Person:

Pascual-Leone, Alvaro

Deceptive abilities have long been studied in relation to personality traits. More recently, studies explored the neural substrates associated with deceptive skills suggesting a critical role of the prefrontal cortex. Here we investigated whether non-invasive brain stimulation over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) could modulate generation of untruthful responses about subject’s personal life across contexts (i.e., deceiving on guilt-free questions on daily activities; generating previously memorized lies about past experience; and producing spontaneous lies about past experience), as well as across modality responses (verbal and motor responses). Results reveal that real, but not sham, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the DLPFC can reduce response latency for untruthful over truthful answers across contexts and modality responses. Also, contexts of lies seem to incur a different hemispheric laterality. These findings add up to previous studies demonstrating that it is possible to modulate some processes involved in generation of untruthful answers by applying non-invasive brain stimulation over the DLPFC and extend these findings by showing a differential hemispheric contribution of DLPFCs according to contexts.

Biomedical enhancement refers to the use of biomedical interventions to improve capacities beyond normal, rather than to treat deficiencies due to diseases. Enhancement can target physical or cognitive capacities, but also complex human behaviors such as morality. However, the complexity of normal moral behavior makes it unlikely that morality is a single capacity that can be deficient or enhanced. Instead, our central hypothesis will be that moral behavior results from multiple, interacting cognitive-affective networks in the brain. First, we will test this hypothesis by reviewing evidence for modulation of moral behavior using non-invasive brain stimulation. Next, we will discuss how this evidence affects ethical issues related to the use of moral enhancement. We end with the conclusion that while brain stimulation has the potential to alter moral behavior, such alteration is unlikely to improve moral behavior in all situations, and may even lead to less morally desirable behavior in some instances.

Chronic abdominal visceral pain (CAVP) has a significant clinical impact and represents one of the most frequent and debilitating disorders in the general population. It also leads to a significant economic burden due to workdays lost, reduced productivity, and long-term use of medications with their associated side effects. Despite the availability of several therapeutic options, the management of patients with CAVP is often inadequate, resulting in frustration for both patients and physicians. This may in part be explained by the lack of understanding of the mechanisms underlying chronic pain; in contrast with acute pain in which the pathophysiology is relatively well known and has several satisfactory therapeutic options. Recently, the development of tools for brain investigation, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, has provided new insights on the pathophysiology of chronic pain. These new data have shown that plastic changes in the central and peripheral nervous system might play an important role in the maintenance of chronic pain. Therefore, approaches aimed at the modulation of the nervous system, rather than the ones interfering with the inflammatory pathways, may be more effective for chronic pain treatment. We propose that noninvasive central nervous system stimulation, with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), might be a novel therapeutic option for CAVP. This paper will present an overview of the pathophysiology and the available therapies for CAVP, focusing on the recent advances in the treatment of this pathology.