19 Eadie and Bladin, A Disease Once Sacred.
20 Sapolsky, “The frontal cortex.”
21 Scarpa and Raine, “The psychophysiology,” and Kiehl, “A cognitive neuroscience perspective on psychopathy.”
22 Sapolsky, “The frontal cortex.”
23 Singer, “Keiner kann anders, als er ist.”
24 Note that “abnormal” is meant only in a statistical sense—that is, not the normal way of behaving. The fact that most people behave a certain way is mute on whether that action is correct in a larger moral sense. It is only a statement about the local laws, customs, and mores of a group of people at a particular time—exactly the same loose constraints by which the “crime” is always defined.
25 See Monahan, “A jurisprudence,” or Denno, “Consciousness.”
26 A challenge for biological explanations of behavior is that people on the left and right will push their own agendas. See Laland and Brown, Sense and Nonsense, as well as O’Hara, “How neuroscience might advance the law.” Appropriate caution is of tantamount importance, because biological stories about human behavior have been misused in the past to support agendas. However, past misuse does not mean the biological studies should be abandoned; it only implies that they should be improved.
27 See, for example, Bezdjian, Raine, Baker, and Lynam, “Psychopathic personality,” or Raine, The Psychopathology of Crime.
28 Note that the lobotomy was considered a successful procedure for noncriminal patients in large part because of the glowing reports of the families. It wasn’t immediately appreciated how biased the sources were. Parents would bring in a troubled, loud, dramatic, and troublesome child, and after the surgery the child would be much easier to handle. The mental problems had been replaced by docility. So the feedback was positive. One woman reported of her mother’s lobotomy: “She was absolutely violently suicidal beforehand. After the transorbital lobotomy there was nothing. It stopped immediately. It was just peace. I don’t know how to explain it to you; it was like turning a coin over. That quick. So whatever [Dr. Freeman] did, he did something right.”
As the operation grew in popularity, the age threshold for receiving one went down. The youngest patient to receive the treatment was a twelve-year-old boy named Howard Dully. His stepmother described the behavior that, to her mind, necessitated the operation: “He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says ‘I don’t know.’ He turns the room’s lights on when there is broad sunlight outside.” And under the ice pick he went.
29 See, for example, Kennedy and Grubin, “Hot-headed or impulsive?”, and Stanford and Barratt, “Impulsivity.”
30 See LaConte, et al., “Modulating,” and Chiu, et al., “Real-time fMRI.” Stephen LaConte has been a pioneer in the development of real-time feedback in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and he is the mastermind of this work. Pearl Chiu is an expert in psychology and addiction, and she is spearheading the current experiments to use this technology to cure cigarette smokers of their addiction.
31 Imagine a fantasy world in which we could rehabilitate with 100 percent success. Would that mean that systems of punishment would go away? Not entirely. It could be reasonably argued that punishment would still be necessary for two reasons: deterrence of future criminals and the satisfaction of the natural retributive impulse.
32 Eagleman, “Unsolved mysteries.”
33 Goodenough, “Responsibility and punishment.”
34 Baird and Fugelsang, “The emergence of consequential thought.”
35 Eagleman, “The death penalty.”
36 Greene and Cohen, “For the law.”
37 There are important nuances and subtleties to the arguments presented in this short chapter, and these are developed at more length elsewhere. For those interested in further detail, please see the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law (www.neulaw.org), which brings together neuroscientists, lawyers, ethicists, and policy makers with the goal of building evidence-based social policy. For further reading, see Eagleman, “Neuroscience and the law,” or Eagleman, Correro, and Singh, “Why neuroscience matters.”
38 For more about incentive structuring, see Jones, “Law, evolution, and the brain” or Chorvat and McCabe, “The brain and the law.”
39 Mitchell and Aamodt, “The incidence of child abuse in serial killers.”
40 Eagleman, “Neuroscience and the law.”
Chapter 7. Life After the Monarchy
1 Paul, Annihilation of Man.
2 Mascall, The Importance of Being Human.
3 As for the history of the phrase, the Roman poet Juvenal suggested that “Know thyself” descended straight from heaven (de caelo); more sober scholars attribute it to Chilon of Sparta, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Solon of Athens, Thales of Miletus, or simply popular proverb.
4 Bigelow, “Dr. Harlow’s case.”
5 Boston Post, September 21, 1848, crediting an earlier report from the Ludlow Free Soil Union (a Vermont newspaper). The version of the text quoted corrects a confusion in the original report in which the word “diameter” was incorrectly replaced with “circumference.” See also Macmillan, An Odd Kind of Fame.
6 Harlow, “Recovery.”
7 For clarity, I am not compelled by traditional religious stories of the soul. What I mean with the question of a “soul” is something more like a general essence that lives on top of, or outside of, the currently understood biological processes.
8 Pierce and Kumaresan, “The mesolimbic dopamine system.”
9 In animal models, researchers will shut down serotonin receptors and demonstrate changes in anxiety and behavior, then restore the receptors and restore normal behavior. For example, see Weisstaub, Zhou and Lira, “Cortical 5-HT2A.”
10 Waxman and Geschwind, “Hypergraphia.”
11 See Trimble and Freeman, “An investigation,” for studies of religiosity in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, and Devinsky and Lai, “Spirituality,” for an overview of epilepsy and religiosity. See d’Orsi and Tinuper, “ ‘I heard voices,’ ” for the view that the epilepsy of Joan of Arc was a newly described type: idiopathic partial epilepsy with auditory features (IPEAF). See Freemon, “A differential diagnosis,” for a historical diagnosis of Muhammad in which he concludes, “Although an unequivocal decision is not possible from existing knowledge, psychomotor or complex partial seizures of temporal lobe epilepsy would be the most tenable diagnosis.”
12 I have often wondered whether the promotion of sexual behavior in humans would be the most obvious mechanism for a sexually transmitted virus to advance self-survival. I do not know of any data that support this, but it seems an obvious place to go hunting.
13 There are many more examples of small biological tweaks causing big changes. Patients with herpes simplex encephalitis often get damage to specific areas of their brains, and show up at the doctor’s office with problems in using and understanding the meaning of words—for example, past tense irregulars such as drive and drove. If you ever intuited that something as impalpable as past tense irregulars is not directly connected to the microscopic knobs, think again. And Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a problem caused by abnormally folded proteins called prions, almost always ends in a global dementia characterized by self-neglect, apathy, and irritability. Bizarrely, victims have specific problems with writing, reading, and left-right disorientation. Who would have thought that your sense of left and right had a dependence on the exact folding structure of proteins that are two thousand times smaller than the width of a hair on your head? But there it is.
14 Cummings, “Behavioral and psychiatric symptoms.”
15 Sapolsky, “The frontal cortex.”
16 See Farah, “Neuroethics.”
17 According to one hypothesis of the relationship between schizophrenia and immigration, continual social defeat perturbs dopamine function in the brain. For reviews, see Selten, Cantor-Graae, and Kahn, “Migration,” or Weiser, et al
., “Elaboration.” Thanks to my colleague Jonathan Downar for first bringing this literature to my attention.
18 As of 2008, the U.S. had 2.3 million people behind bars, leading the world in the percentage of its citizens in jail. While society benefits from incarcerating violent repeat offenders, many of those behind bars—such as drug addicts—could be dealt with in a more fruitful manner than imprisonment.
19 Suomi, “Risk, resilience.”
20 The genetic change in question lies in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene.
21 Uher and McGuffin, “The moderation,” and Robinson, Grozinger, and Whitfield, “Sociogenomics.”
22 Caspi, Sugden, Moffitt, et al., “Influence of life stress on depression.”
23 Caspi, McClay, Moffitt, et al., “Role of genotype.” The genetic change they found was in the promotor region of the gene encoding for monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). MAOA is a molecule that modifies two neurotransmitter systems critical for mood and emotional regulation: noradrenaline and serotonin.
24 Caspi, Moffitt, Cannon, et al., “Moderation.” In this case, the link is a small change in the gene encoding catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT).
25 Scarpa and Raine, “The psychophysiology of antisocial behaviour.”
26 Is it possible that understanding gene–environment interactions could inform preventative approaches? Here’s a thought experiment: should we modify the genes once we understand them? We have seen that not everyone who suffers childhood maltreatment follows the path to violence in adulthood. Historically, sociologists have focused on social experiences that might protect some children (for example, can we rescue the child from the abusive home and raise him in a safe and caring environment?). But what has not yet been explored is a protective role of genes—that is, whether genes can protect against environmental insults. While this idea is currently science fiction, it will not be long before someone proposes a gene therapy for such situations: a violence vaccine.
But there’s a downside to this sort of intervention: genetic variation is beneficial. We need variation to produce artists, athletes, accountants, architects, and so on. As Stephen Suomi puts it, the “variation seen in certain genes in rhesus monkeys and humans but apparently not in other primate species may actually contribute to their remarkable adaptability and resilience at the species level.” In other words, we have a deep ignorance of which genetic combinations end up being most beneficial for a society—and this ignorance provides the firmest argument against genetic intervention. Further, depending on the environment in which one finds oneself, the same set of genes may cause excellence instead of crime. Genes predisposing for aggressiveness may make a talented entrepreneur or CEO; genes predisposing for violence may make a football hero, admired and paid a handsome salary by the population.
27 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred.
28 Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy.
29 One potential sticking point in drawing a relationship between neuroscience and quantum mechanics is the fact that brain tissue is roughly three hundred degrees Kelvin and is in constant interaction with its immediate environment—these features are not amenable to interesting macroscopic quantum behaviors such as entanglement. Nonetheless, the gap between the two fields is beginning to close, with scientists from both sides making overtures to reach a meaningful hand across the gulf. Moreover, it is now clear that photosynthesis operates with quantum mechanical principles in this same temperature range, which further bespeaks the likelihood that Mother Nature, having figured out how to exploit these tricks in one arena, will exploit them elsewhere. For more on the possibility of quantum effects in the brain, see Koch and Hepp, “Quantum mechanics,” or Macgregor, “Quantum mechanics and brain uncertainty.”
30 We are sometimes lucky enough to have a hint of what’s missing. For example, Albert Einstein felt certain that we were stuck in our psychological filters when it came to understanding the passage of time. Einstein wrote the following to the sister and son of his best friend, Michele Besso, after Besso’s death: “Michele has preceded me a little in leaving this strange world. This is not important. For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” Einstein–Besso correspondence, edited by Pierre Speziali (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 537–39.
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