 358-374.
37. Johnson, M. H., S. Dziurawiec, H. Ellis, and J. Morton. 1991. Newborns' preferential tracking of face-like stimuli and its subsequent decline. Cognition 40: 1-19.
38. Johnson, S. C. 2003. Detecting agents. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B Biological Sciences 358: 549-559.
39. Jones, D. G. 2004. The emergence of persons. In From cells to souls - and beyond, ed. M. Jeeves, 11-33. Grand Rapids, SD: William B. Eerdmans.
40. Jones, G. 1989. Brain birth and personal identity. Journal of Medical Ethics 15: 173-178.
41. Kant, I. 1948. Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. In The moral law: Kant's groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, ed. H. J. Paton, X-XX. London, UK: Hutchinson.
42. Kanwisher, N., J. McDermott, and M. M. Chun. 1997. The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. Journal of Neuroscience 17: 4302-4311.
43. Locke, J. 1997. An essay concerning human understanding. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
44. Martin, A., and J. Weisberg. 2003. Neural foundations for understanding social and mechanical concepts. Cognitive Neuropsychology 20: 575-587.
45. Martin, R. C. 2003. Language processing: Functional organization and neuroanatomical basis. Annual Review of Psychology 54: 55-89.
46. McMahan, J. 1995. The metaphysics of brain death. Bioethics 9: 91-126.
47. McNeil, J. E., and E. K. Warrington. 1993. Prosopagnosia: A face-specific disorder. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology 46A: 1-10.
48. Miller, E. K., and J. D. Cohen. 2001. An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience 24: 167-202.
49. Mitchell, J. P., T. F. Heatherton, and C. N. Macrae. 2002. Distinct neural systems subserve person and object knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A 99: 15238-15243.
50. Mitchell, J. P., C. Neil Macrae, and M. R. Banaji. 2005. Forming impressions of people versus inanimate objects: social-cognitive processing in the medial prefrontal cortex. NeuroImage 26: 251-257.
51. Moussa, M., and T. A. Shannon. 1992. The search for the new pineal gland. Brain life and personhood. Hastings Center Report 22: 30-37.
52. O'Reilly, R. C., and Y. Munakata. 2000. Computational explorations in cognitive neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
53. Osterling, J. A., G. Dawson, and J. A. Munson. 2002. Early recognition of 1-year-old infants with autism spectrum disorder versus mental retardation. Development and Psychopathology 14: 239-251.
54. Paulesu, E., J. Harrison, S. Baron-Cohen, J. D.Watson, L. Goldstein, J. Heather, R. S. Frackowiak, and C. D. Firth. 1995. The physiology of coloured hearing. A PET activation study of colour-word synaesthesia. Brain 118 (Pt 3): 661-676.
55. Peelen, M. V., and P. E. Downing. 2005. Selectivity for the human body in the fusiform gyrus. Journal of Neurophysiology 93: 603-608.
56. Pelphrey, K., R. Adolphs, and J. P. Morris. 2004. Neuroanatomical substrates of social cognition dysfunction in autism. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Review 10: 259-271.
57. Phillips, M. L.,W. C. Drevets, S. L. Rauch, and R. Lane. 2003. Neurobiology of emotion perception I: The neural basis of normal emotion perception. Biological Psychiatry 54: 504-514.
58. Piven, J. 1997. The biological basis of autism. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 7: 708-712.
59. Rochat, P., R. Morgan, and M. Carpenter. 1997. Young infants' sensitivity to movement information specifying social causality. Cognitive Development 12: 537-561.
60. Ronald, A., F. Happe, and R. Plomin. 2005. The genetic relationship between individual differences in social and nonsocial behaviours characteristic of autism. Developmental Science 8: 444-458.
61. Rorty, A. O. 1988. Mind in action: Essays in the philosophy of mind. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
62. Saxe, R., and A. Wexler. 2005. Making sense of another mind: the role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia 43: 1391-1399.
63. Saxe, R., D. K. Xiao, G. Kovacs, D. I. Perrett, and N. Kanwisher. 2004. A region of right posterior superior temporal sulcus responds to observed intentional actions. Neuropsychologia 42: 1435-1446.
64. Scholl, B. J., and P. D. Tremoulet. 2000. Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 299-309.
65. Schultz, R. T., I. Gauthier, A. Klin, R. K. Fulbright, A. W. Anderson, F. Volkmar, P. Skudlarski, C. Lacadie, D. J. Cohen, and J. C. Gore. 2000. Abnormal ventral temporal cortical activity during face discrimination among individuals with autism and Asperger syndrome. Archives of General Psychiatry 57: 331-340.
66. Schultz, R. T., D. J. Grelotti, A. Klin, J. Kleinman, C. Van der Gaag, R. Mavois, and P. Skudlarski. 2003. The role of the fusiform face area in social cognition: implications for the pathobiology of autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. Biological Sciences 358: 415-427.
67. Singer, P. 1994. Rethinking life and death: The collapse of our traditional ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
68. Skuse, D., J. Morris, and K. Lawrence. 2003. The amygdala and development of the social brain. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1008: 91-101.
69. Squire, L. 1992. Memory and the hippocampus: A synthesis of findings from rats, monkeys and humans. Psychological Review 99: 195-231.
70. Tarr, M. J., and I. Gauthier. 2000. FFA: A flexible fusiform area for subordinate-level visual processing automatized by expertise. Nature Neuroscience 3: 764-769.
71. Tooley, M. 1972. Abortion and infanticide. Philosophy and Public Affairs 2: 37-65.
72. Vuilleumier, P. 2000. Faces call for attention: Evidence from patients with visual extinction. Neuropsychologia 38: 693-700.
73. Wise, S. 2002. 'Practical autonomy' entitles some animals to rights. Nature 416: 785.
74. Woodward, A. L. 1998. Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach. Cognition 69: 1-34.
75. Wright, C. I., B. Martis, L. M. Shin, H. Fischer, and S. L. Rauch. 2002. Enhanced amygdala responses to emotional versus neutral schematic facial expressions. Neuroreport 13: 785-790.