Personal Identity and Fractured Selves

This book brings together some of the best minds in neurology and philosophy to discuss the concept of personal identity and the moral dimensions of treating brain disease and injury. The contributors engage a crucial question: When an individual’s personality changes radically because of disease or injury, should this changed individual be treated as the same person?

Rapid advances in brain science are expanding knowledge of human memory, emotion, and cognition and pointing the way toward new approaches for the prevention and treatment of devastating illnesses and disabilities. Through case studies of Alzheimer disease, frontotemporal dementia, deep brain stimulation, and steroid psychosis, the contributors highlight relevant ethical and social concerns that clinicians, researchers, and ethicists are likely to encounter.

Personal Identity and Fractured Selves represents the first formal collaboration between the Brain Sciences Institute and the Berman Institute of Bioethics, both at the Johns Hopkins University. The book asks neuroscientists and philosophers to address important questions on the topic of personal identity in an effort to engage both fields in fruitful conversation.

Contributors: Samuel Barondes, M.D., University of California, San Francisco; David M. Blass, M.D., Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Patrick Duggan, A.B., Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics; Ruth R. Faden, Ph.D., M.P.H., Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics; Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara; Guy M. McKhann, M.D., Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; John Perry, Ph.D., Stanford University; Carol Rovane, Ph.D., Columbia University; Alan Regenberg, M.Be., Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics; Marya Schechtman, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago; Maura Tumulty, Ph.D., Colgate University

Debra J. H. Mathews, Ph.D., M.A., is the assistant director for science programs for the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.

Hilary Bok, Ph.D., is a professor of bioethics and moral and political theory at the Johns Hopkins University and a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. She is author of Freedom and Responsibility.

Peter V. Rabins, MD, MPH, is professor emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The author of Is It Alzheimer's? 101 Answers to Your Most Pressing Questions about Memory Loss and Dementia and coauthor of The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease and Other Dementias, he was the founding director of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neuropsychiatry and the first holder of the Richman Family Professorship for Alzheimer's and Related Diseases.