Brain Dynamics and Plastic Deformation of Self Circuitries in the Dementia Patient

Despite improved medical care that has resulted in greatly extended life expectancies, significant increases in numbers of individuals suffering age related cognitive defects is expected, making the improved understanding of normal and pathological aging an important priority. Current studies indicating that brain activity requires a dynamical architecture to preserve functional order in the face of persistent and extraneous activity suggests that cognitive impairments are likely to be closely linked to dysfunctional dynamical activity of brain systems. Cognitive impairments such as those introduced by Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), that affect fundamental operational constructs like the self, are thus likely to implicate global dynamics that oversee whole brain operation. This paper explores plastic events associated with dynamical elements used in the normal construction of the self percept and the etiology of their deconstruction in the course of AD. It is proposed that the evolution of the disease involves the increasing impairment of a global dynamical operation that is normally engaged in forming a stable and coherent self image needed to flexibly engage task related, motor plans and effectors

Framing Neuroethical Praxis: Wojtyła’s Metaphysical Subject and its Modernist Cartesian Variants

Numerous neuroethical quandaries today mark concerns over the normative propriety of corporal intervention in the nervous system. At the center of the debates is the question of how the human subject is understood. Accounts influenced by Cartesian metaphysics separate the subject into his immaterial and material manifestations, yielding ethical approaches that devalue the body and neural architecture. Contemporary neuroscience, on the one hand, proposes that the subject is purely a physiological creation, whereas posthumanism privileges the isolated ego on the other; both, thereby, validate an arbitrary neuroethical praxis. By anchoring neuroethics in the metaphysical subject Wojtyła proposes a fundamental corrective to these metaethical approaches, and the promise of a new praxis for corporal intervention in the brain.Numerous neuroethical quandaries today mark concerns over the normative propriety of corporal intervention in the nervous system. At the center of the debates is the question of how the human subject is understood. Accounts influenced by Cartesian metaphysics separate the subject into his immaterial and material manifestations, yielding ethical approaches that devalue the body and neural architecture. Contemporary neuroscience, on the one hand, proposes that the subject is purely a physiological creation, whereas posthumanism privileges the isolated ego on the other; both, thereby, validate an arbitrary neuroethical praxis. By anchoring neuroethics in the metaphysical subject Wojtyła proposes a fundamental corrective to these metaethical approaches, and the promise of a new praxis for corporal intervention in the brain

Resting-State fMRI Advances for Functional Brain Dynamics

The development of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in quiescent brain imaging has revealed that even at rest, brain activity is highly structured, with voxel-to-voxel comparisons consistently demonstrating a suite of resting-state networks (RSNs). Since its initial use, resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) has undergone a renaissance in methodological and interpretive advances that have expanded this functional connectivity understanding of brain RSNs. RS-fMRI has benefitted from the technical developments in MRI such as parallel imaging, high-strength magnetic fields, and big data handling capacity, which have enhanced data acquisition speed, spatial resolution, and whole-brain data retrieval, respectively. It has also benefitted from analytical approaches that have yielded insight into RSN causal connectivity and topological features, now being applied to normal and disease states. Increasingly, these new interpretive methods seek to advance understanding of dynamic network changes that give rise to whole brain states and behavior. This review explores the technical outgrowth of RS-fMRI from fMRI and the use of these technical advances to underwrite the current analytical evolution directed toward understanding the role of RSN dynamics in brain functioning

Neuroethics in Principle and Praxis - Conceptual Foundations

With the conclusion of the Decade of the Brain and Decade of the Mind, neuroscience has advanced well beyond single neuron functions, and begun to investigate global properties that emerge from central nervous system operation. Core ethical issues for neural intervention, in consequence, now touch on concerns over how the individual as a whole may be affected. Central to these concerns is the fundamental value of the human being, which lends normative weight to questions, interventions, and practices influencing him or her. Yet, despite wide recognition of the crucial relevance of human value, the derivation of metaethical principles that underwrite this value is by no means uniformly agreed to. Why and how the human being is normatively privileged, accordingly, emerge as core questions that frame issues of ethical praxis. This book tackles this dissonance, and exposes the philosophical foundations that are rooting contemporary divisions in ethical approaches to intervention in the nervous system