Neuroethics and fMRI: Mapping a Fledgling Relationship Alex Garnett1,2, Louise Whiteley1, Heather Piwowar3, Edie Rasmussen2, Judy Illes1* 1 National Core for Neuroethics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2 School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 3 National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America Abstract Human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) informs the understanding of the neural basis of mental function and is a key domain of ethical enquiry. It raises questions about the practice and implications of research, and reflexively informs ethics through the empirical investigation of moral judgments. It is at the centre of debate surrounding the importance of neuroscience findings for concepts such as personhood and free will, and the extent of their practical consequences. Here, we map the landscape of fMRI and neuroethics, using citation analysis to uncover salient topics. We find that this landscape is sparsely populated: despite previous calls for debate, there are few articles that discuss both fMRI and ethical, legal, or social implications (ELSI), and even fewer direct citations between the two literatures. Recognizing that practical barriers exist to integrating ELSI discussion into the research literature, we argue nonetheless that the ethical challenges of fMRI, and controversy over its conceptual and practical implications, make this essential. Citation: Garnett A, Whiteley L, Piwowar H, Rasmussen E, Illes J (2011) Neuroethics and fMRI: Mapping a Fledgling Relationship. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18537. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018537 Editor: Angela Sirigu, French National Centre for Scientific Research, France Received January 26, 2011; Accepted March 3, 2011; Published April 22, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Garnett et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Generously supported by NIH/NIMH RO1 #R01MH84282, CIHR/INMHA CNE #85117, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: jilles@interchange.ubc.ca Introduction Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an increas- ingly popular noninvasive method for studying the functional anatomy of the human brain. fMRI experiments correlate mental phenomena with a hemodynamic measure of brain metabolism, and the resulting data are often presented as an anatomical map of the brain regions purportedly involved in the mental phenomenon of interest. The domains in which fMRI has been applied are highly diverse, ranging from language comprehension or short- term memory to personality traits, political behavior, or aesthetic judgment [1]. fMRI raises key ethics questions throughout the research process: from the conceptualization of experiments through their design, conduct, and analysis, to the interpretation and dissemination of results, and the possible implications and applications of research [2–4]. Here, we briefly review the neuroethics of fMRI [5], focusing on issues most relevant to the researcher. We consider arguments for bringing discussion of ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) into the primary research literature, and review barriers to such activity. We then use bibliometric methods to map out the ELSI landscape for fMRI, highlight salient topics and citation relationships, and reveal the degree to which calls for ethics discussion in the research literature have been heeded. In the research context, fMRI raises familiar issues of informed consent [6] and hotly debated questions about the investigation of incidental findings [7], inflected by the potential impact of neurological conditions on cognition and selfhood [5,8]. In the clinical context, explaining and treating mental illness in biological terms is deeply controversial, and it remains unclear whether neuroimaging practices for diagnosis and treatment will benefit patients [9]. The effect on participants of taking part in neuroimaging research studies of psychiatric conditions is also unclear; recent studies suggest that brain scans are powerful tools for shaping or reinforcing concepts of a ‘disordered’ self [10–11]. fMRI also has potential applications in legal, educational, and economic contexts, ranging from lie detection to the justification of cognitive enhancing drugs in educational settings [12–15]. Although many of these applications are currently speculative, and while there is a danger of exaggerating the real-world consequences of neuroscientific findings [16], the impact of fMRI research on ways of thinking about education, psychiatric classification, economics, and responsibility is already substantial [17–22]. In the philosophical context, imaging studies of human judgment, emotion, personhood and responsibility all have controversial implications for ethical theory [23–25]. These debates are intensified by the question of how brain images should be communicated: fMRI scans are highly processed representations of an indirect measure of neural activity, but are often described as if they are direct snapshots of the mind in action. They are thus rhetorically powerful, and their apparent directness can obscure a range of contingent interpretations and underlying conceptual commitments [26–27]. Take, for example, the presentation of two scan images, one from a group of patients with a particular psychiatric diagnosis and one from a control group: the scans can imply both that the categories are distinct and that they are biologically-based while neither may be the case [28]. Many of these issues are directly relevant to the fMRI researcher [29]. In addition to the more transparent ethics issues surrounding the conduct of research, the conceptualization and dissemination of research raises difficult questions about the researcher’s expertise and public responsibility. In designing controlled laboratory studies of complex concepts such as anger, wisdom, or empathy, there is much to be learned from philosophical literatures and studies in the social sciences about the implications of operationalizing these concepts in particular PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 April 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 4 | e18537