You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“What would happen in this country if corporate marketers and political consultants could literally peer inside our brains and chart the neural activity that leads to our selections in the supermarket and voting booth? What if they then could trigger this neural activity by various means, so as to modify our behavior to serve their own ends?” [Commercial Alert letter to U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, quoted in Illes, De Vries, Cho, & Schraedley-Desmond, 2006]
Where does the new field of neuropsychoanalysis situate itself in the debate over the biology underlying human experience? Recent meetings of our Group, attended by clinicians and researchers, attempted to address some of the burning questions of how one can understand and perhaps help, and not harm, the human condition with our burgeoning neuroscientific knowledge.
Illes et al. (2006) summarize a number of areas of concern: the actual measurement of links between brain function and behavior, the mapping of the reasoning-through of difficult moral decisions, neural correlates of value judgments, biological underpinnings of cooperation and competition, surveillance in public places, such as airports, and use of imaging to bolster racial or gender discrimination. Concerns raised by participants in their study included the overinterpretation of research results, the lack of a formal theory that inevitably must acknowledge the complexity of the systems studied, and potentially harmful