And the winner

AS BRAIN RESEARCH, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, ethics, policy, and law intersect with increasing regularity, neuroethics continues to gain traction as a scientific discipline. Since 2014, the International Neuroethics Society and the International Youth Neuroscience Association have teamed to hold a Neuroethics Essay Contest for secondary and high school students from around the world. The contest aims to promote interest in neuroethics among students in high school, university, and early career training programs.

Following are excepts from the winners in three categories: general interest, academic, and high school. The full essays, with citations, may be referenced by clicking on the essay title.

General Interest

God, Politics, and Death: How a New Medicine Raises Age-Old Questions

BY EDDIE JACOBS University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain, which—although far more effective than any available alternative—might also change your religious beliefs? Or a treatment for lymphoma that brings one in three patients into remission, but also made them more likely to vote for your least preferred political party?

These seem like idle hypothetical questions about impossible side effects. After all, this is not how medicine works. But a new mental health treatment, set to be licensed next year, poses just this sort of problem. Psychotherapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in “magic mushrooms,” seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies, but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine. Although its precise therapeutic mechanisms remain unclear, clinically relevant doses of psilocybin can induce powerful mystical experiences more commonly associated with extended periods of fasting, prayer or meditation. Arguably, then, it is unsurprising that it can generate long-lasting changes in patients: studies report increased prosociality and aesthetic appreciation, plus robust shifts in personality, values and attitudes to life, even leading some atheists to find God. What’s more, these experiences appear to be a feature, rather than a bug, of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, with the intensity of the mystical experience correlating with the extent of clinical benefit l