Matthew Taylor
speaker
407 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Matthew Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm watching his lesson on a monitor alongside Alice Jones, a neuroscientist from Goldsmiths University and former UCL.
Alice and her colleagues have looked at the brains of children who've developed a condition the scientists now want to see officially recognised.
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.
So these children, given the same scan as other children, when you show them stimuli, which frighten faces, which ought to lead to the amygdala lighting up, as it were, it's not lighting up, or it's lighting up in a much less pronounced way.
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.
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.
It is the, it was my brain that made me do it, gov, defence.
We already have that defence in certain areas.
Diminished responsibility.
Diminished responsibility, yeah, in certain forms of epilepsy.
Acts committed while the person was asleep.
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 organisation of the brain?
And the answer is it isn't.
And I think we might and we should see the role of punishment moving progressively more and more in the direction of trying to reorganise the brain of an individual whose actions are not acceptable to society.
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 Blatmore's predictions come true will in part depend on a new, still tentative area of study, the limbic system of the brain.
Showing 281–300 of 407 · page 15 of 21
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