WEBVTT - Ep15 "What should happen when someone with a brain tumor breaks the law?" 0:00:05.360 --> 0:00:08.920 Why was Maurzio Gucci killed by his wife? And even 0:00:08.960 --> 0:00:11.200 though there was a good movie about it recently, what 0:00:11.480 --> 0:00:13.600 was the part of the movie that was left out? 0:00:14.160 --> 0:00:17.760 Who was Charles Whitman and what had changes in his 0:00:18.000 --> 0:00:21.360 brain have to do with him becoming a school shooter? 0:00:21.920 --> 0:00:23.520 And what does any of this have to do with 0:00:23.600 --> 0:00:27.920 Friedrich Nietzsche or guessing which sex offender is going to 0:00:28.000 --> 0:00:32.879 re offend, or the notion of culpability. Where does the 0:00:32.920 --> 0:00:36.600 study of the brain overlap with how we think about 0:00:36.800 --> 0:00:44.680 our legal system. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. 0:00:45.840 --> 0:00:49.519 I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and 0:00:49.560 --> 0:00:53.760 I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how 0:00:53.840 --> 0:01:06.520 the brain works and how we experience life. In the 0:01:06.640 --> 0:01:09.479 last episode, we talked about all the ways in which 0:01:09.480 --> 0:01:13.720 your unconscious brain drives the show of what's happening in 0:01:13.760 --> 0:01:17.560 your life. We feel like we make free decisions, that 0:01:17.600 --> 0:01:21.600 we have free will, but it turns out that your actions, 0:01:22.080 --> 0:01:25.680 your beliefs, who you are, these are all driven by 0:01:25.840 --> 0:01:30.959 mechanisms well below the access level of your conscious mind. 0:01:31.440 --> 0:01:35.280 So given that foundation, we're now going to explore what 0:01:35.319 --> 0:01:39.399 this means for us on a societal level. Today, we're 0:01:39.440 --> 0:01:43.280 going to talk about the intersection of brain science, which 0:01:43.319 --> 0:01:46.240 is playing out in labs all over the world, and 0:01:46.720 --> 0:01:50.680 the legal system, which plays out on streets and courthouses 0:01:50.720 --> 0:01:53.840 all around the world. These are usually thought of as 0:01:54.200 --> 0:01:59.960 separate issues, but in fact they are inseparable. What happened 0:02:00.520 --> 0:02:03.160 when someone commits a crime and it might have something 0:02:03.200 --> 0:02:06.880 to do with a disease or defect in their brain, 0:02:07.400 --> 0:02:10.680 do we punish them differently? We can't just let them 0:02:10.720 --> 0:02:13.520 off the hook, right, because the job of the legal 0:02:13.560 --> 0:02:16.440 system is to keep everyone safe. So what is the 0:02:16.520 --> 0:02:19.440 right thing to do here? So today I'm going to 0:02:19.480 --> 0:02:23.520 give you the argument why we can't keep pretending like 0:02:23.720 --> 0:02:27.280 everyone is exactly the same on the inside and that 0:02:27.360 --> 0:02:31.760 we all act from our own free will, because modern 0:02:31.840 --> 0:02:36.720 neuroscience suggests these are bad assumptions. So let's dive into 0:02:36.760 --> 0:02:40.720 the inner cosmos. When you look at neuroscience labs on 0:02:40.760 --> 0:02:44.680 any campus all over the planet, you find entire labs 0:02:44.760 --> 0:02:47.639 devoted to studying the brain at the level of the 0:02:47.720 --> 0:02:53.440 human genome, or studying the incredibly precise orchestra of molecules 0:02:53.440 --> 0:02:57.240 that dance around the genome. Or other labs that study 0:02:57.320 --> 0:03:00.960 the cascades of signals that pervade as sell and go 0:03:01.000 --> 0:03:03.559 all the way to the membranes and can get excreted 0:03:03.639 --> 0:03:07.000 and so on. Or you can devote an entire lab 0:03:07.080 --> 0:03:11.600 to understanding the behavior of individual neurons, which are like 0:03:11.639 --> 0:03:14.960 their own little animals with their own personalities. Or you 0:03:15.000 --> 0:03:19.799 can study giant networks of neurons and how information flows 0:03:19.840 --> 0:03:23.279 in those networks, and how those are changed by chemicals, 0:03:23.320 --> 0:03:27.239 by what you eat, your environment and your society, your religion, 0:03:27.320 --> 0:03:32.720 your culture. All these are different aspects of neuroscience. Now, 0:03:32.760 --> 0:03:36.000 my personal interest has always been in studying all these 0:03:36.120 --> 0:03:41.440 levels and trying to understand how they map onto our behavior, 0:03:42.080 --> 0:03:47.560 our perception, our reality. As I worked to demonstrate in 0:03:47.600 --> 0:03:51.440 the last episode, you are built out of this alien 0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:57.720 computational material. You are not separate from your brain. So 0:03:57.800 --> 0:04:00.320 what I want to do now is give you three 0:04:00.360 --> 0:04:04.360 examples to illustrate this point. Some of you will be 0:04:04.520 --> 0:04:07.640 familiar with the story of a young man who had 0:04:07.720 --> 0:04:11.440 a terrible accident that taught the world a lot about 0:04:11.800 --> 0:04:16.200 how your brain maps onto who you are. This young 0:04:16.240 --> 0:04:19.920 man was named Phineas Gage, and in eighteen forty eight 0:04:19.960 --> 0:04:24.719 he was working with a crew on a railroad near Cavendish, Vermont, 0:04:25.320 --> 0:04:28.000 and the way the land was cleared to build the 0:04:28.080 --> 0:04:32.240 railroad was by a series of explosions. So the way 0:04:32.240 --> 0:04:35.600 this would work is one guy would dig small holes, 0:04:36.080 --> 0:04:39.039 and then a second guy would fill those holes with gunpowder, 0:04:39.440 --> 0:04:42.600 and another guy would put sand on top of the gunpowder, 0:04:43.000 --> 0:04:47.000 and then Phineas Gauge would go around and tamp down 0:04:47.160 --> 0:04:50.800 the sand on top with a big metal rod called 0:04:50.800 --> 0:04:54.719 a tamping rod. So one day, the guy ahead of 0:04:54.800 --> 0:04:57.800 him forgot to put the sand on top of the 0:04:57.839 --> 0:05:02.080 gunpowder in one of these holes, and Phineas didn't notice that, 0:05:02.720 --> 0:05:05.680 and so when he pounded the tamping rod into the hole, 0:05:06.400 --> 0:05:10.000 the metal rod hit a rock and caused a spark, 0:05:10.600 --> 0:05:15.520 and the gunpowder exploded. And this metal tamping rod, which 0:05:15.600 --> 0:05:18.599 was about the width of a dry erase marker and 0:05:18.600 --> 0:05:23.280 almost four feet long, this exploded into his head and 0:05:23.400 --> 0:05:26.960 straight through it. It went below his chin, and it 0:05:27.120 --> 0:05:29.960 burst out the top of his skull, and this metal 0:05:30.040 --> 0:05:33.680 rod clattered to the ground eighty feet away. Now this 0:05:33.760 --> 0:05:37.480 became a very famous medical case because he didn't die, 0:05:38.040 --> 0:05:41.640 and in fact, he didn't even lose consciousness. The first 0:05:41.680 --> 0:05:44.960 doctor to arrive on the scene about thirty minutes later, 0:05:45.400 --> 0:05:48.599 wasn't even quite sure that he believed what everyone was 0:05:48.680 --> 0:05:52.279 saying had just happened. But then Phineas got up and 0:05:52.640 --> 0:05:57.160 vomited and quote a half at cupful of brain fell 0:05:57.200 --> 0:06:00.760 out on the floor. But it became a really, really 0:06:00.839 --> 0:06:08.640 famous medical case because Gauge's personality changed entirely. His friend said, 0:06:08.760 --> 0:06:12.480 he quote is no longer a Gauge. He went from 0:06:12.560 --> 0:06:16.599 a nice young man to someone who cussed and gambled 0:06:16.760 --> 0:06:20.200 and slept with sex workers. And this was an early 0:06:20.360 --> 0:06:24.120 case that started opening the door to an understanding of 0:06:24.160 --> 0:06:29.560 something massively important. And that is when your biology changes, 0:06:30.240 --> 0:06:33.360 you change. Now. I want to take as a second example, 0:06:34.040 --> 0:06:38.039 a clean cut young man named Charles Whitman. On a 0:06:38.120 --> 0:06:42.280 hot day in nineteen sixty six, Whitman climbed to the 0:06:42.320 --> 0:06:46.560 top of the tower on U T. Austin's campus and 0:06:46.640 --> 0:06:51.120 began to shoot people at random. He shot at pedestrians, 0:06:51.200 --> 0:06:53.120 he shot at the people who came to help them, 0:06:53.560 --> 0:06:56.800 He shot at the ambulance drivers that came to help them. 0:06:57.279 --> 0:07:01.040 In total, he murdered fourteen people that day and wounded 0:07:01.120 --> 0:07:05.640 thirty one. But there was a mystery about Whitman, and 0:07:05.640 --> 0:07:09.480 that is, there was nothing in particular about him that 0:07:09.560 --> 0:07:14.760 would have presaged this kind of horrific act. He had 0:07:14.800 --> 0:07:19.840 been an eagle scout, he'd been honorably discharged from the Marines. 0:07:20.320 --> 0:07:22.600 He'd come back to U T. Austin to be in 0:07:22.680 --> 0:07:26.760 the architectural engineering program. He was married, He was a 0:07:26.800 --> 0:07:30.480 good student with a high IQ. He just wasn't the 0:07:30.560 --> 0:07:33.920 type of person that you would predict for a murdering 0:07:34.040 --> 0:07:38.800 spree like this. But about a year before the tower shooting, 0:07:39.480 --> 0:07:43.880 he began to feel changes inside. He wrote about this 0:07:44.000 --> 0:07:46.880 extensively in his diary. He explained that he was not 0:07:47.440 --> 0:07:51.320 feeling like himself. He went to see a psychiatrist to 0:07:51.440 --> 0:07:56.080 express that he was feeling more and more uncontrollable anger. 0:07:56.200 --> 0:07:58.840 But this was in the nineteen sixties. There were no 0:07:58.960 --> 0:08:03.120 imaging technology available. There was little that could be done clinically. So, 0:08:03.240 --> 0:08:06.560 as it turns out, the night before the tower shooting, 0:08:07.080 --> 0:08:10.520 he murdered his wife and his mother, and then he 0:08:10.720 --> 0:08:14.880 sat down at his typewriter and he wrote a suicide note. 0:08:15.160 --> 0:08:18.640 And here's part of it quote, I do not quite 0:08:18.800 --> 0:08:21.880 understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. 0:08:22.240 --> 0:08:26.400 I do not really understand myself these days. I'm supposed 0:08:26.440 --> 0:08:31.160 to be an average, reasonable and intelligent young man. However, 0:08:31.280 --> 0:08:34.600 lately I cannot recall when it started. I have been 0:08:34.640 --> 0:08:39.800 a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. End quote. 0:08:40.520 --> 0:08:43.560 So he wrote in his suicide note that when this 0:08:43.679 --> 0:08:48.200 whole ordeal was over, that he wanted an autopsy to 0:08:48.240 --> 0:08:51.520 be performed to figure out what in the world was 0:08:51.600 --> 0:08:54.760 going on. And that's exactly what they did. They took 0:08:54.760 --> 0:08:57.840 his body to the coroner's office, and they used a 0:08:57.880 --> 0:09:00.200 bone saw to drill off the top of the skull, 0:09:00.240 --> 0:09:03.640 and they lifted out his brain and carefully dissected it. 0:09:04.240 --> 0:09:07.200 And what they found was a tumor pressing against a 0:09:07.240 --> 0:09:10.560 part of his brain called the amygdala, which is a 0:09:10.679 --> 0:09:15.560 small region involved in fear and aggression. Now, how do 0:09:15.640 --> 0:09:19.520 we interpret this? Not everyone who gets a tumor pressing 0:09:19.600 --> 0:09:23.400 on their amygdala becomes a murderer. Nonetheless, did it have 0:09:23.559 --> 0:09:26.360 something to do with his crime? We'll return to this 0:09:26.400 --> 0:09:29.880 sort of question many times in future episodes, because the 0:09:29.880 --> 0:09:34.080 answer isn't always obvious. After all, not everyone with a 0:09:34.200 --> 0:09:36.840 tumor in this area commits a horrific crime. So we 0:09:36.920 --> 0:09:41.160 have to look at the timeline of his behavioral changes 0:09:41.559 --> 0:09:44.920 and the presumed timeline of his tumor, and if they're 0:09:45.000 --> 0:09:49.000 well correlated, as they were in Whitman's case, this gives 0:09:49.080 --> 0:09:52.480 us more confidence that there was a connection. But for 0:09:52.520 --> 0:09:56.360 today's purposes, we can say that Whitman's tumor may well 0:09:56.400 --> 0:10:00.559 have had something to do with his drastic personality changes, 0:10:00.880 --> 0:10:05.400 for the same reason that Phineas Gage's more obvious camping 0:10:05.520 --> 0:10:09.000 rod had something to do with his personality changes. When 0:10:09.080 --> 0:10:13.880 your brain changes, so do you. So let's expose a 0:10:13.880 --> 0:10:16.000 few more examples like this, and then we're going to 0:10:16.000 --> 0:10:19.680 circle back around to the big picture question about how 0:10:19.720 --> 0:10:23.800 your actions result from your biology and how that affects 0:10:23.840 --> 0:10:28.000 the way we think about culpability in the legal system. 0:10:28.200 --> 0:10:31.600 This next case was reported in the medical literature. It 0:10:31.679 --> 0:10:34.880 was a forty year old man who was married. He 0:10:34.960 --> 0:10:39.640 had a normal sexual appetite, and then he started developing 0:10:39.640 --> 0:10:44.840 an interest in pedophilia. He started collecting child pornography, and 0:10:44.880 --> 0:10:48.920 then he tried to touch his prepubescent stepdaughter who lived 0:10:49.000 --> 0:10:51.679 with him and his wife, and at that point his 0:10:51.720 --> 0:10:55.400 wife had him arrested. So while he was in jail 0:10:55.520 --> 0:11:00.439 awaiting sentencing. He started complaining of these terrible headaches and 0:11:00.440 --> 0:11:02.800 they were getting worse and worse. So he was eventually 0:11:02.840 --> 0:11:06.920 taken to the doctor and a brain scan was done, 0:11:07.040 --> 0:11:10.120 and what they discovered was a massive tumor in his 0:11:10.160 --> 0:11:13.559 frontal lobes, about the size of a golf ball. So 0:11:13.679 --> 0:11:18.319 he underwent an emergency neurosurgery and they cut the tumor out, 0:11:18.600 --> 0:11:22.360 and his sexual appetites returned completely to normal. He no 0:11:22.440 --> 0:11:26.520 longer had any pedophilic urges. Now the story has an 0:11:26.559 --> 0:11:29.959 important PostScript because his wife took him back and everything 0:11:30.040 --> 0:11:33.840 was fine, But then about six months later, he started 0:11:33.880 --> 0:11:39.000 developing an interest in pedophilia again. So this time, instead 0:11:39.000 --> 0:11:42.040 of taking him to the police, his wife took him 0:11:42.120 --> 0:11:45.720 back to his neurosurgeon, and it was discovered that a 0:11:45.760 --> 0:11:48.760 part of his tumor had been missed in the surgery 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:52.480 and the tumor was now regrowing, so they resected the 0:11:52.480 --> 0:11:56.720 tumor a second time, and his sexual behavior returned to 0:11:56.840 --> 0:12:02.160 normal again. The lesson from the sudden pedophile is the 0:12:02.200 --> 0:12:05.360 same lesson that we can take from Phineas Gage and 0:12:05.400 --> 0:12:10.120 from Charles Whitman. When your biology changes, that can change 0:12:10.160 --> 0:12:14.439 your decision making. In quite dramatic ways. And the thing 0:12:14.440 --> 0:12:17.040 we're going to return to that's important is that he 0:12:17.120 --> 0:12:20.200 didn't choose to have a brain tumor, just like Whitman 0:12:20.280 --> 0:12:23.240 didn't just like Phineas Gage didn't choose to have the 0:12:23.280 --> 0:12:26.880 tamping run through his head. Now, what we covered in 0:12:26.920 --> 0:12:29.480 the last episode is that when it comes to things 0:12:29.600 --> 0:12:33.120 like your instincts or what you find beautiful, or who 0:12:33.120 --> 0:12:37.080 you're attracted to, or your decisions in life, these things 0:12:37.120 --> 0:12:41.200 are all driven by automatic circuitry in your brain. It's 0:12:41.240 --> 0:12:45.559 not about the conscious you. It's about your unconscious brain, 0:12:46.200 --> 0:12:49.679 to which you mostly don't have any access or acquaintance. 0:12:50.360 --> 0:12:53.920 So the notion of free will, we called that into 0:12:54.000 --> 0:12:59.000 question last time. Enough of our drives are so inaccessible 0:12:59.559 --> 0:13:03.160 that free will may not exist, or if it exists, 0:13:03.200 --> 0:13:06.360 it might be a small player in the system. Now, 0:13:06.400 --> 0:13:10.200 the question of free will matters quite a bit when 0:13:10.240 --> 0:13:15.000 we turn to culpability. When a criminal stands in front 0:13:15.040 --> 0:13:18.439 of the judge's bench having recently committed a crime, the 0:13:18.520 --> 0:13:23.280 legal system wants to know whether he is blameworthy after all, 0:13:23.320 --> 0:13:27.920 whether he's fundamentally responsible for his actions. Navigates the way 0:13:27.960 --> 0:13:32.280 that we punish, for example, you might punish your child 0:13:32.360 --> 0:13:35.000 if she writes with a cran on the wall, but 0:13:35.080 --> 0:13:37.960 you wouldn't punish her if she did the same thing 0:13:38.120 --> 0:13:42.120 while sleepwalking. But why not. She's the same child with 0:13:42.160 --> 0:13:46.079 the same brain in both cases, right. The difference lies 0:13:46.200 --> 0:13:50.160 in your intuitions about free will. In one case, if 0:13:50.160 --> 0:13:53.000 she's awake, she has it. In the other case, when 0:13:53.000 --> 0:13:56.640 she's asleep, she doesn't. In one case, she's choosing to 0:13:56.679 --> 0:14:01.319 act mischievously. In the other she's an un conscious automaton. 0:14:01.960 --> 0:14:05.040 So you assign culpability in the first case and not 0:14:05.200 --> 0:14:09.480 in the second, and the legal system shares your intuition. 0:14:10.080 --> 0:14:17.000 Responsibility for your actions parallels your volitional control. If someone 0:14:17.040 --> 0:14:21.280 commits a murder while awake, he hangs. If he does 0:14:21.320 --> 0:14:25.440 so while he's sleepwalking, which has happened many times, and 0:14:25.440 --> 0:14:29.840 I'll cover this in a future episode, then he's acquitted. Similarly, 0:14:29.960 --> 0:14:33.600 if you hit someone in the face, the law cares 0:14:33.720 --> 0:14:38.960 whether you were being aggressive or you have hemibilismus, which 0:14:38.960 --> 0:14:42.320 is a disorder in which your limbs can flail wildly 0:14:42.440 --> 0:14:46.640 without warning. If you crash your car into a roadside 0:14:46.640 --> 0:14:50.600 fruit stand, the law cares whether you were driving like 0:14:50.640 --> 0:14:53.920 a maniac, or instead you were the victim of a 0:14:53.960 --> 0:14:58.240 heart attack. All these distinctions pivot on the assumption that 0:14:58.280 --> 0:15:02.600 we possess free will. Well, but do we don't We 0:15:03.360 --> 0:15:06.560 science can't yet figure out a way to say yes, 0:15:06.640 --> 0:15:09.160 we have it. Our intuition has a hard time saying no, 0:15:09.240 --> 0:15:11.600 we don't have it. But what I covered in the 0:15:11.640 --> 0:15:14.560 previous episode is that if we have any free will 0:15:14.600 --> 0:15:18.440 at all, it is a bit player because most of 0:15:18.480 --> 0:15:22.120 what we do we do unconsciously. So the question of 0:15:22.160 --> 0:15:24.080 whether we have free will or not is a tough 0:15:24.080 --> 0:15:27.960 scientific problem. But I propose that the answer to the 0:15:28.040 --> 0:15:31.560 question of free will doesn't matter for the purposes of 0:15:31.600 --> 0:15:35.840 social policy. And here's why. In the legal system, there's 0:15:35.880 --> 0:15:40.160 a defense known as an automatism. So what's an automatism. 0:15:40.400 --> 0:15:43.920 It's something that I have no conscious control over. So 0:15:44.160 --> 0:15:47.160 let's say I have that disorder that causes me to 0:15:47.200 --> 0:15:51.359 fling my arm out hemibalismus and I have no conscious 0:15:51.520 --> 0:15:54.440 input into this. It just happens. So one day I 0:15:54.600 --> 0:15:56.680 fling my arm out and I hit someone and they 0:15:56.800 --> 0:15:59.680 fall off a cliff to their death. From the point 0:15:59.720 --> 0:16:02.960 of view view of the legal system, I'm not culpable 0:16:03.120 --> 0:16:07.840 for their death because it was an automatism The conscious 0:16:08.000 --> 0:16:11.640 me was not involved. I didn't have any ill intention 0:16:11.840 --> 0:16:15.760 behind the act, or what the legal system calls mensraea, 0:16:15.920 --> 0:16:19.120 which is Latin for guilty mind. And this kind of 0:16:19.160 --> 0:16:21.920 thing comes up all the time in the courtroom. Let's 0:16:21.920 --> 0:16:24.480 say a person is driving a car and has an 0:16:24.560 --> 0:16:28.840 epileptic seizure and that causes her to steer her car 0:16:28.920 --> 0:16:33.720 into a crowd of pedestrians. The automatism defense is used 0:16:33.760 --> 0:16:36.920 when a lawyer says, look, that act was due to 0:16:37.040 --> 0:16:41.560 a biological process over which the defendant had no control. 0:16:42.240 --> 0:16:45.480 In other words, there was a guilty act, but there 0:16:45.520 --> 0:16:50.000 was not a guilty mind behind it. Okay, but wait 0:16:50.040 --> 0:16:54.000 a minute, Based on everything we've been talking about, don't 0:16:54.160 --> 0:16:58.920 these kind of biological processes describe most, or possibly all, 0:16:59.400 --> 0:17:03.600 of what is going on in our brains. Given the 0:17:03.640 --> 0:17:08.919 steering power of our genetics, of our childhood experiences, of 0:17:09.119 --> 0:17:15.440 environmental toxins or hormones, neurotransmitters, all the details of our neurocircuitry, 0:17:16.280 --> 0:17:21.040 enough of our decisions are beyond our explicit control that 0:17:21.080 --> 0:17:26.199 we are arguably not the ones in charge. So in 0:17:26.240 --> 0:17:29.679 my book Incognito, I proposed what I call the principle 0:17:29.880 --> 0:17:34.840 of sufficient automatism, and this arises simply from understanding that 0:17:35.000 --> 0:17:39.120 free will, if it exists, is only a small factor 0:17:39.480 --> 0:17:45.120 writing on top of enormous automated machinery, so small that 0:17:45.160 --> 0:17:48.200 we might be able to think about bad decision making 0:17:48.280 --> 0:17:52.280 in the same way we think about other physical processes 0:17:52.400 --> 0:17:58.000 like diabetes or lung disease. The principle of sufficient automatism 0:17:58.400 --> 0:18:02.080 says that the answer to the free will question simply 0:18:02.119 --> 0:18:06.679 doesn't matter. To put this another way, Phineas Gage or 0:18:06.760 --> 0:18:11.240 Charles Whitman or the Sudden Pedophile all share the common 0:18:11.359 --> 0:18:17.720 upshot that actions can't be considered separately from the biology 0:18:18.119 --> 0:18:22.400 of the actors. Free will is not as simple as 0:18:22.440 --> 0:18:26.480 we into it, and our confusion about it suggests that 0:18:26.560 --> 0:18:32.520 we cannot meaningfully use it as the basis of punishment decisions. Now, 0:18:32.560 --> 0:18:34.680 before I move on to the heart of the argument, 0:18:34.720 --> 0:18:38.160 I need to put to rest the concern that if 0:18:38.200 --> 0:18:41.760 we look for biological explanations about what's going on with 0:18:41.880 --> 0:18:45.560 people who commit crimes, that's going to lead to freeing 0:18:45.640 --> 0:18:49.880 criminals on the grounds that nothing is their fault. Will 0:18:49.920 --> 0:18:54.080 we still punish criminals? Yes, Letting criminals go wander the 0:18:54.080 --> 0:19:00.200 streets is not the goal of improved understanding. Biological explanation 0:19:01.000 --> 0:19:05.160 does not equal exculpation, which is letting people off the hook. 0:19:05.640 --> 0:19:09.840 Societies will always need to get bad actors off the streets. 0:19:09.920 --> 0:19:13.919 We will not abandon punishment, but we can refine the 0:19:14.119 --> 0:19:18.200 way we punish. See, in the current system, we use 0:19:18.320 --> 0:19:23.320 incarceration as a one size fits all solution. As a result, 0:19:23.720 --> 0:19:28.600 America leads the world in the percentage of our population 0:19:28.880 --> 0:19:32.920 behind bars. Not everyone knows this, but we imprison more 0:19:32.960 --> 0:19:35.720 of our population than any country in the world. Look 0:19:35.720 --> 0:19:38.000 it up if you don't believe it. Now, aside from 0:19:38.040 --> 0:19:41.080 any moral stance you might have on this, it's a 0:19:41.240 --> 0:19:47.679 problem because prison is provably criminogenic, which means that it 0:19:47.840 --> 0:19:51.520 leads to more crime. That's because when you put someone 0:19:51.720 --> 0:19:54.399 in a prison, you break their social circles, and you 0:19:54.440 --> 0:19:58.639 break their employment opportunities, and presumably you introduce them to 0:19:58.680 --> 0:20:04.080 new social circles employment opportunities. As a result, prison becomes 0:20:04.160 --> 0:20:08.399 a revolving door. Now, this is generally something that people 0:20:08.480 --> 0:20:10.840 have an intuition about, but what a lot of people 0:20:10.880 --> 0:20:15.040 don't realize is the estimate that thirty percent of the 0:20:15.080 --> 0:20:20.119 prison population has some form of mental illness. Jail has 0:20:20.240 --> 0:20:25.119 become our de facto mental healthcare system in America. We 0:20:25.240 --> 0:20:29.000 used to have mental institutions, but these were all shut 0:20:29.040 --> 0:20:33.320 down in the nineteen sixties in a process called deinstitutionalization, 0:20:33.800 --> 0:20:38.840 and the whole population flowed from there into the prison system. Now, 0:20:38.920 --> 0:20:42.080 we could reasonably have a discussion about the morality of 0:20:42.080 --> 0:20:44.720 the situation, but I just want to make a practical 0:20:44.800 --> 0:20:49.320 point that this is not a cost effective solution to 0:20:49.520 --> 0:20:53.520 dealing with mental illness in our society because it has 0:20:53.920 --> 0:20:58.320 little to no utility in solving the problem. And here's 0:20:58.400 --> 0:21:03.680 another issue. Ours are stuffed with people who have drug addictions. 0:21:04.160 --> 0:21:07.600 This began when Nixon declared the War on drugs, and 0:21:07.680 --> 0:21:11.440 since that time, our prison population has gone up eightfold. 0:21:12.720 --> 0:21:14.840 This is not the right place for us to be 0:21:14.920 --> 0:21:18.280 putting people with addiction problems. I'm not saying this is 0:21:18.280 --> 0:21:22.560 a morality play. The issue is that prison doesn't solve 0:21:22.640 --> 0:21:28.360 the problem. Addiction is a biological issue. You can't incarcerate 0:21:28.440 --> 0:21:32.320 someone and expect they're going to forget their addiction. And 0:21:32.440 --> 0:21:50.760 also there's an active drug trade in prison systems. So 0:21:50.920 --> 0:21:55.320 all this points to developing a better understanding of what's 0:21:55.480 --> 0:21:59.440 happening in brains so that we can root people through 0:21:59.520 --> 0:22:03.760 the system him in a more tailored fashion. Now I 0:22:03.800 --> 0:22:09.560 want to hit this point again, with biological explanation equal exculpation. 0:22:10.400 --> 0:22:14.399 No better insight would lead us to be able to 0:22:14.480 --> 0:22:20.120 do many things. The first is rational sentencing. We don't 0:22:20.119 --> 0:22:22.439 have to build a legal system with an emphasis on 0:22:22.760 --> 0:22:26.760 how much we punish, but instead on how to best 0:22:26.920 --> 0:22:30.360 root individuals through the system. This doesn't let people off 0:22:30.400 --> 0:22:32.840 the hook who have committed a crime, because we still 0:22:32.880 --> 0:22:36.200 need to keep our streets safe, but it does allow 0:22:36.280 --> 0:22:40.200 us to abandon the notion that all brains are the 0:22:40.240 --> 0:22:44.800 same and everyone should get the same mandated sentence, like 0:22:45.000 --> 0:22:48.439 five years for this crime. You can have lots of 0:22:48.560 --> 0:22:51.600 brains in front of a judge's bench for the exact 0:22:51.680 --> 0:22:55.760 same crime. But this one is there because he has schizophrenia, 0:22:56.000 --> 0:22:59.520 and this one is a psychopath, and this one over 0:22:59.560 --> 0:23:02.400 here is tweak down on drugs, and this one has 0:23:02.560 --> 0:23:05.959 a brain tumor, and so on. Not all brains are 0:23:05.960 --> 0:23:11.520 the same, and people can be sentenced on more individualized grounds. 0:23:12.040 --> 0:23:15.040 And one of the key components of this is the 0:23:15.080 --> 0:23:19.040 second thing. That we could have better insight on customized 0:23:19.240 --> 0:23:24.600 rehabilitation instead of imagining that jail is the one size 0:23:24.640 --> 0:23:28.800 fits all solution. We are increasingly getting more insight into 0:23:28.840 --> 0:23:31.840 what can be done for things like drug addiction, which 0:23:31.880 --> 0:23:35.600 I'll come back to. And the third thing is realistic 0:23:36.040 --> 0:23:42.360 incentive structuring, including deterrence and what kinds of punishments actually 0:23:42.440 --> 0:23:45.600 work for which kinds of people, and which ones are 0:23:45.640 --> 0:23:50.000 a waste of time that only satisfy our bloodlust but 0:23:50.040 --> 0:23:53.919 are ineffective at the societal level. Because the fact is 0:23:54.000 --> 0:23:57.080 that brains are different, and we talk about things like 0:23:57.320 --> 0:24:02.719 tailored education, why not talk about tailored social policy. So 0:24:02.760 --> 0:24:06.640 there's a real need for understanding what is happening inside 0:24:06.680 --> 0:24:09.479 different heads. It doesn't make sense for us to pretend 0:24:09.480 --> 0:24:12.520 that everyone is just like us or just like each 0:24:12.560 --> 0:24:15.399 other on the inside. And to help us think about this, 0:24:15.520 --> 0:24:19.720 here's an excerpt from Charles Whitman's suicide note. He said, quote, 0:24:20.040 --> 0:24:23.960 if my life insurance policy is valid, please pay off 0:24:24.000 --> 0:24:28.560 my debts, donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. 0:24:29.160 --> 0:24:34.639 Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type. So 0:24:34.840 --> 0:24:39.159 some years ago, these considerations inspired me to start the 0:24:39.240 --> 0:24:42.760 Center for Science and Law, which brings together scientists and 0:24:42.760 --> 0:24:47.719 attorneys and policy makers to understand how science can refine 0:24:47.800 --> 0:24:52.320 our legal system. We tackle things like how neuroscience matters 0:24:52.320 --> 0:24:56.600 for a rational drug policy, or a better understanding of 0:24:56.640 --> 0:25:01.480 the insanity defense, or how to think about sentencing in juveniles, 0:25:01.600 --> 0:25:03.920 like what happens when someone commits a terrible crime but 0:25:03.960 --> 0:25:09.000 they're sixteen years old, and issues like eyewitness testimony and 0:25:09.400 --> 0:25:13.200 even the brain of the juror. I'm going to drop 0:25:13.240 --> 0:25:16.320 several episodes on these topics in the coming months, but 0:25:16.440 --> 0:25:19.880 for now, I want to emphasize the big picture issue, 0:25:20.200 --> 0:25:23.240 and that is what we understand and how we can 0:25:23.280 --> 0:25:26.679 move the science forward. So we know that the details 0:25:26.680 --> 0:25:32.240 of the brain map onto behavior, but it's an extraordinarily 0:25:32.680 --> 0:25:37.600 complex system, one of such complexity with its billions of 0:25:37.600 --> 0:25:42.040 neurons and trillions of connections that it bankrupts our ability 0:25:42.080 --> 0:25:46.159 to understand it. So how do we go about trying 0:25:46.200 --> 0:25:49.800 to understand the brain of someone who has committed a crime. 0:25:50.440 --> 0:25:53.800 So let's start by acknowledging that when big crimes happen, 0:25:53.920 --> 0:25:56.560 it's often the case that we don't even have a 0:25:56.600 --> 0:26:00.879 brain to examine. Lots of times person will commit a 0:26:00.960 --> 0:26:04.440 mass shooting, and then shoot themselves in the head, which 0:26:04.480 --> 0:26:09.240 renders their brain unexaminable. Or take Adam Lanza, the shooter 0:26:09.440 --> 0:26:12.719 at Sandy Hook Elementary. I remember seeing on the news 0:26:12.800 --> 0:26:16.840 that he had smashed his computer and hard drive before 0:26:16.880 --> 0:26:19.840 committing the crime, but that struck me as the least 0:26:19.920 --> 0:26:23.960 of our problems, because Lanza had committed suicide within fifteen 0:26:24.000 --> 0:26:26.480 minutes of the nine to one one call by shooting 0:26:26.520 --> 0:26:29.560 himself in the head, meaning that it wasn't just his 0:26:29.720 --> 0:26:32.600 hard drive that you couldn't get data from, but his 0:26:32.720 --> 0:26:35.919 brain as well. So the point is that we couldn't 0:26:35.920 --> 0:26:38.159 even take a swing at seeing if there was something 0:26:38.240 --> 0:26:41.600 wrong with his brain, like a tumor or a malformation 0:26:41.680 --> 0:26:44.240 that he was born with, or a stroke. And this 0:26:44.320 --> 0:26:48.600 situation is actually surprisingly common. Take the guy Joe Stack, 0:26:48.680 --> 0:26:51.240 who is mad about his taxes and so he flew 0:26:51.320 --> 0:26:56.360 his small plane into the IRS office building. Everyone hypothesized 0:26:56.400 --> 0:26:59.080 about what had gone wrong with Stack based on his 0:26:59.160 --> 0:27:02.440 suicide note and his behaviors leading up to the attack, 0:27:03.040 --> 0:27:06.320 But was there anything pathological going on in his brain? 0:27:06.800 --> 0:27:09.719 Will never know because it was destroyed in the crash. 0:27:10.160 --> 0:27:12.439 But what happens when we do have a brain to 0:27:12.480 --> 0:27:16.399