Neuroscience and the courts - this is your brain on adolescence
The Law and Neuroscience Project is a $10 million multidisciplinary brain secrets study that was launched last year, by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and with the help of 25 universities. The goal of the research is to provide "policy recommendations and materials of use to judges, attorneys and law professors concerning the appropriate courtroom application of brain science."
According to Newscientist.com, the project has undertaken research intended to establish criteria for reliable lie-detection technologies, an area that is dangerous at best when we are dealing with the law and in-court testimony.
Whether the technology is eventually deemed reliable enough for the courts will ultimately be decided by the judges. Let's hope they are wise enough not to be seduced by a machine that claims to determine truthfulness at the flick of a switch.
"To the Justice System: this is a brain on adolescence" is the title of a blog post by Adrienne Edwards, about Sylvia Bunge, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and part of the Law and Neuroscience Project, who has been researching the impact of brain science on juvenile justice:
She wants to use what she knows about the teenage brain to help society deal with young risk-takers. Bunge feels that current legal attitudes toward teen criminals needs revamping.“Do you put someone away for life who lost his temper at 13, or do you acknowledge that his prefrontal cortex has matured since then?,” she asks. “The law is slow to change, but it will, over time, incorporate scientific evidence.”
She has found that there is a "control network" in our brains that involves the prefontal cortex, which assists in resisting impulses and ignoring distractions, and that adults are better able to utilize this control network than are children or adults with damage to the prefontal cortex. One potential application of this research is in prevention - Bunge has found, in research with elementary school children, that by engaging in activities such as playing a certain game every day, access to the prefontal cortex can be increased:
“We’re not only training their ability to tackle novel problems, but to control their impulses and ignore irrelevant information as well.” She hopes this research will eventually translate into a training program that could be used for rehabilitation in juvenile detention centers.Bunge and Knight are particularly interested in the possibility of intervention for children from low socio-economic backgrounds, who are more likely than the average teenager to commit crimes and may have less adult guidance and education. They want to help these kids learn to make better decisions early — before they get in trouble with the law.
“We want to understand not just the influences that affect criminal responsibility,” says Knight, but we want to get in earlier in the food chain to examine exactly what the effects of socio-economic status are in brain development. Do they make you more or less likely to get in trouble with the law? And can we intervene at an early age and improve those skills?”
This sort of research is an excellent example of prevention and rehabilitation that we can and should be doing with our criminal justice dollars, rather than using them to prosecute and incarcerate more and more of our citizens each year.
