Reading Quest #1

In the fourth chapter of “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer, leucotomy and the effects of lobotomies in general are discussed. The book states, “Although doctors tried to cut only the connections to the prefrontal cortex, they really didn’t know what they were cutting. However, over the past several decades, neurologists studied this brain area with great precision. They now know exactly what happens when the prefrontal cortex is damaged.”(Lehrer 102). I think this is a very important subject. If neurologists now know exactly what happens if the prefrontal cortex is damaged because they have studied it with precision that would suggest they studied on live humans (because how else would you know what happens?), then this leads me to question: how did/do neurologists and test subjects decided that the study of human neurology is ethical?

I understand that due to various neurological studies, we, as the human species, have gathered useful information and I agree that this knowledge is a asset, but I question the ethics which revolve around taking a stab in the dark (quite literately too, just under the human eye) and causing the “side effects” of: death, sinking into a stupor, uninterested in everything, losing the ability to use language, etc. to other human beings (Lehrer 101-2). For this specific matter, I also question what other side effects may have or do occur – how do neurologists respond, emotionally and psychologically, to knowing that their studies in the past have caused unfortunate damage to many individuals?

Now, I know the easy way to answer my question is to suggest that the good outweighs the bad and with the results, maybe I could agree; however, past neurologists didn’t even know what the exact results of what would happen if they performed lobotomies – they just guessed – so in the past, how does the unknown good outweigh the unknown evil?

I was going to stop here, but after finishing the fourth chapter, I found myself unable to. Now, later on, the fourth chapter discusses self-control and studies of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Lehrer 113-115).

When it came to the section about self-control and children with ADHD, I’m not sure how I feel about this section because I question the methods how psychiatrists and human behaviorists determine whether a child has a neurological disorder or not. To my knowledge, I have discovered that many psychiatrists will still with a child and their parents, write down all of the symptoms and try to match them with a checklist specifying multiple disorders. Now a lot of disorders have similar ‘checklists’ of symptoms, so if a child is experiencing a supposed disorder, but its symptoms match with other disorders as well, then the psychiatrists, child and parent will go through a trail-and-error testing phase with different medicines – if one works, then that’s the medicine they’ll stick to, if one doesn’t work, then they’ll switch to a different medicine. Humans develop over time and not everyone develops at the same time or the same rate. Therefore, I question about the children who slip through the cracks, not the children who don’t receive medical attention, but the children who might receive too much attention because their doctor was going off of a checklist of so-called symptoms and wasn’t able to or didn’t perform any neurological tests to wholeheartedly confirm a diagnosis.

Works Cited

Lehrer, Jonah. "The Uses of Reason." How We Decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 93-132. Print.