neurolaw

Mind Hacks’ 10/27 post ‘My brain made me do it’ reminds me of my Behavioral Science and the Law article, and makes me realize I never announced when it was published earlier this year. I remember when it happened I was kind of shy about it so I only mentioned it if it happened to come up, but since this blog marks a new “share my thoughts with the world” phase that I’m giving a try, it probably makes sense to share my first professional published psychology article . Here it is:

burnsbehscilaw.pdf

And actually it was kind of funny, I knew it was being published in or around April of this year, but the way I found out it had actually come out is when my friend Natalie wrote to me saying that she’d had it assigned in her neuroscience class at Columbia. This for me was one of those weird moments when you start to think of yourself as maybe-sort-of an adult. Seeing as I’ve spent my whole adult life thus far in student/finding myself mode, and am still working on the latter, oh, and actually the former also, I still feel like I’m in extended adolescence a bit. So then to hear that an Ivy League professor decided to give something I wrote to his students is kind of a trip. Maybe I am here for something more than navel-gazing.

Anyway, the Mind Hacks post references a Times article (UK, not NY) in which the author expresses skepticism about the rise of “neurolaw”, e.g. the legal profession’s current attention to what current & developing neuroscience can tell us about responsibility for actions and other phenomena that are often at issue in legal cases.

Tallis cites the example of the trial of Bobby Joe Long where his lawyers tried to argue (unsuccessfully as it turned out) that he wasn’t responsible for his crimes because brain scan evidence showed that he had an overactive amygdala (supposedly suggesting increased aggression) and underactive frontal lobes (supposedly suggesting reduced ability to inhibit aggression).

This, Tallis argues, is hardly evidence for diminished responsibility because it assumes that our brain is some sort of separate ‘alien force’ that is somehow not ‘us’, when we generally think of the brain as being synonymous with the self.

However, he goes on to cite the example of an epileptic seizure and argues that this is an example where we definitely can’t say the person is responsible for twitching or losing consciousness.

Tallis aims to make a clear cut distinction between these different sorts of action and how we attribute responsibility for them, but he is perhaps relying on the extremes when reality can be full of grey areas.

And actually that is the point where my article picks up. The piece I wrote was for Behavioral Science and the Law’s special issue on free will. I wrote it along with Antoine Bechara of USC’s Center for the Brain and Creativity, who has done a lot of neuroscience research about the process of decision-making. The neuro research is all his but he pulled me in as a collaborator to place the research in a legal context. When doing this I argued that the neuroscience research supports a view of human decision making that is fairly deterministic (avoiding a hard-line “there is no free will” approach, but pointing out that the current criminal justice system assumes a much greater degree of free will than actually exists). As a result, it makes less sense to hold that individual defendants should be found to have diminished responsibility for their actions, than it does to reexamine the way that our justice system treats all defendants.

The whole neurolaw thing is interesting to me particularly because as neuroscience researchers learn more about the brain, there will be more “hard-science” evidence of what social science has already been telling us about human behavior, which policymakers so often ignore. Reading this Mind Hacks post was interesting when I just in my psychopathology class read an article about the neuroscience of trauma and neglect, saying that the brain pattern cited above (overactive amygdala, underactive frontal lobes) are both causes of aggressive/impulsive behavior AND exactly the effects that abuse and neglect in childhood have on the developing brain. It’s the cycle of violence that we hear about so often, but maybe voters and policymakers will have more sympathy for it when they can see it, undeniable, in biological evidence.

Relatedly, in my article, one of the types of justice system that I suggested paying more attention to is the restorative justice model, which has been gaining some footing in juvenile justice policy (which is structurally/in theory more sympathetic to the effect of the environment on young people accused of crimes than the broader criminal justice system is to adults). When I wrote that, I wasn’t even aware of the success of Missouri’s totally overhauled, restorative-justice-modeled juvenile system, which apparently has reduced recidivism rates to 10%!!! (For comparison, you usually see them in the 70%+ range, though admittedly I am not sure to what time period post-program this 10% is referring). Hey blue states, can’t we treat our kids as well as that?