Brain Culture Part 1
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How does Brain Culture introduce neuroscience's impact on society?
Thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC. For the next three weeks, we've got something a little different for you brainy More or Less regulars. As part of a season of Radio 4 programmes exploring the rise of neuroscience, the former number 10 Downing Street head of strategy, Matthew Taylor, presents Brain Culture. In the first of his series exploring how neuroscience will change society, he asks how the justice system will change now that we can scan criminal brains.
Imagine a world where our institutions, our social attitudes and even the way we think of ourselves are influenced by our understanding of how brains work. Welcome to Brain Culture. Over recent decades, neuroscience and related disciplines have been the fastest growing areas of scientific inquiry. And now this work is coming out of the laboratory and starting to change the world around us. How about the scientists who are exploring the anatomy of evil, the brains of criminal psychopaths?
The types of crimes they commit are wide ranging. They include everything from simple drug possession and use all the way up to cold blooded murder. It's just now that we understand how their brains are different and how really dramatically different they truly are, it has a very powerful influence on the legal system, for example.
That's Dr. Kent Keel. He wants the legal system to see criminals, even serial killers, differently. In the first of three programs, I'll be exploring controversial new ideas of a criminal justice process shaped by brain science. But before we get to the stories of operating on paedophile brains or of lie detection using brain imaging, let's look at pioneering research work being done in Britain right now. It goes back to the basics, before any crime has been committed, by using functional brain scanning to explore what makes some adults and children behave badly in the first place.
I don't like the feel of your trousers today. You don't like these trousers today? No, no, you don't. Right, let's start off with... This is what we're going to do today. Stephen started the school with extremely antisocial behaviours. He would repeatedly attack other children.
Stephen, not his real name, is just seven, but he already has a track record of naughty behaviour. He goes to a special school in the south of England, where neuroscientists and teachers are developing new ways of responding to children like him. These children's brains just don't seem to respond as normal, and it's this that makes it so hard to help them behave in ways society finds acceptable. Stephen is one of the children who's having to learn automatic reactions that the rest of us just take for granted. Tara is his teacher.
So that's the speaking part of the lesson. You're going to do the speaking and I'm going to do the listening. A classic piece of Stephen's behaviour would be if he was playing a game with another child and he lost, then you would have the game equipment thrown across the classroom. He would try to physically attack the other child. If an adult came close, he would then attack the adult. If you withdrew, the behaviours didn't de-escalate. He didn't just calm himself down and get over losing. He would carry on escalating higher and higher until he had the reward of knowing that somebody else was hurt.
Stephen's willingness to hurt people may be the result of a problem of the way his brain works. 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.
Now what will happen in our brains if we see a fearful face is that crudely our amygdalas will respond.
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