← More or Less
More or Less
Brain Culture Part 1
00:28:27
In a change to the usual format, we are podcasting Matthew Taylor’s series “Brain...
Loading summary
Transcript75 lines
- [00:00]
Matthew Taylor
Thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC. For the next three weeks, we've got something a little different for you, Brainy. More or less regulars. As part of a season of Radio 4 programs exploring the rise of neuroscience, the former Number 10 Downing street head of strategy, Matthew Taylor presents Brain Culture. In the first of his series exploring how neuroscience will change society, he he asks how the justice system will change now that we can scan criminal brains.
- [00:39]
Narrator/Presenter
Imagine a world where our institutions, our social attitudes and even the way we think of ourselves are influenced by our understanding of how brains work. Welcome to to Brain Culture. Over recent decades, neuroscience and related disciplines have been the fastest growing areas of scientific inquiry. And now this work is coming out of the laboratory and starting to change the world around us. How about the scientists who are exploring the anatomy of evil? The brains of criminal psychopaths, the types
- [01:18]
Kent Keel
of crimes they commit are wide ranging. They include everything from simple drug possession and use, all the way up to cold blooded murder. It's just now that we understand how their brains are different and how really dramatically different they truly are, it has a very powerful influence on the legal system.
- [01:33]
Narrator/Presenter
For example, that's Dr. Kent Keel. He wants the legal system to see criminals, even serial killers, differently. In the first of three programs, I'll be exploring controversial new ideas of a criminal justice process and shaped by brain science. But before we get to the stories of operating on paedophile brains or of lie detection using brain imaging, let's look at pioneering research work being done in Britain right now. It goes back to the basics, before any crime has been committed, by using functional brain scanning to explore what makes some adults and children behave badly in the first place. I don't like your feel of your trousers.
- [02:15]
Tara (Teacher)
You don't like these trousers today? No.
- [02:16]
Colin Blakemore
No, you don't.
- [02:18]
Tara (Teacher)
Right, let's start off with this is what we're going to do today. Stephen started the school with extremely antisocial behaviours. He would repeatedly attack other children.
- [02:32]
Narrator/Presenter
Stephen, not his real name, is just seven, but he already has a track record of naughty behaviour. He goes to a special school in the south of England where neuroscientists and teachers are developing new ways of responding to children like him. These children's brains just don't seem to respond as normal and it's this that makes it so hard to help them behave in ways society finds acceptable. Stephen is one of the children who's having to learn automatic reactions that the rest of us just take for granted. Tara is his teacher. This is the worst.
- [03:09]
Tara (Teacher)
Am I You're going to do the speaking and I'm going to do the listening. A classic piece of Stephen's behaviour would be if he was playing a game with another child and he lost, then you would have the game equipment thrown across the classroom. He would try to physically attack the other child. If an adult came close, he would then attack the adult. If you withdrew, the behaviours didn't de escalate. He didn't just calm himself down and get over losing, he would carry on escalating higher and higher until he had the reward of knowing that somebody else was hurt.
- [03:46]
Narrator/Presenter
Stephen's willingness to hurt people may be the result of a problem of the way his brain works. I'm watching his lesson on a monitor alongside Alice Jones, a neuroscientist from Goldsmith University and formerly ucl. Alice and her colleagues have looked at the brains of children who've developed a condition the scientists now want to see officially recognized. They call these children callous and unemotional, a diagnosis loosely related to the adult symptoms of psychopathy. The clue to the children's condition lies in the way a part of their brain reacts when it sees images of faces showing fear.
- [04:27]
Alice Jones
Now, what will happen in our brains if we see a fearful face is that crudely, our amygdalas will respond crudely, it's our threat. What we discovered was that having higher levels of these sorts of psychopathic or callous on emotional traits was also associated with lesser reactivity to these distress emotions.
- [04:48]
Narrator/Presenter
So these children given the same scan as other children, when you show them stimuli, which frightened faces, which ought to lead to the amygdala lighting up, as it were, it's not lighting up them or it's lighting up in a much less pronounced way.
- [05:03]
Alice Jones
Absolutely. For some children, their brains aren't really reacting in the same way to emotions that ours might. We can't have the same expectations of children like Stephen than we might do about other kids of his age.
- [05:20]
Narrator/Presenter
So when we judge other people's bad behaviour, we kind of assume that they see the world like we see the world and they've just made a bad choice. Like we sometimes make bad choices.
- [05:29]
Alice Jones
Yep. The way that Stephen perceives the world is that, you know, if he hurts somebody and they look upset or distressed, that's not really meaning anything to him.
- [05:40]
Narrator/Presenter
We'll catch up with Stephen later on. But his case is a good example of fresh thinking emerging from the new technique of functional imaging, which doesn't just identify the regions where brain functions occur, but lets us see brain processes in real time. But if we see Stephen not as morally bad but as a damaged brain, does that change how we should judge adults with brain based conditions if they commit crimes? One of Britain's most prominent neuroscientists, Colin Blakemore of Oxford University, thinks the implications are profound.
- [06:20]
Colin Blakemore
It is the it was my brain that made me do it gov defence. We already have that defence in certain areas.
- [06:29]
Narrator/Presenter
Diminished responsibility.
- [06:31]
Colin Blakemore
Diminished responsibility, yeah. In certain forms of epilepsy, acts committed while the person was asleep, you know, you only have to push that argument a little bit further to start saying, well then when is any action something other than a result of the organization of the brain? And the answer is it isn't. And I think we might and we should see the role of punishment moving more progressively more and more in the direction of trying to reorganize the brain of an individual whose actions are not acceptable to society.
- [07:11]
Narrator/Presenter
I'm not sure whether a criminal justice system which demanded the repairing of brains rather than the punishing of people would end up more effective, more humane or maybe more authoritarian. But whether Colin Blakemore's predictions come true will in part depend on a new, still tentative area of study, the limbic system of the brain. Our understanding of this behavior circuit and the role it has in deviancy took a huge leap forward in 2002. That's when a 40 year old paedophile walked into a Kansas City hospital near complaining of a headache. Here's the doctor who was on duty that night. Russell Swerdlow.
- [07:54]
Russell Swerdlow
This was a gentleman in his early 40s, worked as a police officer, worked as a school teacher. He was married. What he got in trouble over was making inappropriate advances towards his stepdaughter.
- [08:09]
Narrator/Presenter
This man, let's call him Fred, had lived a normal life until very suddenly his wife noticed him making sexual advances on her 11 year old daughter. After then finding a stash of child pornography in his cupboard, she called in the police. And he was about to start a community sentence when Dr. Swerdlow intervened.
- [08:28]
Russell Swerdlow
He was making inappropriate comments to one of the female physicians who was on the consult team with me. And he had urinated on himself and didn't seem particularly concerned about that at all. And all those signs suggest something in the frontal lobes wasn't quite right.
- [08:48]
Narrator/Presenter
So you then undertake an examination?
- [08:51]
Russell Swerdlow
Yeah, yeah. You know, I told the residents working with me that everyone's going to hate me for sabotaging this guy's discharge, but we need to get an MRI and I thought we were going to see something, but I was shocked when the next day I looked at The MRI films, and he had a very large tumor called a hemangiopericytoma, which was compressing the right frontal lobe in an area in a specific part called the orbitofrontal cortex.
- [09:20]
Narrator/Presenter
It seemed Fred's brain tumor had turned him from a good citizen to a monster. And in case the evidence wasn't already clear, when the tumor was removed, his behavior returned to normal. And when he started going off the tracks again, the doctor found the tumor had grown back. Advances in neuroscience have often involved extreme cases like Fred's. Scientists knew the prefrontal cortex was vital to our behavior. But Fred's case history, and by the way, ultimately he was let off his sentence, turned theory into vivid reality. So putting it simply, removing the tumor from Fred's brain cured him of his paedophilia.
- [10:02]
Russell Swerdlow
Yeah, that's a way to see it.
- [10:05]
Narrator/Presenter
And what does this tell us, do you think, more generally about the nature of pedophilia or other forms of sexual deviance?
- [10:16]
Russell Swerdlow
I don't believe that we stumbled onto, let's say, the pedophilia center of the brain. Really what this tumor was doing was disrupting his impulse control center. Now, in the behavioral neurology business, we've recognized for over 100 years that injury to the orbitofrontal cortices of the frontal lobes will alter behavior and tend to make people very impulsive.
- [10:42]
Narrator/Presenter
Fred's case was important to science, but it also brings into sharper relief some pivotal questions for our ideas of crime and punishment posed by our greater understanding of brain processes. And the issues don't just concern the most extreme cases. Chris Frith is a leading British neuroscientist at University College London. The example of the chap who became paedophilic in relation to this frontal lobe tumour fits very well with what we know about the frontal cortex, which, in a sense, is the most advanced bit of the brain. It's the bit that evolved most recently, and it in essence controls the rest of the brain that's behind it. Given that the orbitofrontal cortex is where the self control takes place. Presumably, if, as science advances, we become more and more able to see what capacity people have in their orbitofrontal contacts that will go right to the issue of people's culpability for their actions, it would certainly address the, yes, the issue of diminished responsibility.
- [11:46]
Russell Swerdlow
It has all these implications for people who may know the difference between right from wrong, but because of damage to this part of the brain, may not be able to act on that knowledge
- [11:56]
Narrator/Presenter
as the science advances. Do you think that we will be able to relate physiological observations to less extreme forms of behavior and less extreme forms of damage to the brain?
- [12:08]
Russell Swerdlow
I would guess things are going to move in that direction. The implication of what you're asking is how free really is free will. More than maybe we'd like to admit our behavior is hardwired.
- [12:24]
Narrator/Presenter
And this is what some neuroscientists now argue, that understanding more clearly the way brain processes lead to behavior has tilted the age old philosophical argument about free will. But what is the legal system meant to do with knowledge that our behaviour reflects the wiring of our brains?
- [12:45]
Colin Blakemore
Colin Blakemore it will force us, and the US in this case of course means lawyers really to re examine the notion of a responsible mind, of mens rea, this underpinning principle that people are in control of their actions. That is not to say that the my brain did it defence will become a reason to let people off. They can't just be released on the streets again. They've done something which society judges to be wrong. But the way in which they are seen, their culpability and their responsibility for the act, I think we will reassess very substantially as we learn more about how the brain works. The term blaming them will, I think, become less and less meaningful.
- [13:33]
Narrator/Presenter
But there still is a moment when we know that there is right and we know there is wrong and we plump for wrong and therefore deserve to be punished. But you are saying that that plumping for wrong is simply a function of the construct of our brain?
- [13:47]
Colin Blakemore
Well, of course it must be. What else could it be that is making our muscles move if it's not our brains?
- [13:55]
Stephen J Morse
The reason I have a problem with this case is this. When the tumor was discovered, the man was clearly suffering from major rationality defects.
- [14:05]
Narrator/Presenter
Stephen J Morse of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. And as in British law, American courts can conclude that there are times when brain malfunctions mean people can't be held responsible. For example, someone who commits a criminal act when having an epileptic fit. That's the basis of the plea of diminished responsibility. But even though Fred's whole personality changed when he developed a tumour, evidence about damage to the brain hasn't yet been conclusive in a criminal case, neither here nor nor in America. Morse argues that that's because the way of thinking which underlies our way of judging blame, what he terms our folk philosophy, remains more powerful.
- [14:46]
Stephen J Morse
If he had done it then so, for instance, when the tumour was discovered, he was molesting nurses in the examination room would I hold him responsible for molesting nurses in the examination room? Of course not. The man at that point had severely damaged rationality. But at the time he touched his stepdaughter, which was many months earlier, he was going to his job. He was keeping secret his pedophilic tendencies from his wife. You know, there are a lot of people with pedophilic tendencies where those tendencies don't come from a tumor. We don't excuse those people. Whether that strong untoward desire comes from the kind of child rearing you had some biological factor, some sociological factor, or all three, we're still going to hold you responsible for, for giving in to a strong illegal desire, as it were, if you had sufficient capacity for rationality. And that's the real question for the law.
- [15:48]
Narrator/Presenter
But if neuroscientists and brain scans can't yet tell us who to blame, can they at least help us decide who to trust? Brain scanning technology has resurrected the idea of that machines can judge human memory. In America, companies market this technology to employers and government departments. In India, the older version of brain scanning, the electrocephalogram, was recently used to help convict a young woman of murder. And there are some making the case for the new technology closer to home. Professor Hans Marksovich of Bielfeld University in Germany is a world leading expert in amnesia. And he may also be the first scientist to use brain scanning in a criminal case in Europe. A murder in Germany.
- [16:35]
Hans Marksovich
It was a person who was accused of having murdered someone else and having tried to murder a young woman. She was severely injured and she was apparently the only witness.
- [16:53]
Narrator/Presenter
The young woman scanned by Marksovich was the key witness in a case of brutal murder. She'd been beaten so severely by the alleged murderer that she suffered from amnesia. So the judge wanted help to decide whether to trust her account of the incident.
- [17:09]
Hans Marksovich
So I investigated her, I studied her neuropsychologically and in addition, I asked the judge whether I could do functional brain imaging.
- [17:23]
Narrator/Presenter
You were able, by looking at the scan, to be able to tell whether or not her memory was likely to be real?
- [17:34]
Hans Marksovich
Yes, in principle, one can say from the activations in the brain, it looked as if her memories were true.
- [17:44]
Narrator/Presenter
The man she testified against was eventually found guilty of murder. Marksevich based the test on research in which university students watched movies and were tested on their memories. He found that when students recalled things in the film, they actually saw a specific part of the brain was activated. But when they genuinely thought they recalled something but were wrong, a different part lit up. It's pioneering work but it doesn't convince Geraint Reiss, leading neuroimager at ucla. It's an interesting area, but one thing which I think we don't yet have clarity. Most of the studies on so called lie detection have employed situations very different to the kind of lies that you or I might or might not make in everyday life. They've employed situations where college students are paid to lie in a scanner and pretend to lie. Now, I'm not sure if that's exactly the same situation as in the real world, when people actually have an intent to deceive. So there's a problem there. Marksevich himself is well aware of the shortcomings of scanning, especially when used on a single individual. So he uses it only amongst a battery of other techniques to assess memory. Even he thinks it's simply not reliable enough to use on most witnesses, at least yet. But the big step forward in the modern form of brain scanning, its ability to image brain processes in real time, leads him to make the bold claim that FMRI technology will be used in courts within the next decade.
- [19:15]
Hans Marksovich
If this becomes reality, you even won't need judges in the manner we need them now, because this comes down to a more technical or mechanical procedure. Because you know from the scanning results, whether he did it or did not murder or rape or whatever, neuroscientists would
- [19:39]
Nick Rose
like to make themselves useful in these practices, would like to claim that their research has powers which are beyond the powers that I think it has. If you really have individuals who want to deceive, they will deceive these technologies in the same way as they deceived old lie detection technologies. Old lie detection technologies are almost never admissible in the court.
- [20:02]
Narrator/Presenter
Nick Rose is one of Britain's most cited sociologists and he's an expert on how science impacts society. He's not that worried about using brain scans in courts because he thinks judges will just dismiss unreliable neuroscience techniques. But Rose thinks the impact of brain science on criminal justice may lie elsewhere.
- [20:23]
Nick Rose
Where I think you'll find some of these neurobiological arguments having more weight is before the verdict, before the individual gets to court, we've done a brain scan, the brain scan has showed a, or we've done a brain scan and the brain scan doesn't show a or after the verdict, in decisions about the sentence, what should be done with this person. At that point, all the arguments about what the state is of their neurobiology, how we can intervene on that, at that point they become relevant. And at that point the evidence, the arguments are not tested in the way in which they are tested in the courtroom.
- [21:01]
Narrator/Presenter
For some neuroscientists, it's not so much the courts as wider society that should be taking notice of new insights. Kent Keel of the University of New Mexico is an evangelist for brain science. So committed is he to understanding the brains of murderers and other criminals that he drives his own mobile brain scanner into high security prisons.
- [21:23]
Kent Keel
I've worked with one serial killer named Brian Dugan, and Brian suffered from, as a very early age, As a child, 4, 5 and 6, a lot of behavioral problems. He did classic things. He set fires, he hurt animals, he, you know, injured his brothers and sisters. He was put in special homes. He continued to do very bad things and eventually was convicted of killing three women, two of which were very young girls. And Brian, when I interviewed him, Even in his 50s, clinically, it's very fascinating when you see how he struggles to try to understand why people even care about what he did.
- [21:58]
Narrator/Presenter
Brian Dugan is a psychopath. The scans show that his limbic system is impaired. His brain is demonstrably different to that of normally adjusted people. But I put a question to Kiel that was starting to bug me. So serial killers brains are different and that's part of why they do what they do. But so what?
- [22:18]
Kent Keel
Of course their brains are going to be different. It's just now that we understand how their brains are different and how really, dramatically different they truly are, that people are starting to take notice. When you do that, I think it has a very powerful influence on, like the legal system, for example.
- [22:34]
Narrator/Presenter
Keel admits that brain scanning alone doesn't allow us to understand the complex set of factors that create antisocial behavior or serial killers. At most, evidence like his is being used to get people off death row and into lifetime prison sentences. But he thinks neuroscience could help us to deal with these symptoms earlier in
- [22:54]
Kent Keel
children, at the very beginning. What I would hope is that we can help use this research to help properly identify the emotional and cognitive abnormalities in kids so that you could prevent those individuals like Brian from ever developing and escalating into the individual that he is today.
- [23:12]
Narrator/Presenter
And that brings us back to the south of England, where schoolteacher Tara is working with neuroscientists to understand the boy I've called Stephen. Tara is convinced that understanding the failings of Stephen's brain can help us really get to grips with his naughty, sometimes destructive behaviour and find ways to help him change it.
- [23:34]
Tara (Teacher)
So what do you think they're feeling? Not happy.
- [23:39]
Alice Jones
Not happy. Give me a.
- [23:40]
Tara (Teacher)
It's not jealous, is it jealous? It could be jealous, yes. So jealous. Okay, what number jealous do you think they are? Look at their bodies.
- [23:49]
Narrator/Presenter
A5.
- [23:50]
Tara (Teacher)
He doesn't see all the other information that the world and society and any social relationships are giving him. So when he's lost the game and he's angry, he wants to hurt somebody. Because those areas of the brain and those that circuitry in the brain hasn't developed, they haven't learned how to recognise and respond to other people's emotions appropriately in the way that people whose brain development has been more normal do. So you do have to explicitly teach it and it's very much like you would teach literacy, numeracy, science, geography, anything else you have to teach them. This is a fact that sounds to me like a three jealous voice because it's still quiet and it doesn't sound unfriendly, it sounds moody.
- [24:31]
Narrator/Presenter
That's not fair.
- [24:33]
Tara (Teacher)
What's that one?
- [24:34]
Narrator/Presenter
How is neuroscience, and particularly the ability to scan the brains of children or adults who have this problem, how has that changed our understanding?
- [24:44]
Tara (Teacher)
It's changed now our expectations and understanding of how children will respond. We don't rely on the child to have that capacity to want to make other people pleased with them or want to make anybody happy with them and just to get on and enjoy a reciprocal relationship. These children don't seek that. So what we do is teach them very explicitly and objectively, if you like. Here is an emotion. People tend to feel like that when this happens. Even if you don't and you don't experience that same emotion, you still have to allow for the fact that other people in the world do. And if you respond in this way, you can get what you want in a safe, socially acceptable way. If you respond like this, you're not going to get what you want and there's nothing in it for you.
- [25:30]
Narrator/Presenter
The idea that these new techniques will be able to help Stephen stay out of trouble is inspiring, but it's still only a theory. Like so much at the frontiers of neuroscience, the evidence is far from being conclusive, given that the more far fetched fantasies, like scanning children's brains early to identify their frailties and look premature or even dangerous. But when you hear the words of Jeff, the school head with over 20 years experience, you get a sense of how neuroscience might help us tackle problems which seemed, up till now, intractable. He wishes the science had come earlier. He's seen a generation of pupils, many of whom he now believes should have had the same diagnosis as Stephen, misunderstood and failed by the system, they tend
- [26:17]
Jeff (School Head)
to be the children who have been in most trouble with the law. They tend to be the ones who are now in prison. They tend to be the children who face society with the greatest challenges. And now we'd recognise those as having been the children who we are now working with in a different way. They have the profile we're now working with. They're not the conventional emotional, behavioural difficulties children we thought we had at the time.
- [26:40]
Narrator/Presenter
So there are adults out there now in prison or causing damage to society simply because the neuroscience wasn't there to enable us to diagnose them properly before?
- [26:51]
Jeff (School Head)
Absolutely, yes, completely.
- [26:56]
Narrator/Presenter
I don't know whether neuroscience will make it into the courtroom, whether Hans Markzevich's lie detector will prove as unreliable as those that went before. And however good the science, I don't think the defence my brain made me do it will work in any but the most extreme of cases. But, and this is surely more important, it may help us stop people with behavioural problems that have their causes in brain functioning from ending up in trouble, ending up in court or ending up in prison.
- [27:28]
Jeff (School Head)
If somebody had said to me two years ago, this is what neuroscience is going to do in your school, I wouldn't have believed it. We wouldn't have done what we've done here without the neuroscience having been in working with us. What will happen in the next 20 years if neuroscientists can be working alongside, together with educationalists and people from social care and other people from health, will be phenomenal.
- [27:50]
Narrator/Presenter
And it's the new understanding of how we learn based on the idea that brains remain plastic throughout our lives, that will be the subject of the next edition of Brain Culture. Join me next week, same time.
- [28:12]
Matthew Taylor
Brain Culture was presented by Matthew Taylor. The producer was me, Mukul Devachand. For our Terms of Use, please go to the BBC website and you can hear the next program in the series if you download the more or less podcast again from next Tuesday.