The brain and the law, when Bobby goes bad

Each year I deliver a “guest lecture” in a medical ethics course at Stanford. My friend Bill Hurlbut, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, is the course director. The issues that I raise in this course were addressed in part by an interesting cover story in the March 11th New York Times Sunday magazine (“The Brain on the Stand”), which considered some of the ways that contemporary neuroscience could be used in our legal system to neurologically determine truth from falsehood, or guilt from innocence. The article stated, quite correctly, that it should soon be possible to reconstruct a brain’s historic involvement in a past criminal event, or at least to query a subject in a way that the brain’s lying or truth-telling about it would be unequivocally documented. The ethical issues raised by the advances in brain science are deeper and more complicated, and we’re going to talk about them on this blog from time to time. I am stirred to write about them today because of the tragedy that has just occured on that peaceful university campus in the mountains of western Virginia. Our jurisprudence is based on the principle of “blame” for behaviors that should by hypothetically controlled by our “free will”. Alas, human observers and psychologists (and with increasing clarity, we brain scientists) have understood from the beginning of time that your or my “will” is not entirely “free&#...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs