Joshua Greene

put people in the scanner and you have them consider dilemmas like the switch case and dilemmas like the footbridge case, you'd see more activity related to a kind of emotional response in the footbridge case.

The stronger that response, the more people would say, no, you can't push the guy off the footbridge or whatever it is.

And we found something broadly consistent with that in that first neuroimaging study, which was published in 2001.

The cool thing about brain imaging is that you can look and see what's going on, but it's a very noisy signal and you don't have experimental control, right?

You can change what people are reading or are asked to think about, but you can't turn on or off some part of the brain.

Whereas a brain lesion, that part of the brain is permanently turned off, right?

And so the actual studies or the work that made me think to make that prediction about brain imaging was work with patients like the famous case of Phineas Gage.

Listen to this.

So Phineas Gage is the 19th century railroad foreman who was working on the railroad all the live long day in Vermont and got an iron spike through the front of his head.

And as a result, was fundamentally changed.

I mean, you might think that someone who had that kind of injury

They wouldn't be able to speak.

They wouldn't be able to ever do another math problem.

His sort of rational faculties and language faculties and just general sort of thinking ability remained intact.

But his emotions and his decision making were very much damaged.

And the way researchers who studied people like this, in particular, this is reported in a book called Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio, which I read as an undergrad, said these people, they know the words, but they don't hear the music.

They don't feel the music, that they don't have the emotional response.

When I read that book, I literally jumped up and down on my bed when I got to that passage.

I was like, this is what's going on in the footbridge case.

Is what's missing in these patients that have damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, sort of this is the part of your brain above your eyes in the middle of your forehead.