Watch Out!

“Jeffrey’s crazy again tonight, absolutely crazy.” Megan borrowed a line from Strindberg. She was reading Miss Julie because Strindberg had at one time been a socialist and he was going into “the book.” Of course the line was supposed to say Miss Julie. But Megan did not like what she read in The New York Times Magazine. After midnight, Strindberg abandoned, she read Jeffrey Rosen, hoping Rosen had not written this. Perhaps an editor had edited out the sections about ethics. He wrote about evidence being introduced into court on the basis of a criminal’s brain scan in an MRI. (Forget the DNA: go with the MRI.) And he had discovered that Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology (a former classmate of Rosen’s), and Rene Marois, a neuroscientist, both at Vanderbilt, could predict what Rosen was thinking after a brain scan in an MRI .

This did not horrify Rosen. Jones was his old classmate.

Probably the only reason the damned thing made it into the magazine. But a good thing. Megan needed to know about it.

The brain scans were used to study criminals, but Rosen admitted the data could even change jury selection. Lawyers could examine brain scans and on those grounds pick jurors. No wild cards. The new powerful Tesla MRIs would also track brains and determine methods of learning, predict trades or professions, decide whether someone would be a good foster parent, etc., according to Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of social psychiatry and psychiatric ethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Rosen spent only a couple of paragraphs discussing the ethics. it seemed to excite, not horrify, him.

Heil Jones, Marois, and Wolpe. Hitler's dead...but we've got this.

Rosen insanely allowed his old classmate and Marois to experiment on him. “Marois explained that he and Jones wanted to study the interactions among the emotion-generating regions of the brain, like the amygdala, and the prefrontal regions responsible for reason....We then turned to the results of the second experiment, in which I had been asked to alternate between thinking of faces and places without disclosing the order. ‘We think we can guess what you were thinking about, even though you didn’t tell us the order you started with,’ Malrois said proudly. ‘We think you started with places and we will prove to you that it wasn’t just luck.’ Marois showed me a picture of my parahippocampus, the area of the brain that responds strongly to places and the recognitions of scenes. ‘It’s lighting up like Christmas in all cylinders,’ Marois said. ‘It worked beautifully, even though we hadn’t tried this before.’”

Didn’t this worry Rosen? Didn't he realize he, as a journalist, would probably be tracked for life?

Crazy. Anything for a story

Sometimes, based on PET scans, criminals were now found insane and got rehab rather than capital punishment. Okay with Megan there.. But Megan understood sinkingly that they were being used as experiments. The research would be used to control minds.

Joshua D. Green, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard: “To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain.”

What did she care what an assistant professor said? An assistant professor should not be quoted in this article. This was too serious.

Bad journalism.

Megan was her brain. Was she just a brain?

Wait: this wasn’t the first caveat. 1984, Brave New World, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Wrinkle in Time.

That had worked for a while.

She did not believe this. People were: anima, personalities, souls, characters, selves.

Weren’t people against this?

Forget the war. Protest this. Why weren’t people protesting in the U.S.? Destroying the labs. Did they have any idea what this meant?

A sick man, Megan said. It wasn't clear whether she meant the neuroscientists or Rosen.

Jim agreed with her. He knew more about neurolaw than she did, though it was not his line of work.

It’s the whole new idea of having abortions to get the baby you want. No diseases. Perfect, perfect.

There is no perfect.

Of course there isn’t. There will be new problems.

No souls. Just brains.

It’s the nuclear bomb all over again.

They’re already experimenting on those poor people’s brains. They’re criminals, but they don’t deserve this.

Is there a movement?

Well, I don’t know. We’ll have to look it up.

Megan wanted to spread the word. It was midnight but she thought about calling her son. She hoped people would write in to the New York Times.

What a world we live in.

Jim insisted, It has always been horrible. You live knowing it’s horrible. The leaders are mostly...insane. If you’re lucky you get a Clinton once in a while. We have our small personal lives.

Mom says we’ll have a Republican for our next president. I read the news and I must say she might be right. There is no hope, Megan said unhappily.

How does she know? Jim laughed.

God only knows. But she’s always right. Seriously. She predicts these things. Neurolaw...Republicans.

What would she say about Jeffrey Rosen?

Watch out!