engleski

Neuroenhancement and vulnerability of minors

Children are generally considered vulnerable due to their physical and mental immaturity, lack of knowledge and experience, and overall dependency on adults. Normative documents in the field of medicine (e.g. laws, conventions, professional codices) strongly promote special measures for protecting children in medical treatments and research. In this paper, we intend to examine the case of neuroenhancement in minors. The use of technology to alter human characteristics and capacities beyond the “normal” is considered “human enhancement”, while neuroenhancement refers to the modification of brain processes with the aim of enhancing healthy people. Human enhancement could be seen as the ultimate praise to personal autonomy and freedom: one can exercise the power of making autonomous decisions, providing that others are not hurt in the process. When it comes to the human enhancement of minors, some would claim that the improvement of certain features might be in the child’s best interest. Immersed in super-hero pop culture and driven by the advancement of science and technology, children begin to have different (greater) expectations from themselves, expectations that may exceed the frame of the human being initially given to them. One might ask whether a hypothetical adolescent who wishes to undergo an enhancement procedure should be considered vulnerable and on what grounds. The brain is an electrochemical organ where synaptic pharmacology simply serves to influence how electrical signals are transmitted. However, non- pharmacological methods with the potential to affect the functioning of the brain have been developed. The two most common are transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Several authors have called for caution in the use of these methods to treat children and adolescents because of the unknown mechanisms of stimulation, short- and long-term side effects and the lack of dosing guidelines and translational studies from adults to children. These methods, especially tDCS, which is low- cost and easy to use, have been increasingly marketed as safe ways to improve cognition, mood, motor functioning, etc. Synaptic and molecular mechanisms of neuronal excitability and plasticity are difficult to study and protocols for the use of TMS and tDCS are often derived from animal studies. A certain amount of tDCS/TMS work has been done on the adult brain, however children and adolescent brains are not simply small adult brains. Excitation and inhibition of neuronal patterns change as the brain develops, as well as long- term potentiation, long-term depression and plasticity. Therefore, changes that these methods could induce in developing brain tissue and consequently their interference with the normal neurodevelopmental processes could have far- reaching health ramifications. However, neither children/adolescents, nor their parents or guardians, could have sufficient knowledge to apprehend the scope of influence that these methods might exert on their minds and bodies. Therefore, they present a new cause of vulnerability of the adolescent population – accessibility to technical gadgets that cannot be understood and whose use is questionable.

neuroenhancement ; tDCS ; TMS ; minors ; vulnerability

Rad je ostvaren u okviru projekta "Filozofski i odgojni aspekti suosjećanja", financiranom od strane Sveučilišta u Zagrebu (2018.).