My brain made me do it

Summary

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Unexplainable Podcast: "My brain made me do it"

Date: March 9, 2026
Host: Vox (Amy Padula)
Summary by: Podcast Summarizer

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Episode Overview

This gripping episode explores one of the most fascinating intersections between neuroscience and criminal law: can brain scans influence legal responsibility? Using the case of Herbert Weinstein, the first U.S. defendant whose brain scan was admitted as court evidence, the episode unpacks how neuroscience has upended legal assumptions about guilt, control, and free will. The hosts and expert guests probe the scientific, ethical, and philosophical questions raised when brain science meets the justice system.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Case of Herbert Weinstein

• [01:10–13:30]
  • Background: In 1991, Herbert Weinstein, a 65-year-old Manhattan resident and retired ad executive, killed his wife during a heated argument by strangulation and threw her body out of their 12th-story apartment window.
  • Investigation: Police found him acting oddly calm after the crime. He confessed quickly but his demeanor troubled his defense team, prompting a psychiatric evaluation.
  • Discovery: A PET scan revealed an “orange-sized” arachnoid cyst pressing on Weinstein’s frontal lobe (04:49, 04:56).
    • Quote:
      “He had an orange sized cyst pressing on his frontal lobe.”
      — Legal Expert/Commentator [04:49]
  • Significance: This became the first U.S. case where a PET scan was admitted as evidence to potentially mitigate culpability.

2. Neuroscience 101: What Does the Frontal Lobe Do?

• [05:10–07:25]
  • Explanation (Anthony Wagner, Stanford Neuroscientist):
    • The frontal lobes help regulate behavior, executive function, impulse control, and contextual judgment.
      • Quote:
        “Frontal lobe’s roles [include] allowing us to represent our goals and plans... bring our behavior in line [with context] and act appropriately.”
        — Anthony Wagner [06:07]
    • Cysts like Weinstein’s can result in loss of impulse control or emotional regulation—though most arachnoid cysts are asymptomatic.
    • Example: A person with frontal lobe impairment might answer the phone in a doctor’s office—a “habitual response”—despite the context being inappropriate.

3. Legal Standards: Admitting Science in Court

• [07:58–10:45]
  • Frye and Daubert Standards:
    • Frye: Judges must decide if scientific evidence is “generally accepted” by the scientific community.
    • Daubert: Adds emphasis on reliability, relevance, and methodology.
    • In Weinstein’s case, a special Frye hearing determined whether PET scans were valid evidence.
      • Quote:
        “The Frye Standard... is to have experts... weigh in on whether or not this new scientific method is generally accepted... setting up the judge as... gatekeeper.”
        — Anthony Wagner [08:28]
  • Challenge: The PET scan proved a cyst existed but could not definitively link it to Weinstein’s actions.
    • “The scan proved he had a cyst... but that’s about all it showed.”
      — Amy Padula [07:25]

4. The “Brain Defense” and Its Impact

• [10:45–13:30]
  • Defense Argument: Weinstein’s lawyer contended his client shouldn’t be fully responsible due to impaired control over his actions.
    • Quote:
      “That he’s not fully in control. At the very least, he should be held less responsible.”
      — Legal Expert/Commentator [10:45]
  • Prosecution Worries: The prosecution feared the compelling visual of a brain abnormality could unduly sway the jury, regardless of causality (11:22–12:45).
    • “It is so tempting to go from brain abnormality to absolving of guilt in the minds of some people at least.”
      — Legal Expert/Commentator [11:38]
  • Outcome: Judge allowed the evidence; Weinstein ultimately pleaded guilty to manslaughter (not murder), sentenced to 7–21 years.
    • “Arguably, brain imaging really reduced someone’s sentence where you had a charge of second degree murder down to manslaughter.”
      — Legal Expert/Commentator [13:17]
  • Reflection: Weinstein showed no further violence through 12 years in prison; the cyst was never removed due to risk.

5. The Tension: Science vs. Law

• [17:27–21:20]
  • Amy Padula: Neuroimaging’s entry into the courts has fundamentally altered legal arguments about criminal intent.
  • Anthony Wagner: Science requires high evidence standards and repeated trials; courts have to make immediate decisions on individual cases.
    • Quote:
      “The courts have a different challenge. They have a singular case... They have to make a determination. You can’t punt it down the road.”
      — Anthony Wagner [18:12]
  • Adina Roskes (Neuroethicist): Science makes general claims about populations, but law deals with individuals; translating science to the courtroom is fraught.
    • “When you’re talking about neuroimaging, the law is typically concerned with... individual acts. And it’s really hard to take... science... apply it to these individual acts.”
      — Adina Roskes [20:03]
  • Legal Perspective: Eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, yet allowed; maybe juries should see more evidence, even with limitations (21:34).
    • “It would be helpful if we had more evidence rather than less. So I’m a bit concerned about pulling evidence off the table.”
      — Legal Expert/Commentator [21:34]

6. The Technology Advances: fMRI and AI

• [22:28–25:41]
  • Rise of fMRI: Emerged in the 90s, now the main technique for mapping brain function (22:35).
  • Current Frontiers:
    • Combination of fMRI, machine learning, and behavioral data aims to detect mental states.
      • Quote:
        “FMRI has been used in combination with machine learning tools... to detect mental states... Like is the person remembering... or perhaps lying versus not lying.”
        — Anthony Wagner [24:00]
    • Brain-based lie detection is a scientific focus but far from court admissibility; lab settings can’t recreate “real” stakes or lies (24:33–26:00).
      • “It’s really hard science to do... we just don’t know.”
        — Anthony Wagner [25:41]
  • Potential and Limitations: Data are still too generalized; no consensus that these tools can reliably “read minds” or distinguish lies at the individual level.

7. The Big Philosophical Question: Are We Just Our Brains?

• [26:22–26:57]
  • Agency vs. Biology:
    • Ongoing debate: Are our actions governed by biology alone? Is consciousness explainable by neural activity?
      • “There are these deep questions about whether our private experiences versus this brain activity... could they just be one and the same thing or are they just fundamentally different?”
        — Legal Expert/Commentator [26:22]
  • As neuroscience progresses, it may reshape both our justice system and our philosophical understanding of self and responsibility.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “My brain made me do it.” — Episode theme [10:56]
• “It is so tempting to go from brain abnormality to absolving of guilt.” — Legal Expert/Commentator [11:38]
• “FMRI today is the dominant technique used to try to understand brain function.” — Anthony Wagner [22:35]
• “There are these deep questions about whether... our experiences... are just fundamentally different [from brain activity].” — Legal Expert/Commentator [26:22]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:10–04:49]: Herbert Weinstein’s crime, arrest, and discovery of the brain cyst
• [05:10–07:25]: Neuroscience of frontal lobe and behavior
• [07:58–10:45]: Legal standards (Frye, Daubert) and evidence debates
• [10:45–13:30]: The “brain defense,” plea deal, and impact on sentencing
• [17:27–21:20]: Challenges of bringing neuroscience into court
• [22:28–25:41]: Rise of fMRI, AI, and hopes/limits of brain-based lie detection
• [26:22–26:57]: Philosophical reflections on agency and responsibility

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Conclusion

The Weinstein case opened the door for neuroscience in American courtrooms—a door that has only widened with advances in neuroimaging and AI. But the episode highlights the persistent tension: courts must decide quickly, yet science demands caution. And the ultimate question—how much are we in control, and how much are we at the mercy of our brains?—remains both scientifically and philosophically unexplainable.

Recommended Further Reading:

• The Brain Defense by Kevin Davis

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Transcript

[Sponsor/Host]

Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. They say that Claude is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow. So for developers that looks like Claude code, it runs in your terminal, reads your code base, and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without you hand holding it through every step. Anthropic committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by an advertiser's agenda. Ready to tackle bigger problems. Get started with Claude today at Claude. AI unexplainable.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

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[Narrator/Amy Padula]

The year was 1991 and Herbert Weinstein was a retired ad executive.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

He's 65 years old and he's living in Manhattan on a 12 story apartment.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

I called up Josh May to tell me this story. He's an ethics professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

Gets into an argument with his wife at the time and he apparently got into such a fit that he strangled her and then tried to make it look like a suicide by pushing her body out of the 12 story window.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

There was a 911 call. The officers responded to claims that a woman may have jumped. When the police arrived, they saw a woman lying on the sidewalk in broad daylight and they saw a window open in the building above. Weinstein was in the lobby. One of the officers asked the man if he lived there. He did. He replied and gave them his name. He said he lived upstairs with his wife Barbara. He didn't know where she was. Then Weinstein and the officers went up to the 12th floor. He got agitated once they reached the apartment. Where was she? Why were there officers there? The officer told him that there was a woman dead on the sidewalk. And Weinstein's like, is it Barbara?

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

He was acting kind of strangely. Apparently seemed a bit unconcerned that his wife had just died and that he was being a suspect in this case.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

The officers asked him questions, why do you have a scratch on your face? And they noticed that one of his hands was black and Blue with a spot of blood on it. And so then he came clean.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

There were witnesses or people who saw that he had pushed the body out. And he pretty readily confessed to it, to everything.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

He confessed to strangulation. He confessed to throwing her out the window in a panic. And he admitted to covering up the crime. And so the officers arrested him. Weinstein's defense attorney was struck by how relaxed his client seemed in the days after the crime, and so he ordered a psychiatric evaluation. The man's history indicated nothing glaring. He had no criminal record, no history of violence, and there was no known motive. His defense team did a PET scan, basically a snapshot of his brain. What they found was shocking. And in the ensuing trial, People v. Weinstein, it was the first time a judge allowed a PET scan as evidence to determine the defendant's guilt or innocence. What I find so fascinating, though, is that this PET scan sort of opened up a Pandora's box in the courts, as one New York Times writer put it, this case was arguably the moment that neuroscience began to transform the American legal system. Today. What is the role of neuroscience in the law and what are its limits? I'm Amy Padula, and this is unexplainable. So when Weinstein's PET scan came back, the image revealed something alarming. A big, dark circle.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

He had a orange sized cyst pressing on his frontal lobe.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

It was an arachnoid cyst, which forms in the arachnoid tissue of the brain. There are sort of multiple layers of protective tissue that surround the brain. The PET scan showed diminished glucose metabolism near the cyst.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

The arachnoid, sort of the middle layer predominantly has cerebral spinal fluid in it. These tissues essentially provide some protection to the brain.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

Anthony Wagner is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. So the cyst was on the left side of Weinstein's brain.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

Essentially, it's sort of a filling up. It's a little sac within the arachnoid space. It's the filling up of that space with cerebral spinal fluid. And so it begins to fill up. It can actually sort of impinge on the underlying brain tissue. In a small percentage of cases, it could impact brain function. Most individuals who have arachnoid cysts, there are no consequences for behavior, for neural function, but a small percentage it can. And so it's this sort of impinging on the brain that can perhaps change brain function for some individuals.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

Weinstein's cyst was also critically pressing up against his frontal lobe

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

at a high level. We know a lot about the Frontal lobes, the frontal lobe's roles in allowing us to sort of represent our goals, our plans, to. To represent the context that we're in, and to try to bring our behavior in line, act appropriately within a particular context.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

So Anthony says, for instance, if you had a wound in this area of the brain, your behavior might change. Say you're in your doctor's office. Maybe the phone rings. Someone with damage in that part of the brain might simply just pick up the phone.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

That's a habitual response. These are things we do with phones. But given the context in which one is in, it's not your home, it's not your office, it's your doctor's office. Most of us would not sort of go ahead and pick up the phone, right? So lateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or lateral prefrontal cortex interacting with other brain regions allow us to represent our goals, our context, bring our behavior in line with, and to produce contextually appropriate behavior. One might be a bit more impulsive. On average, individuals who have prefrontal lesions or impairment in prefrontal function might be a bit more impulsive. They might struggle to regulate emotion. They might struggle to regulate overlearned or habitual behaviors that are not context relevant.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

So Weinstein's defense team has the scan at their disposal. The prosecution was really anxious about it because even though Weinstein had already admitted to what he had done, was he going to get off easy because of the cyst? Because maybe Weinstein was one of the unlucky ones that did have cognitive impairment. But it's tricky. The pet image was taken after the crime was committed, not the day of the crime. The scan proved he had a cyst in his brain, but that's about all it showed.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

One of the challenges for the courts is to try to figure out what evidence should they allow in either the prosecution or the defense. One side wants to bring the evidence forward. And do you just have a free for all, or is there some process upon which or by which the court should be making these decisions?

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

We actually have a special process in the court system to help us figure out what scientific evidence is admitted and not admitted. One is something called the Frye Standard. Today we have another one called Dobert.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

The Fry Standard at the highest level is to have experts or have one or both sides of the case weigh in on whether or not this new scientific method is generally accepted as doing the thing that it's being proffered to do in that particular case. Sort of setting up the judge as essentially the gatekeeper. Should I let this particular scientific evidence enter the courtroom, be presented to the jury. Does it meet this set of criteria? What do we know about that? And so in Fry hearings and Daubert hearings, these are pretrial hearings where there's presentation from both sides about the state of the science.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

In the Weinstein case, the judge conducted a special hearing for the scan, and the Fry standard was applied. If he found that the PET scan was a generally accepted technological tool, then experts could testify about whether that scan supported a claim of brain dysfunction. They could argue that because of this cyst and its location near the frontal lobe, Weinstein lacked the capacity to behave normally, that he had gone temporarily insane. But this hearing would also give the prosecution the opportunity to ask questions and bring in experts to argue like, well, just because Weinstein's frontal lobe was affected, it doesn't mean it could cause violent behavior, and it doesn't follow that it caused him to commit this crime. Biology says one thing. There was a cyst on this man's brain. We know that from the PET scan. But Josh May says in the law, the law is interested in something else.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

Really, in the law, it's not largely about the science. It's about, you know, can you convince a jury?

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

Okay. So the judge pored over the testimonies of physicians and scientists who had defended both arguments that the scan showed that the cyst could reasonably have impacted how he behaved. Other experts testified that the mere existence of the cyst was not the cause of this man's actions. So Weinstein's lawyer suggests that his client should not be held responsible for his actions because of this, because of the presence of this. That's essentially the argument.

[Sponsor/Host]

Yep.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

That he's not fully in control. At the very least, he should be held less responsible. The question here is about whether he really had control over it, and so that could be a mitigating factor.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

This is really what we call the brain defense. Basically, my brain made me do it. Was Weinstein in control of what he did, or was his brain impacted by this cyst in this specific area of the brain that. That we know controls executive function, personality, and some behavior. Because of that, did he make a sudden, awful choice?

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

The district attorney got worried that a jury would possibly acquit if they saw this large, you know, cyst pressing on his frontal lobe?

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

Basically. Oh, so there's a cyst on his brain. They might assume his brain made him do it and then let him off.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

The prosecution, I think it's mostly that they're worried that even if it's a bad argument that a jury might be swayed by it. And especially in Weinstein's case, the brain imaging is very powerful, compelling evidence that there is that brain abnormality. And it is so tempting to go from brain abnormality to absolving of guilt in the minds of some people at least.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

It's a hard argument for the prosecution. They want to argue that this man was not insane and that he committed this crime, that he admitted to it, sister, not he did this.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

So I think that the prosecution is hedging their bets there and they're worried that some people might make that inference, even if it's not a very good one. I think that's exactly what the district attorney was worried about, is that this could be convincing or compelling to a jury. And it is right. If you can have some. What feels like very solid, hard evidence through some actual physical object pressing on his brain, that can be pretty compelling to some juries.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

In October of 1992, the judge decided that Weinstein's scan could be admitted as evidence. But they couldn't explicitly say that the cyst caused him to be violent. Tensions rose. The prosecution worried that this was the end of their case. The PET scan was so promising, it could sway the jury. And then on the morning of jury selection, the prosecution team made a deal. They would let Weinstein plead guilty for a less significant sentence.

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

Arguably, brain imaging really reduced someone's sentence where you had a charge of second degree murder down to manslaughter.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

Weinstein was sentenced to seven to 21 years in prison. He also never got the cyst removed. It was too risky. But the thing that strikes me the most, the entire time he was there more than 12 years, he showed no signs of violence. After the break. How neuroimaging changed and entered the courts after Weinstein. And what's next?

[Sponsor/Host]

Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. If you are the kind of person who goes down a rabbit hole and then stays there, or who keeps pulling at a quantity question until it clicks, they say Claude was built for that kind of thinking. For developers that looks like Claude code. It runs in your terminal, reads your code base, and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring or debugging without you handholding it through every step. I texted my friend who uses Claude and told him I was making an ad about Claude and asked why I should use Claude and or Claude code. It's just really good at coding. Lol. He said, what does that mean? I said, with it, I can build things. I wouldn't have time for myself or ability for myself in many cases, he said. Nice, I said. Anthropic says they are committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by someone else's advertisement taking you out of the deep work, ready to tackle bigger problems. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Unexplainable and see why some problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Support for Unexplainable comes from Shopify. Every worthwhile journey starts with a handful of granola and a brain full of dreams. Dreams like what if I discover a new species or a new genus? Dreams like what if I paint a masterpiece that whispers some eternal truth to everyone who sees it? Dreams of winning the big race car trophy with your big fast race car? Or dreams of building your own thriving business? That last one is a dream Shopify can help you with. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and across according to their data, at least 10% of all E commerce in the United States. Start with your own design studio and choose from hundreds of ready to use templates to make your online store. You can use their AI tools to help you with copywriting and glamming up your product photos and then use the platform to build a marketing campaign. You can turn those what ifs into a thriving business with Shopify Today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today and at shopify.com unexplainable go to shopify.com unexplainable that is shopify.com unexplainable

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

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[Legal Expert/Commentator]

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[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

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[Legal Expert/Commentator]

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[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

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[Legal Expert/Commentator]

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[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

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[Narrator/Amy Padula]

The decision to admit the pet scan in Weinstein's trial in 1992 had enormous implications. It arguably pushed neuroimaging into the courtroom for good. In 2005, a super high profile Supreme Court case called Roper vs Simmons overturned the juvenile death penalty, an argument that was made citing neuroimaging research showing differences between teenage and adult brains. Neuroimaging has this much of an impact on the Court system, a system that operates completely differently than science. And yet both fields are sort of bound up in each other, knotted like cat's cradle.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

You know, scientists, we have high thresholds for wanting to draw an inference and believe that we've discovered something and are comfortable sort of reporting it out to the broader scientific community. We want there to be fairly convincing evidence that it's more likely than not, due to chance, that we see something. We still have the luxury that when we do our experiments, we should have, and we typically set our standards exceptionally high, and we want to have compelling evidence before we're going to draw an inference. So we can wait out, we can do additional experiments, we can gather more evidence before we actually make a decision, make a determination, write a paper and say, hey, I think I've discovered X. The courts have a different challenge. They have a singular case, it's sitting in front of them. They have a particular defendant and they have to make a determination. Look, we have to make a decision. That jury or that judge has to make a determination. You can't punt it down the road. You can't do another trial five years from now and get more evidence. The jury has to make some determination, the basis upon their decision about guilty, not guilty, the ability to sort of form intent, the ability to engage in more reasoned, goal directed, sort of thoughtful sort of behavior. That seems like it's often a key question in these trials.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

I keep thinking about something Adina Roskes told me. She's a philosopher of neuroscience who specializes in cognitive neuroimaging and neuroethics. She says scientists are interested in understanding how things work and what we know and don't know at a moment in time. But that is a very different project than holding someone responsible for their actions.

[Sponsor/Host]

We often have to average across multiple trials, often across multiple people, in order to get any kind of general statement about how brains do the kinds of things that they do. And what we reach is some kind of biological, mechanistic understanding. Actually, the level of neuroimaging, we rarely get to the level of mechanism. What the kinds of results of the science give you tend to be general statements about populations. When you're talking about neuroimaging, the law is typically concerned with social structure and individual acts. And it's really hard to take the kind of science that's predicated on populations and generalities and apply it to these individual acts. And the law works with a very different framework than the sciences work with. I mean, it's very unclear how to apply knowledge in one domain. To another domain. I don't think there are any clear deductions

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

if the evidence is imperfect, if an image of a brain only suggests something about that brain without being definitive about it. Should this kind of evidence have been admitted in a case like Weinstein's?

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

After all, I do think that we have to compare it to other kinds of evidence that we already allow into courts. And really science has revealed that a lot of the evidence we admit is not very reliable. Things like eyewitness testimony is not very reliable, we know, and yet we don't banish it from courts. And I think part of that reason is that we often don't have a lot of evidence when it comes to these very high stakes decisions. And we're trying to figure out, you know, whether somebody has committed murder or at least a certain degree of murder. And it would be helpful if we had more evidence rather than less. So I'm a bit concerned about pulling evidence off of the table and presuming that juries aren't capable of, of trying to assess that evidence. It's a hard issue to resolve, but I think it's better in general to give them more evidence rather than less.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

A more fine tuned technology emerged after PET called fmri, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

FMRI is really the workhorse now of modern sort of human systems neuroscience. It's transformed our field in so many different ways. FMRI today is the dominant technique used to try to understand brain function.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

FMRI looks at changes in oxygenated blood flow in the brain that show changes in brain activity. Anthony Wagner says after FMRI broke through in the 90s, there have been these bursts of development with the technology. And another phase has been underway for a while.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

The combining of current modern day AI tools and systems with behavioral phenotypes of people, behavioral, rich behavioral assaying of people, but also underlying neural signals. And I think that that's going to give rise to an explosion in the field of neuroscience as well as obviously in many other fields. So we have these moments of sort of what seem like bursts of discovery, often tied to changes in what we can do as scientists, the techniques we have. But on the whole, science is slow, it's incremental, it's accumulating evidence over years.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

He says we can now get closer and closer to understanding the brain at increasing levels of specificity. Right now, FMRI has been used in combination with machine learning tools, classifiers that

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

can be trained over brain patterns to detect mental states. Like is the person remembering the face that they're being presented at this Moment versus perceiving the face as novel. Are they perhaps lying versus not lying, lying?

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

There's been a tremendous push from the mid-2000s onward to develop a reliable brain based lie detector. Anthony was actually part of a huge effort through the MacArthur foundation to assess the literature on the validity of brain based lie detection.

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

The details of what's in somebody's mind are still fairly limited. I think. It's not clear how far we'll get, but I'm pretty confident that leveraging brain patterns as inputs to AI models will allow us to do. We're already beginning to see this on the visual perceptual reconstruction. We will do even better in terms of being able to. It's a little scary, this notion of mind reading, trying to understand and reconstruct. And I think that those discoveries will continue to come and there'll be many others. It's pretty clear to me that there's not consensus within the neuroscience community that FMRI can be used to differentiate, with a known precision, differentiate between truth and lying. It's really hard science to do. I think of myself as a memory scientist. Some of the problems we work on, they're easier problems because in a lab setting you really cannot create lies of real world experiences with real stakes that are going to elicit the kind of potential threat.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

It's very hard to concoct a lie

[Neuroscientist/Anthony Wagner]

in a lab when you're lying. If you're caught lying, you cannot create experimental settings that are analogs of what might be happening in the real world. The short answer to the question, is it too early? The answer is yes, it's too early from my perspective, which is we just don't know.

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

So brain based lie detection is unlikely to get anywhere near something like the fry standard any day soon. But it could. I keep thinking about something Josh May asked. Are we really just these physical things controlled by our brains and do we actually have any agency over our actions?

[Legal Expert/Commentator]

That's still heavily debated. You might think that we have made some progress, but even neuroscientists will tell you, especially when it comes to consciousness, our experiences, we really just have no idea how that arises in the brain. And there are these deep questions about whether that is a fundamentally different thing. Our private experiences versus this brain activity, could they just be one and the same thing or are they just fundamentally different? And that's still a hotly debated issue in philosophy, but also in neuroscience. There are these long standing philosophical questions about does that mean that we are just our brains?

[Narrator/Amy Padula]

The answer to that big question is best left to neuroscience. And as science evolves, our understanding of justice could too. If you want to read more about the Weinstein case, you can read a great book by by journalist Kevin Davis called the Brain Defense. This episode was produced by me, Amy Padula. It was edited by Joanna Solotaroff, mixing and sound design from Joe Plord, and music from Noam Hassenfeld. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors. Sally Helm is the fact that brain information travels at speeds up to 268 mph and Bird Pinkerton headed for the subway and as soon as she walked down the stairs she looked at the walls white tiles in a station. She must be close so she got on the first A train and headed towards Manhattan. As always, thank you to Brian Resnick for co creating the show with Noam and Bird. If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It's very easy to do. Just go to Vox.com members. You'll get access to all of Vox's journalism. For those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. If you can't join our membership, that's okay. If you wanted to leave us a nice review on your podcast platform five stars or a written review, we would really really appreciate it. Or you can tell someone in your life that they might want to listen to the show. Those things make a real difference. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media podcast network. We will be back soon with another episode about everything we don't yet know.

[Sponsor/Host]

Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. They say that Claude is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow. So for developers, that looks like Claude code, it runs in your terminal, reads your code base, and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring or debugging without you hand holding it through every step. Anthropic committed to not running ads in Claude so So when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by an advertiser's agenda. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at Claude AI Unexplainable.