This is the Nature of Things.
(♪♪)
It was beyond my control when I started thinking
I wish someone would stop me.
I wasn't in control.
I definitely didn't feel in control of myself.
(♪♪)
Narrator: What causes some peoples' behaviour to suddenly
change and others to commit horrible crimes?
(siren) (gunshots)
He just started murdering at random and he killed
pedestrians, he killed the people who came to help them.
Narrator: Neuroscientists are making new discoveries about
the workings of the human brain and criminal behaviour.
When things change even a little bit due to brain damage,
or coffee, or drugs, or anything like that,
who you are and how you decide, all of these things change.
Narrator: And they're finding answers to the question..
' What made them do it? '
People have said my brain made me do it,
but I think neuroscientifically that's always true,
it's always my brain that makes me do it.
(♪♪)
(♪♪)
When faced with grim acts of violence,
we shake our heads and ask who would do this?
Now, neuroscientists are pointing to the powerful
influence of brain biology on criminal behaviour.
So when a brutal crime is committed,
who is ultimately to blame, the perpetrator or their brain?
(♪♪)
Narrator: Austin, Texas, the clock tower that overlooks
the University of Texas campus,
looks much the same as it did in the summer of 1966.
(♪♪)
That year, student and former Marine, Charles Whitman...
(ding)
...made his way to the top of the tower,
took out a rifle and began firing on the people below.
(siren) (gunshot)
(siren)
Newsreel: Student Charles Whitman goes berserk.
He had with him a whole bag full of weapons,
and he just started murdering at random.
He killed pedestrians.
He killed the people who came to help them.
He killed the ambulance drivers who came to help them.
(gunshot)
Narrator: In all, he killed 16 people
and wounded over 30 others.
It's been said that on that day Charles Whitman introduced
America to the idea of mass murder in public spaces.
(siren)
The Austin police finally made it to the top of the tower
and they were able to kill him,
and the first thing they wanted to know was who is this?
What just happened here?
Newsreel: I don't feel like that I know the Charles Whitman
that they found up on university tower,
and the one that I knew was kind and generally good.
(♪♪)
Narrator: Police later discovered that in the hours
leading up to the shootings, Whitman had killed his mother,
and stabbed his wife to death while she slept.
(♪♪)
There was nothing about Charles Whitman that would ever flag,
oh, this is a guy who is about to go do that.
But in his diary, there was a very clear progression that had
been happening where he felt that he'd been the victim of
angry and aggressive thoughts that he couldn't control
increasingly, and he didn't know why.
In the suicide note that he wrote the night before
the shooting, he said, "When this is all over,
I want an autopsy to be performed to see if something
is wrong with my brain."
Newsreel: I've just been informed that the autopsy shows
that Mr. Whitman had a brain tumour.
It was about the size of a nickel and it had been growing
over the previous year, and it was pressing on a particular
part of his brain called the amygdala,
which is involved in fear and aggression.
Did it have something to do with what Charles Whitman did?
Almost certainly it did.
(♪♪)
The brain is the headquarters where your
cognition, your emotion, the way you behave and decide and act,
all that's happening in the brain.
When there's damage to the brain,
that changes how you behave in the world,
how you see the world, how you proceed, how you act.
(♪♪)
Narrator: Jeffrey Burns and Russell Swerdlow
investigated a comparable case in the year 2000.
(♪♪)
While neurologists at the University of Virginia Hospital,
they met a remarkable patient we'll call Michael.
He was a normal guy, you know, had a job and a wife,
and was living a normal life.
(♪♪)
It looked like he was beginning to hoard pornography,
including child pornography.
(♪♪)
Things evolved to the point that there were
improprieties with approaches to the stepdaughter.
(♪♪)
He was arrested and that led to a conviction.
Narrator: The night before his prison sentence was to start,
Michael complained of headaches, so he went to an emergency ward
where the nurses noticed some disturbing behaviour.
Russell: He remarked to a nurse that if I go home I will
either kill myself, or I will rape my landlady,
so they admitted him to the psychiatry service
for that night.
Narrator: That's where Swerdlow and Burns ran a battery
of tests on Michael.
During the exam, he was attempting to flirt with female
members of the medial team, which I thought was very unusual
for someone who is, who is about to go to prison.
Narrator: Swerdlow suspected neurological damage,
so he ordered a brain scan.
What it revealed was a massive tumour.
You can see the tumour growing off the skull base here.
These are the back of the eye sockets.
This is the right side, this is the left side,
and you can see now the tumour in stark relief extending up
through the frontal lobe mostly on the right,
really displacing where the normal orbital frontal cortex
would be, here is the cyst part of it.
You can see here the left side of the brain being pushed over
towards the left side of the skull because of the bulk
of the tumour.
We knew right away that this, this lesion,
this damage to the brain was responsible for his behaviour.
Is this a pedophilia centre of the brain?
No, but it is an area that leads to the inability to
inhibit urges and inhibit, you know, desires and inhibit,
you know, bad choices.
It was clear that putting this gentleman in prison wasn't going
to cure his inability to conform within the norms of society.
What he needed to conform within the norms of society was to have
his tumour removed.
Narrator: After surgeons removed or resected the tumour,
Michael's pedophilia and other strange
sexual behaviour disappeared.
He didn't go to jail, but spent time in a rehabilitation
program, and his wife took him back.
The story has an interesting postscript because what
happened is six months later he started developing
an interest in pedophilia again,
so his wife took him back to the doctors.
It turns out the surgeons had missed a little piece
of the tumour, which was now re-growing,
so they resected it a second time and
his sexual behaviour returned to normal a second time.
Narrator: It turns out that Michael's tumour affected a lot
more than impulse control.
When his overall brain function was tested,
the results were shocking.
I had him copy this picture here,
and this is what he came up with.
And we had him copy this picture here,
and this is what he was able to produce.
This is before the tumour was resected.
And I asked him to draw a clock and then to put the arms
of the clock in so that the time said 20 minutes after 8,
and this is what he, he generated, so not very good.
I asked him to write a sentence and this is what he wrote.
It's virtually illegible.
Now after the tumour was resected,
I had him do the same tasks,
and this you can see here that there was dramatic change.
And when he was asked to write a sentence again,
he now wrote this, I am happy that my tumour was removed.
Quite a big change.
And putting him in prison wasn't going to fix this.
(♪♪)
Narrator: Cases like this raise serious questions about
the role brain abnormalities can play in criminal behaviour.
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and the head of
the Centre for Science and Law in Houston, Texas.
(♪♪)
So, what do we do with somebody who gets a tumour and
becomes a pedophile, and when the tumour is removed
he's no longer a pedophile?
Situations like that really complexify our notions
of culpability.
And we can imagine cases where people are killed,
and then there's a tumour removed and the person is
no longer the person he was when he committed the murder,
and we haven't faced that case yet in courts,
but it's coming soon, and in part we know that because
brain imaging has become prevalent now.
Narrator: Brain imaging has made it possible for neuroscientists
to study the criminal mind in greater detail than ever before.
(♪♪)
In Albuquerque, New Mexico,
the Director of Science at the Mind Research Network,
Kent Kiehl, studies the brains of psychopaths.
He's interested in why they commit a disproportionate amount
of violent and criminal acts.
Psychopathy has been generally associated without conscience.
The traits are synonymous with somebody having no guilt
or remorse or empathy for what they've done.
(♪♪)
Narrator: Kiehl used magnetic resonance imaging
or MRI machines to examine the brains of hundreds of
psychopaths serving time in prison.
He's created the largest database in the world.
He's made some startling discoveries.
Psychopaths' brains are very different from non-psychopathic
or healthy brains.
The brain is like a muscle.
So, they basically have less muscle mass in those emotional
regions of the brain.
(♪♪)
And we believe that contributes to the symptoms
related to psychopathic traits, lack of empathy,
inability to experience remorse or guilt,
in grey matter in the thinking areas of the brain.
In individuals with psychopathy we find that these green areas
are showing a reduction in grey matter density,
and so it's essentially like come out of the womb with not
the same amount of tissue there, not the same amount of working
matter there as, as the rest of us,
and so this contributes to the development of those symptoms.
We've also found that some of the tissues that connect the
temporal lobe and the frontal lobe together are reduced,
the wiring is thinner, which would suggest less connectivity
between those regions, and that's, you know,
a very important finding because it's believed to be, you know,
very much a brain wiring issue,
so that might be something they're born with.
This is just three different planes,
and so this is the front of the brain here, these are the eyes,
right here, this is the orbital frontal cortex,
and here are the two amygdala.
So, it's these two structures and the connections between them
that we have found are abnormal in individuals with psychopathy.
Narrator: To test the implications of those findings,
Kiehl is now using MRI to study how psychopathic brains react
to different visual stimuli.
Do they use emotional information, for example, the
same way when you make a moral decision as other people do?
Narrator: In one experiment, Kiehl flashes images that would
trigger a strong emotional response in most people.
In the vast 95% of us, 99% of us,
when you process these emotional pictures you get a big emotional
response in the brain, this limbic circuitry goes off.
But in psychopaths it's just, like, dark.
The feeling that comes along with it doesn't happen,
so they have this kind of disconnection between emotion
and decision-making.
(♪♪)
Narrator: So, what about the rest of us?
Do we control our brains, or do our brains control us,
and what's neuroscience telling us about how and why we make
the decisions we make?
We think that we know the reasons why we do what we do
and why we believe what we believe, but, in fact,
we have so little awareness of the vast machinery that
we're sitting on top of.
(♪♪)
(♪♪)
Narrator: Most of us believe that we're in conscious
control of all our actions and every decision our brain makes.
But David Eagleman says that's not the case.
Oh!
And one of the most stunning things about what we're seeing
in neuroscience is the degree to which who you are and how you
act and your beliefs, they're all driven by mechanisms running
under the hood to which we have no conscious access.
Narrator: It turns out that your brain makes most of your
decisions without your conscious awareness.
This is what's talked about is the unconscious brain.
In the 1960s, the psychologist Eckhard Hess ran an experiment
where he showed men pictures of women's faces,
and all they had to do was rate from 1 to 10 how attractive they
thought the woman was.
What the men didn't know was that half the photographs have
the same women but with their eyes dilated,
so their pupils were bigger.
And here's the thing; all the men thought that the women
with the dilated eyes were more attractive,
but none of them noticed this explicitly,
they didn't see that the pupil had a difference of a few
millimetres, and importantly presumably none of the men knew
that dilated eyes is a sign of sexual readiness in women,
but their brains knew it,
and that steered their decision-making.
And this is emblematic of all the ways that our decisions
get steered by signals that we're not even aware of,
things that cause us to act a certain way,
or to be attracted to certain things,
or be repulsed by certain things.
And we don't know why it's happening,
but really the function of the brain is to gather information
from the world and steer your behaviour appropriately,
and that's it.
You, the conscious you, doesn't have to be aware of any of how
it's doing that.
Here's an example of something that becomes automatized.
You're driving and I want you to make a lane change
into your right lane.
What does that look like?
What do your hands actually do?
Most people will do this, they'll turn the wheel
to the right and then they'll come back to centre,
that's what they think a lane change looks like.
In fact, if you did that, what's that done is that just steered
your car and you've gone off the road into a storefront.
The way that you actually do a lane change is by going to the
right, back to centre, just as far to the left and back to
centre again, that's what a lane change looks like.
And people do it everyday, but if you quiz people on it,
you'll find they have no idea how they do it.
And the lesson here is that this is an analogy for essentially
everything that we do.
How we respond to the world, how we react,
the kind of people we are, why we do the things we do,
why we believe the kind of things we believe,
all of these are so deeply automatized that we don't even
know why we do them, we just think it's all true.
Narrator: Eagleman says we're not only consciously unaware
of what we do,
we're also unaware of the reality that surrounds us.
That is, until we stop and bring it to our attention.
(♪♪)
So when I walk out the front door,
I think that I'm in the world and there's people
and there's some activity out there,
but really I'm only seeing the spot where I'm walking.
It's only when I pay attention and ask questions that I see
more details, like I can attend to the sound of the fountain,
(water splashing) or this photographer,
or a girl reading a book,
or a couple laughing,
or somebody's shoes.
It's only when I ask myself the question of what am I
experiencing here that I pull those details into
my internal model and have an experience of them.
And this just is another illustration of how much
your brain is doing under the hood that's unconscious and
you're just walking through life imagining that you're seeing
everything, imagining that your reality is the correct reality,
but, in fact, everyone's got their own reality going on,
on the inside.
(♪♪)
By analogy, if I were to ask you what is the position
of your tongue in your mouth right now,
you can answer that question, it becomes part of your awareness
when I ask it, but it wasn't there before.
(♪♪)
Narrator: So, if our brains control our version
of reality and we're largely unaware of what our brains
are doing, the question remains, is it us,
or our brains that are making the choices?
That's what Patrick Haggard is trying to find out.
He's a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
in University College London.
He studies how we make decisions and whether or not we have
the freewill to control our actions.
I realize that we really understood very little about
the higher levels of how the brain controls our movements
and our actions.
How does the brain decide when to make an action,
when not to make a action?
How does the brain decide which action to make?
So, I began becoming interested really in how do you get
thoughts into actions?
Narrator: Haggard devised an experiment to see if our brains
are influenced to make a choice.
Hello, Aaron.
Hi.
Thanks for volunteering for this simple experiment where we're
interested in the basis of the sense of control,
the feeling of being in control of what happens.
Narrator: Haggard wires his subject up to electrodes
to monitor brain activity.
When the subject sees a left pointing arrow,
he presses the left button.
If he sees a right pointing arrow,
he presses the right button.
And when he sees a double arrow, he can choose either button,
but before the double-headed arrow,
another arrow is flashed on the screen.
It's so quick that the subject doesn't consciously see it.
Here we've slowed it down, so you can see the small arrow
called a "subliminal prime".
Played in real time, the subject doesn't see it,
but his unconscious brain does, and he is more likely to press
the button in the direction of that subliminal arrow.
We can introduce a bias, and we can encourage people
to "freely choose", in quote marks, to use their left hand
or their right hand on any particular trial.
So, you're feeling that you are freely deciding what to do and
controlling what happens is in some senses an illusion,
so that then raises the question of whether we control
our brains, or whether our brains control us.
(♪♪)
Narrator: To answer who is in control,
Haggard does another experiment where the subject presses
a button whenever she feels like it,
and she indicates when she made the decision to act.
The subject's brain waves reveal that there is a lot of neural
activity over a second before she actually presses a button.
So, what does this mean?
Well it means that the brain begins to prepare the action
long before you have the subjective experience that you
are about to make it.
It's your brain, which makes the decisions,
which controls the actions, which produces, if you like,
all of your individual repertoire as a behaving person.
(♪♪)
What I think we can conclude in the view of modern
neuroscience is that if we have freewill at all,
it is a very small player in the system, if it exists at all.
And that's because we know so much at this point about
unconscious decision-making, about the ways that our biology
influences us, about the way that we are totally dependent on
the integrity of our biology, and when things change even
a little bit due to brain damage, or a coffee, or drugs,
or anything like that, who you are and how you decide,
all of these things change, so we are our biologies.
Narrator: So, if freewill is largely an illusion and
our decisions are made by our unconscious brain,
why do some brains make good choices
and others make bad ones?
(♪♪)
(♪♪)
Narrator: In 2011, Sid Weidman was diagnosed with Parkinson's
disease and prescribed a drug for the tremors.
Within weeks, he was so obsessed with his computer
that he ignored everything else.
Eventually his obsession destroyed his family.
I wasn't paying attention to my son.
He'd see dad was just spending all his time on the computer and
not doing what he needs to do.
I had absolutely no switch that went off in my head that said,
okay, that's enough, it just was uncontrollable,
it was a runaway train.
Narrator: In much the same way,
Parkinson's patient Janice Horn became so obsessed with her
university courses that she sometimes did homework for
22 hours a day, she couldn't stop herself.
Everything in my brain was completely focussed on just
the one thing, everything else just got, got left behind.
Narrator: Terry Komadowski can sympathize.
After receiving a Parkinson's drug,
he began to gamble obsessively.
Casinos are a real big draw for me, like,
the feeling of winning and anticipation was so great it was
hard just to stay away, and it got to the point where my wife
had to come in and pull me out.
Narrator: What was causing their compulsive behaviour?
Upon closer inspection, what surfaced was that it was
the medications that they were on.
These medications raised the level of a chemical
known as a dopamine.
A problem in Parkinson's is that dopamine is too low,
but when you raise it, that helps with the motor symptoms,
but dopamine is also involved in the reward systems.
Narrator: With raised levels of dopamine in their brains,
some Parkinson's patients can no longer control
their impulses.
Most commonly this side effect shows up as
a gambling addiction.
Physicians are instructed if this happens to their patients,
just dial down the dosage.
Now when you look at somebody and you say, "Oh,
you're a compulsive gambler, why don't you just stop doing it?"
It's not so easy because their chemicals are dialled around
just a little bit and that totally changes their behaviour.
Narrator: Eagleman points out that drug addiction is similar.
Chemical messengers disrupt the way the brain processes
information causing uncontrollable craving
and decreased impulse control.
For almost all drugs addicts, they want to quit,
but they find themselves unable.
Why?
Because the drugs plug into these very ancient systems
in our brains, these reward systems,
and these drugs jump right onto there and tell the brain
essentially this is the best thing that's ever happened to
you, and those reward systems are in there to steer us towards
our next decisions.
Neuroscience offers a number of pathways to cure drug addiction,
to actually help people to get over the addiction, and that's,
I think, a prime area where instead of just putting people
in jail, neuroscience can come to the legal system
and say here's an alternative.
Narrator: Eagleman is experimenting with an
alternative treatment that he calls "the prefrontal workout".
A subject who is addicted to crack cocaine is placed in the
MRI machine and given real time feedback of his own brain waves.
The idea is if he can see the activity in his brain,
he can concentrate on reducing his craving for cocaine
and strengthen that part of the brain that controls
his impulses.
We show them pictures of crack cocaine,
and we ask them to go ahead and crave,
well that's easy for them to do, and that lights up particular
networks in their brain that are involved in that craving
and we can measure those.
Now we show them other pictures,
and we ask them to suppress that craving,
and that lights up a different set of networks that are
involved in suppression of impulses,
so we can measure the activity in those networks.
Now, as we show them more pictures of the crack cocaine
and the paraphernalia, we ask them to suppress their craving,
and what we do is we visually present to them what looks like
a speedometer that can move between craving and suppressing.
When their craving network is active it's all the way over
here, and when their suppressing network finally wins then it's
all the way over here.
And what they're training to do is figure out how
to move that needle.
You're strengthening up those connections between
the prefrontal cortex and these other areas that are involved
in the craving.
You're strengthening it up by practicing,
and so when your next out of the scanner and somebody offers you
crack cocaine, you still want it,
you still got those systems that really crave that,
but you at least have the cognitive tools now to be able
to tip the battle so that it goes the other way,
so that you can resist it.
Narrator: Eagleman says we have to consider the many biological
factors that can influence our brains and our behaviour.
He points to a simple genetic marker that some people possess
that is associated with a greater probability they will
commit a crime.
Consider this: If you are the carrier of a particular set of
genes, you are four times more likely to commit violent crime,
you're three times more likely to commit robbery,
five times more likely to commit aggravated assault,
you're eight times more likely to get arrested for murder,
and thirteen times more likely to be arrested
for sexual assault.
Almost everybody in prison is a carrier of these genes,
and over 98% of people on death row carry this set.
Now, we summarize this set of genes as the Y chromosome,
and if you are a carrier, we call you a male,
and this means that we can't assume that everybody is coming
to the table equally equipped in terms of their drives
and behaviours, genes matter.
The important part about the Y chromosome is that on average
males are more aggressive than females,
but it does not mean that if you look at any particular male
you're going to have a prediction that this person
is gonna end up on death row just because they're male,
same thing with any particular gene.
Why is that the case?
It's because life's very complicated,
and the genes are only a little piece of the story.
Narrator: Along with your genetic makeup,
the other piece of the story that strongly influences your
behaviour is the environment you grow up in.
(child's laugh)
Sometimes people have a debate about nature
versus nurture, and the fact is that's a completely dead
question in neuroscience because it's always both.
What happens is your environmental experiences work
with your genes, work with the constraints that you have to
shape you in a particular way.
Once you arrive in the world, you land into a certain family
of origin, in a certain neighbourhood,
in a certain culture, a certain time in history,
and all of these experiences shape what your brain becomes
in concert with the genetics that you happen to have.
And what this means is that brains go off in very different
developmental trajectories, so right from the beginning brains
are moving off and becoming very different from one another.
Narrator: So, if your genes and environment shape your brain and
behaviour, is it still your fault if you commit a crime?
Well, according to experimental psychologist Joshua Greene
of Harvard University, there's no simple answer.
Greene studies moral judgement.
He says neuroscience is redefining the whole idea
of responsibility and how the legal system deals with
crime and punishment.
One way to think about this is to imagine engineering a person
designed to be bad...
...choosing just the right genes,
just genes from the normal population that make it very
likely that someone's going to commit crimes,
and you put somebody in an environment that makes it very
likely that the person is going to grow up to be a criminal.
When you raise people with these genes and in this kind
of environment, they end up engaging in criminal behaviour,
right.
There are practical reasons why you might want to punish the
person, but the question is do you feel that this person really
deserves to suffer, or do you feel that this person was
a victim of a horrible unethical lab experiment where this person
was grown to be unethical this way?
(smash)
Another question is why should we think any differently
about real criminals and real criminal behaviour?
Everybody's a product of their genes.
Everybody's a product of their environment.
(♪♪)
(♪♪)
(smash)
Narrator: How useful is brain science when it comes to
real criminal cases?
Can it help shape our legal systems' ideas on culpability
and sentencing?
Consider the case of Brian Dugan.
The child of alcoholics, his mother frequently beat him until
she wore herself out.
When he wet his bed, he was forced to sleep in
the soiled sheets.
Harsh discipline didn't stop him from burning down
the family garage, or setting small animals on fire.
He led a very psychopathic lifestyle from an early age.
He had all sorts of the developmental triggers
and all sorts of the same problems that was here in
all these classic stories.
Narrator: In his mid-twenties, Dugan was arrested for the rape
and murder of a 7-year-old girl.
Later, he admitted to killing two others.
He was convicted by a jury and faced the death penalty.
In a bid to save him from a lethal injection,
his defence attorneys called in Kent Kiehl
to examine Dugan's brain.
The only question before the jury in that trial was does
he deserve to go back to prison for life,
or does he deserve to be on death row?
And so, we did brain scans on him, and we studied him,
and we compared him to our databases of other inmates,
and he, as expected, his brain looked just like all the other
psychopaths that we've studied, and I testified to
the differences in his brain structure to what we know about
psychopathy, and to what that might potentially mean for,
you know, the judicial system.
Narrator: Kiehl's evidence seemed to have swayed the jury.
They came back with a life sentence.
A judge overturned that decision for the death penalty,
but the State of Illinois eventually repealed
the death penalty, and Dugan still remains in prison.
It was the first time in a US courtroom that functional MRI
scans were used to help support a psychiatric diagnosis.
I think that in these big special cases,
like these death penalty cases, that MRI scans are becoming
quite common, because if there is something wrong in their
brain, if there is a hole there, or a tumour,
or something maybe more sophisticated,
and analysis shows something else is wrong,
then juries find that to be usually mitigating and they
sentence them to life sentence versus death, and that's,
of course, what the defence attorney is trying to do.
(smash)
Narrator: There may be many biological reasons why
people are not responsible for their crimes.
(smash)
(smash) (alarm sounding)
But according to Eagleman, that doesn't mean we allow
dangerous offenders back on the streets.
It doesn't let anyone off the hook.
The legal system says are you guilty or not guilty?
Did you pull the trigger or did you not pull the trigger?
So, people who are violent and aggressive and so on,
they have to be taken off the streets to protect the more
general society, whether or not we would say it is their fault
in some deep fundamental freewill sense.
When someone does something horrible,
we may have this impulse that says, you know, lock them up,
throw them in prison, and the nastier that prison is
the better, this person did a horrible thing and
they should really suffer.
Narrator: Joshua Greene says that society's desire for
punishment goes deeper than just wanting to take the wrongdoer
off the streets.
In fact, he says our brains are wired to want revenge.
Revenge tastes good.
There's that evolutionary and a philosophical rationale
for having that taste and abiding by it,
because a world in which people don't punish is world in which
people can get away with transgressions very easily.
Narrator: But Greene maintains the more we learn about the
brain, the more likely we are to soften our desire for revenge,
and he has evidence for that.
In a controlled experiment, he gave subjects a passage to read
about neuroscience that rejected freewill and gave a mechanistic
view of the human brain, then they were made jurors
in a hypothetical murder case, and asked what kind of sentence
the murderer should receive.
They recommended a less harsh punishment than people who
didn't read the paragraph on neuroscience,
five years instead of ten years.
The people who read the neuroscientific passages
reminding you or telling you that human behaviour is
ultimately mechanistic, those people were less inclined
to add on those extra punishment sentences.
Another set of studies done by Lisa Aspinwall and colleagues
presented judges in the United States with evidence concerning
a murderer who seems to be a psychopath,
and they gave them evidence about how this person's
behaviour is shaped by their genes and they're shaped by the
person's brain, and the finding was that judges ended up shaving
off a bit of the sentence that they would hypothetically give.
They saw this scientific evidence as mitigating in a way.
So, it's not just ordinary people who have this response,
it's professional lawmakers, including professional judges.
Now, again, the scientific research doesn't tell you
whether this is good or bad, it's this shift of where
you understand the human mind, the human behaviour
in mechanistic terms, and it makes you less retributive.
Narrator: So, given what neuroscience has already
revealed about the human brain and criminal behaviour,
what can the justice system do to benefit
from the new research?
Eagleman says that if we really want to rehabilitate criminals,
we should start by looking at the effectiveness of prisons.
Jail is the original rewire your brain solution.
In other words, it's meant to punish people so that they say,
well, that was a really bad experience, changes their brain,
changes their cost benefit analyses so that they don't
do it again, and for some people that works.
It's simply that doesn't work across the society because
people end up there for very different reasons.
It tends not to work with drug addiction.
It certainly doesn't work with mental illness.
We now have drug courts, where people who are arrested
for using and abusing, are addicted to drugs,
go to special sentencing, get special things.
So, the system is already recognizing that there's many
people who have different problems, different brains,
and giving them different types of sanctions.
And so in other cases there is new things that come up all the
time, as we learn, for example, about fetal alcohol syndrome,
or posttraumatic stress disorder, you know,
from non-combat things, people are, like,
well we should take these things into consideration when we
decide how to sentence somebody,
because if we can treat the underlying problems,
then we can help to reduce the chances
that they'll do it again.
Narrator: Eagleman says as the neuroscience improves,
criminal behaviour that we don't understand now may in the future
become just another treatable condition.
It used to be that somebody with epilepsy or schizophrenia
or depression, the idea was we can just beat it out of them,
or talk them out of it, but as we've evolved in the sciences,
we've realized that these are biological issues.
So there's this spectrum about what we can measure,
and at any moment in history there's a line drawn by our
technology where if you're on this side of the line we say,
oh, poor guy, it's not really your fault,
you had a brain tumour, you had a brain injury,
if you're on this side of the line we say, well,
it's clearly your fault because we can't measure anything.
Here's the issue: As our technology evolves,
that line is gonna keep moving, we'll be able to measure new
kinds of things and we'll have new names for new disorders that
don't even exist now, so that puts us in this very strange
situation where our current technology steers our intuitions
about somebody's guilt or their culpability,
and I think it can't be a just system that decides somebody's
culpability based on whether we can measure
and we have a name for it or not.
Narrator: Many neuroscientists believe that the more we learn
about the brain and criminal behaviour,
the more the justice system will be forced to change,
placing greater emphasis on treatment and rehabilitation
for those whose brains made them do it.
I believe the neuroscience is gonna help us develop better
outcomes for everyone, and but it will also help us understand
why individuals make bad decisions in a different way,
complementary but in a different way than we view today.
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