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
Our understanding of this behaviour circuit and the role it has in deviancy took a huge leap forward in 2002.
That's when a 40-year-old paedophile walked into a Kansas City hospital complaining of a headache.
Here's the doctor who was on duty that night, Russell Swerdlow.
This man, let's call him Fred, had lived a normal life until very suddenly his wife noticed him making sexual advances on her 11-year-old daughter.
After then finding a stash of child pornography in his cupboard, she called in the police, and he was about to start a community sentence when Dr Swerdlow intervened.
So you then undertake an examination?
It seemed Fred's brain tumour had turned him from a good citizen to a monster.
And in case the evidence wasn't already clear, when the tumour was removed, his behaviour returned to normal.
And when he started going off the tracks again, the doctor found the tumour had grown back.
Advances in neuroscience have often involved extreme cases like Fred's.
Scientists knew the prefrontal cortex was vital to our behaviour.
But Fred's case history, and by the way, ultimately he was let off his sentence, turned theory into vivid reality.
So putting it simply, removing the tumour from Fred's brain cured him of his paedophilia.
And what does this tell us, do you think, more generally about the nature of paedophilia or other forms of kind of sexual deviance?
Fred's case was important to science, but it also brings into sharper relief some pivotal questions for our ideas of crime and punishment posed by our greater understanding of brain processes.
And the issues don't just concern the most extreme cases.
Chris Frith is a leading British neuroscientist at University College London.
Given that the orbitofrontal cortex is where this self-control takes place, presumably if...
As science advances, we become more and more able to see what capacity people have in their orbitofrontal contacts.
That will go right to the issue of people's culpability for their actions.
Showing 301–320 of 407 · page 16 of 21
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