For the past three summers, the rich, the powerful, and the just plain curious have converged on the former mining town of Aspen, Colorado for a weeklong bit of intellectual prospecting. In between informal conversations with celebrities like Bill Clinton, Richard Branson, Karl Rove, Lance Armstrong, and Jessye Norman, this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival featured a special program track focusing on some exciting recent developments in neuroscience.

Invited by the William A. Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences and the Arts, prominent researchers explained why technologies like positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have not only revolutionized how scientists gather information about how the brain works, but also call into question some very fundamental ways in which we understand ourselves and organize our society. The New York Academy of Sciences was there, and has just published an online eBriefing documenting the event.

Perhaps the most startling presentation on the program came from Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neurophysiologist now based at Duke University. He and his team are developing brain–machine interfaces consisting of electrodes implanted in the brain connected to sophisticated computer programs that can analyze firing patterns of individual neurons. In one series of experiments, Nicolelis used this approach to teach monkeys to play a video game purely by thinking. His work won’t just benefit couch potatoes, though. Nicolelis hopes one day that such a technology could enable people with paralysis to move and to physically manipulate their environments.

Jeffrey Rosen, a legal scholar at George Washington University, and Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara both focused on the approaching collision between neuroscience and the law. They pointed out that lawyers are already invoking information from brain scans in defense of criminal behavior, arguing in effect that abnormalities like brain lesions can cause certain antisocial behaviors. Although juries have been skeptical, it is clear that new knowledge about how the brain works could have important implications for basic concepts of free will and responsibility upon which American legal practice relies. Gazzaniga is now helping to direct the Law and Neuroscience Project, a new initiative sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation that is bringing neuroscientists, judges, philosophers, and other scholars together to explore when neuroscience belongs in the courtroom, and when it doesn’t.

The conference also included a personal talk by Bob Woodruff of ABC News, who suffered traumatic brain injury when he was struck by a bomb while covering the war in Iraq in January 2006. He described the experience in harrowing detail, including his long recovery and how the experience has changed him. Other participants included National Medal of Science award-winner Nancy Andreasen on what imaging technologies tell us about individual differences, PET pioneer Marcus Raichle on some vast unexplored areas of brain activity, and former Disney Imagineer Eric Haseltine on some experiments you can do to catch your brain tricking you.

In addition to a meeting summary, the eBriefing also includes complete audio/slides/video of the speakers’ talks, a video introduction with interviews, and a printable e-book consisting of edited transcripts.