Following Schrödinger's Code: A Personal Journey.

On a wintery afternoon over 60 years ago, I was browsing the Baker Library stacks at Dartmouth College and stumbled across a small book with an arresting title: [Schrödinger, E. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944].

Harm to self outweighs benefit to others in moral decision making.

How we make decisions that have direct consequences for ourselves and others forms the moral foundation of our society. Whereas economic theory contends that humans aim at maximizing their own gains, recent seminal psychological work suggests that our behavior is instead hyperaltruistic: We are more willing to sacrifice gains to spare others from harm than to spare ourselves from harm. To investigate how such egoistic and hyperaltruistic tendencies influence moral decision making, we investigated trade-off decisions combining monetary rewards and painful electric shocks, administered to the participants themselves or an anonymous other.

On the research of time past: the hunt for the substrate of memory.

The search for memory is one of the oldest quests in written human history. For at least two millennia, we have tried to understand how we learn and remember. We have gradually converged on the brain and looked inside it to find the basis of knowledge, the trace of memory.

Polyethylene glycol hydrogel rectal spacer implantation in patients with prostate cancer undergoing combination high-dose-rate brachytherapy and external beam radiotherapy.

Purpose: To present rectal toxicity rates in patients administered a polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogel rectal spacer in conjunction with combination high-dose-rate brachytherapy and external beam radiotherapy.

Methods And Materials: Between February 2010 and April 2015, 326 prostate carcinoma patients underwent combination high-dose-rate brachytherapy of 16 Gy (average dose 15.5 Gy; standard deviation [SD] = 1.

Divergent hemispheric reasoning strategies: reducing uncertainty versus resolving inconsistency.

Converging lines of evidence from diverse research domains suggest that the left and right hemispheres play distinct, yet complementary, roles in inferential reasoning. Here, we review research on split-brain patients, brain-damaged patients, delusional patients, and healthy individuals that suggests that the left hemisphere tends to create explanations, make inferences, and bridge gaps in information, while the right hemisphere tends to detect conflict, update beliefs, support mental set-shifts, and monitor and inhibit behavior. Based on this evidence, we propose that the left hemisphere specializes in creating hypotheses and representing causality, while the right hemisphere specializes in evaluating hypotheses, and rejecting those that are implausible or inconsistent with other evidence.

The posteromedial region of the default mode network shows attenuated task-induced deactivation in psychopathic prisoners.

Objective: Psychopathy is a personality disorder with symptoms that include lack of empathy or remorse, antisocial behavior, and excessive self-focus. Previous neuroimaging studies have linked psychopathy to dysfunction in the default mode network (DMN), a brain network that deactivates during externally focused tasks and is more engaged during self-referential processing. Specifically, the DMN has been found to remain relatively active in individuals with psychopathic tendencies during externally focused tasks, suggesting a failure to properly deactivate.

Predictive accuracy in the neuroprediction of rearrest.

A recently published study by the present authors reported evidence that functional changes in the anterior cingulate cortex within a sample of 96 criminal offenders who were engaged in a Go/No-Go impulse control task significantly predicted their rearrest following release from prison. In an extended analysis, we use discrimination and calibration techniques to test the accuracy of these predictions relative to more traditional models and their ability to generalize to new observations in both full and reduced models. Modest to strong discrimination and calibration accuracy were found, providing additional support for the utility of neurobiological measures in predicting rearrest.

Neuroprediction of future rearrest.

Identification of factors that predict recurrent antisocial behavior is integral to the social sciences, criminal justice procedures, and the effective treatment of high-risk individuals. Here we show that error-related brain activity elicited during performance of an inhibitory task prospectively predicted subsequent rearrest among adult offenders within 4 y of release (N = 96). The odds that an offender with relatively low anterior cingulate activity would be rearrested were approximately double that of an offender with high activity in this region, holding constant other observed risk factors.

Why share data? Lessons learned from the fMRIDC.

Neuroimaging and the discipline of cognitive neuroscience have grown together in lock-step with each pushing the other toward an improved ability to explore and examine brain function and form. However successful neuroimaging and the examination of cognitive processes may seem today, the culture of data sharing in these fields remains underdeveloped. In this article, we discuss our own experience in the development of the fMRI Data Center (fMRIDC) - a large-scale effort to gather, curate, and openly share the complete data sets from published research articles of brain activation studies using fMRI.

Dynamic network structure of interhemispheric coordination.

Fifty years ago Gazzaniga and coworkers published a seminal article that discussed the separate roles of the cerebral hemispheres in humans. Today, the study of interhemispheric communication is facilitated by a battery of novel data analysis techniques drawn from across disciplinary boundaries, including dynamic systems theory and network theory. These techniques enable the characterization of dynamic changes in the brain's functional connectivity, thereby providing an unprecedented means of decoding interhemispheric communication.

Shifting gears: seeking new approaches for mind/brain mechanisms.

Using an autobiographical approach, I review several animal and human split-brain studies that have led me to change my long-term view on how best to understand mind/brain interactions. Overall, the view is consistent with the idea that complex neural systems, like other complex information processing systems, are highly modular. At the same time, how the modules come to interact and produce unitary goals is unknown.

Neuroprediction, Violence, and the Law: Setting the Stage.

In this paper, our goal is to (a) survey some of the legal contexts within which violence risk assessment already plays a prominent role, (b) explore whether developments in neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict violence, and (c) discuss whether neuropredictive models of violence create any unique legal or moral problems above and beyond the well worn problems already associated with prediction more generally. In "Violence Risk Assessment and the Law", we briefly examine the role currently played by predictions of violence in three high stakes legal contexts: capital sentencing ("Violence Risk Assessment and Capital Sentencing"), civil commitment hearings ("Violence Risk Assessment and Civil Commitment"), and "sexual predator" statutes ("Violence Risk Assessment and Sexual Predator Statutes"). In "Clinical vs.

Understanding complexity in the human brain.

Although the ultimate aim of neuroscientific enquiry is to gain an understanding of the brain and how its workings relate to the mind, the majority of current efforts are largely focused on small questions using increasingly detailed data. However, it might be possible to successfully address the larger question of mind-brain mechanisms if the cumulative findings from these neuroscientific studies are coupled with complementary approaches from physics and philosophy. The brain, we argue, can be understood as a complex system or network, in which mental states emerge from the interaction between multiple physical and functional levels.

Neuroscience and the correct level of explanation for understanding mind. An extraterrestrial roams through some neuroscience laboratories and concludes earthlings are not grasping how best to understand the mind-brain interface.

An extraterrestrial roams through some neuroscience labs and concludes earthlings are not grasping how best to understand the mind/brain interface

Right hemisphere dominance in visual statistical learning.

Several studies report a right hemisphere advantage for visuospatial integration and a left hemisphere advantage for inferring conceptual knowledge from patterns of covariation. The present study examined hemispheric asymmetry in the implicit learning of new visual feature combinations. A split-brain patient and normal control participants viewed multishape scenes presented in either the right or the left visual fields.

Abnormal moral reasoning in complete and partial callosotomy patients.

Recent neuroimaging studies suggest lateralized cerebral mechanisms in the right temporal parietal junction are involved in complex social and moral reasoning, such as ascribing beliefs to others. Based on this evidence, we tested 3 anterior-resected and 3 complete callosotomy patients along with 22 normal subjects on a reasoning task that required verbal moral judgments. All 6 patients based their judgments primarily on the outcome of the actions, disregarding the beliefs of the agents.

The functional brain architecture of human morality.

Human morality provides the foundation for many of the pillars of society, informing political legislation and guiding legal decisions while also governing everyday social interactions. In the past decade, researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience have made tremendous progress in the effort to understand the neural basis of human morality. The emerging insights from this research point toward a model in which automatic processing in parallel neural circuits, many of which are associated with social emotions, evaluate the actions and intentions of others.

Representations of physical plausibility revealed by event-related potentials.

Maintaining an accurate mental representation of the current environment is crucial to detecting change in that environment and ensuring behavioral coherence. Past experience with interactions between objects, such as collisions, has been shown to influence the perception of object interactions. To assess whether mental representations of object interactions derived from experience influence the maintenance of a mental model of the current stimulus environment, we presented physically plausible and implausible collision events while recording brain electrical activity.

Cortical projection topography of the human splenium: hemispheric asymmetry and individual differences.

The corpus callosum is the largest white matter pathway in the human brain. The most posterior portion, known as the splenium, is critical for interhemispheric communication between visual areas. The current study employed diffusion tensor imaging to delineate the complete cortical projection topography of the human splenium.