I contribute to an effort to run a clinical trial for applying statistical models to drug-resistant epilepsy, for patients who will undergo surgery. The results are complex both scientifically and morally. We saw a patient undergo a "failed" surgery in the sense that seizures continued but GPA shot up to 4.0. That patient is coming back for another surgery, but clinicians aren't sure what to do. Not to mention that total cost is something like 50k+ euros: what other pressing problems could be solved with a large budget?
Outside of invasive neurosurgery, it's also difficult to draw the line between stimulation & behavioral protocols, which can rewire the brain, that are good and those which are bad (for whom? by what metric?). The questions have little to do with neuroscience imo.
The other day I was joking about "fixing" conservatism by frying their amygdalae. I'm pretty sure it's unethical, but, boy, it sure would solve a whole lot of problems.
Just to be clear, I wasn't serious as I am not being serious right now. Amygdalae are useful to prevent us from doing stupid dangerous things.
Mandatory meditation training would also likely have large positive effect, while being much cheaper, but this is a good illustration of why none of the discussion is specific to neuroscience: we know how to improve a situation but there's insufficient moral/politic/economic ground to do so.
I'm sorry, where are you getting this from? That seems contradictory to common knowledge in this subject, and if you want to do a silly thing like label certain behaviors "liberal" or "conservative" in the context of U.S. politics.
Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just relaying what the research says. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..... There are other studies that electromagnetically impair amygdala function which induced hyper empathy and atheism in the lab, but sadly I haven’t been able to find them again on Google.
Outside of invasive neurosurgery, it's also difficult to draw the line between stimulation & behavioral protocols, which can rewire the brain, that are good and those which are bad (for whom? by what metric?). The questions have little to do with neuroscience imo.