What Matthew Sample learned about neuroethics at BrainLinks-BrainTools

Matthew Sample

Can we think, talk, dance our way to responsible innovation?

I recently participated in the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE)’s summer exchange with BrainLinks-BrainTools, a German research center located at the University of Freiburg. Since I’m a doctoral student in philosophy, you may wonder what a philosopher could possibly learn from a distant center for neuroscience and neural engineering. But BrainLinks-BrainTools has its own philosophers, and choreographers and dancers, as it turns out.

A new age for philosophers, ethicists

2014 is an interesting time for many ethicists and philosophers of science. We find ourselves suddenly in strange new places without orientation. Philosophers, perhaps more than ever before, are attached to synthetic biology, to neuroengineering, and other technoscience topics. Humanities scholars are shadowing lab techs, hovering about engineering research clusters, and are even formally evaluated by federal science funding agencies.

Assigning an ethicist to every emerging technology, though ambitious, does nothing to guarantee that technological development actually gains a new ethical and social sensitivity; what’s needed is a practical and rational foundation for these ethics experiments, a guiding framework. There has been a proliferation of models for engagement with the sciences, social recipes—think “one part Socratic questioning; two parts public input”—intended to ensure efficacy in our interactions with technoscience. In the U.S. and Europe, the latest generation of recipes are numerous and untested, with only preliminary hints at success.

Many roads to responsible innovation

How exactly should ethicists collaborate with scientists and engineers?

At the CSNE, Professors Sara Goering (philosophy) and Eran Klein (philosophy, neurology) have crafted their own response to the puzzle, designing and refining an ethics infrastructure suitable for neural engineering. I’ve been lucky to work with Sara and Eran and have helped shape the development of the CSNE ethics model.

What does that mean? We contribute to the academic sphere of ethics; we make careful lists of concepts and ethical issues. We refine arguments and write papers. But we’ve also maintained that embedded ethics must go further than the traditional task of adding to the literature. That means that we work in contact with both neural engineering practice as it happens and with people who are intended to benefit from neural technologies.

We’re starting to embed ourselves in researchers’ labs; my trip to Freiburg is an example, and I’m currently working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a partner organization.

In more practical terms, our model requires regular interaction with researchers and focus groups and with end users (whether people with disabilities, young people or others). In technical terms, our group insists on a “midstream” position and aims for “justice through recognition,” a commitment to integrate the voices of intended beneficiaries into the process of technological development.

Before my visit to BrainLinks-BrainTools, I thought of the CSNE ethics model as the only logical evolution of embedded ethics work. Our growing focus on the complexity of lived experience seemed bold in comparison to ELSI-era interventions of the Human Genome project, which as the name suggests (Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications) is focused only on implications of research after it has been completed.

But in my first meetings with Dr. Gunnar Grah (biology) and Dr. Oliver Müller (philosophy) in Freiburg, I quickly realized that our approach could be much more radical, in two ways. First, we could imagine embedded ethics as a wider project. And, second, we could be using art as a tool.

Art + Science

Ethics research at BrainLinks-BrainTools is expansive, combining outreach and ethics activities. The over-arching project title, Reaching Out: Participative Projects and Ethical Discourse on Neurotechnology, hints at this.

Dr. Grah’s official title is “science communicator” and involves equal parts public relations and participatory ethics. He organizes Café Scientifiques at which neuroscientists and neural engineers interact informally with interested members of the public. Science Jams allow arts and science to mix, when an evening offers improvisational jazz and a research talk on optical illusions, or in play readings on topics like human enhancement.

Similarly, Dr. Müller, as project director for “Reaching Out,” provides these events with critical elements drawn from academic philosophy, posing again the big questions that get left behind in our daily lives. Grah is quick to point out that outreach should be more than just promotion of technology, and must represent the social and ethical complexities associated with BrainLinks-BrainTools.

Beyond dialogue, Müller is enthusiastic about new, unorthodox methodologies. He explained that the academic mode of ethics can be just as problematically exclusive as the scientific perspective. He has a point. How often do members of the public read the journal Neuroethics?

As a solution, he has turned to the idea of “artistic research,” a methodological experiment in collaboration. Müller’s approach is most evident in the dance-oriented events produced by the center, BrainDance Days, and (in planning) the Störung Project.

These elaborate productions leverage a range of activities: Dance workshops for persons with Parkinson’s, public lectures, neuroscience-inspired dance performances, and intense academic discussion between scientists, medical professionals, and artists. My visit to Germany did not, unfortunately, coincide with these events.

Müller describes the programs as centering on the concept of störung, which means disturbance or interference. His choice of concept is interesting not only because it provides modern dance with a new theme (“disturbed movement”) but also because störung is often used in German medical contexts to describe illnesses like Parkinson’s disease.

The performance involves a diverse range of participants (clinicians, researchers, individuals with Parkinson’s, dancers, the public) and encourages participants to question their individual understandings of normality, and reflect on the concept’s use in their own work and lives. This motivation behind BrainDance Days is made very explicitly in the 14-page event brochure:

We want to address the opportunities and limits of different approaches to movement and movement disorder not only on a scientific and artistic level, but also on a methodological level. ... How much is the artistic conception of research compatible with the scientific understanding of research? ... To what extent may actual scientific research benefit from artistic research?

BrainDance Days ended in May, but it is already being expanded to BrainLinks-BrainTools’ partner institutes in Israel.

Stepping out of the lab, away from academic literature

Structurally, Müller and Grah’s vision for “Reaching Out” looks very different from the CSNE model of ethics research. But there’s also a common motivation behind the two approaches.

Our own group is convinced that there is a narrowing of perspective when we think about neurotechnologies as just engineering challenges or as topics for ethics journals. But for a person with a disability, for example, using a brain-computer interface or a robotic prosthesis represents a unified experience, a new phenomenon that furthers or complicates or perhaps even hinders that person’s way of being.

That person experiences neurotechnology not in a piecemeal fashion as, say, a potential privacy risk or as a new capability for movement, but as an entangled new fact of their subjectivity. In the face of this complexity, we’ve recommended that technological development and ethics research must be carried out in conjunction with the people who may eventually benefit from those technologies. These “end users” as we call them can help to re-embody (even if only hypothetically) neurotechnology as part of a human life, rather than a set of discrete problems to be solved.

It is this push for re-embodiment that unites many of the activities associated with “Reaching Out.” By putting Parkinson’s disease or disturbed movement in the context of dance, it can be untethered from its common representation as something that needs a cure or a source of embarrassment.

In the hands of choreographers and dancers, the ideas of Parkinson’s disease or deep brain stimulation are opened up again, placed in non-medicalized bodies, to help us (whether the public or specialized researchers) question our current understandings and whether those understandings are appropriate. Art, in this way, functions as a shared deliberative space for scientists, engineers, ethicists, and the public, a space that is free from traditional disciplinary hierarchies and clinician-patient dynamics. And frivolous as these events may seem -- my philosophical musing may not be convincing -- consider that dance events may provide the only moment of open-ended reflection for researchers stuck in competitive professional roles.

Comparing “Reaching Out” to ethics at the CSNE, these similarities are reassuring. My time in Freiburg helped convince me that responsible innovation requires us to step out of the lab or away from the ethics literature. Theory or bench work is not a replacement for genuine dialogue and reflection. But in keeping with the experimental nature of embedded ethics, I also see “Reaching Out” as a challenge for the CSNE. The mode of “artistic research” reminds me that our own vision for cutting edge ethics need not be the only one.

The challenge facing us at the CSNE, then, is to learn from the successes at BrainLinks-BrainTools and develop whatever tools will best enable re-embodiment, dialogue, and reflection. We must keep an open mind and ask the pressing question: Who is ready to dance?

Matthew Sample is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Washington and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Science, Technology & Society program.