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Brain of a criminal as evidence

16.03.2017

Sometimes people do illegal things simply because they didn’t think about the consequences, or because they obeyed some impulse, or just for fun. And it is quite difficult to distinguish someone who "just didn't think" from someone who really wanted to do exactly what he did, for the sake of some kind of benefit - you need to look for motives, delve into psychology, etc. But the task can be to simplify if you include neuroscience in the case.

Reed Montague (Read Montague) and his colleagues from the Virginia Polytechnic University and other US research centers compared the brain activity of people who were asked to do an illegal thing: according to the scenario, the participants in the experiment, several dozen men and women, had to carry some " contraband" in the suitcase. In some cases, it was known that the suitcase contained “contraband”, while in others it was required to choose from two or five suitcases, one of which contained something that was not allowed, and then you could only guess what you were carrying with you. The probability that you would be caught also depended on whether there was a guard at the checkpoint - there were ten such checkpoints, and at some there were no guards.

An article in PNAS says that the scans showed a clear difference in brain function between those who took the suitcase, being sure that it contained "contraband", and those who were not sure and took the suitcase "just like that." However, these differences were clearly manifested only when the participants in the experiment saw in advance which checkpoints had guards and which did not, and only then chose a suitcase for themselves.

In this case, we are not talking about behavior - everyone had to carry the suitcase one way or another - but about the state of the brain. For some reason, the difference between intentional misconduct and unintentional arose only when a person could assess the degree of risk, that is, the number of guards and the likelihood of choosing the "wrong" suitcase. By and large, we see here that at the level of the brain, confidence in the incompetence of one's actions is clearly different from the situation when a person simply does something for the sake of the process itself, hoping that everything will work out.

True, although we have said that something like this neurobiological test could help forensic scientists distinguish between reputable criminals and unintentional ones, it is not clear how exactly this should work in practice. It is necessary to clarify that in this case, it was not the background activity of the brain that was determined, which could be the “calling card” of the criminal (in general, the question is whether there is such a “background activity” in nature, unless in mentally ill people), but about situational changes in work of nerve centers. That is, if we have a criminal situation, the brain can work this way or that, and depending on the result, we can judge the intentions of a person.

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