Seed Media Group: Blog
Saturday, December 12, 2009 • Events • by Eva Wisten • #
Neurolaw-lecture at Seed
SeedAM speaker Mike Gazzaniga talked about how neuroscience impacts the justice system.
“Our sense of self is reflected in the law. If we come to think of ourselves differently than we currently do as a consequence of modern research, then the law will change to match our new feelings about justice, retribution and punishment.”
Dr. Michael Gazzaniga is the Director of the Sage Centre for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, founder and editor-in-chief, emeritus of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, a past member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and founder of the Law and Neuroscience Project.
In the ‘60s, Gazzaniga worked with neurobiologist Roger Sperry, whose advancements in split-brain research would award him the 1981 Nobel Prize in medicine. The groundbreaking idea at the time was that the left and the right side of the brain operated as two systems that could respond independently of each other, without knowing what the other was doing.
One of the most famous experiments from the Sperry/Gazzaniga collaboration was performed on patients with split brains; their corpus callosum had been surgically severed as an attempt to treat epilepsy. The scientist team would flash an image of an apple to the patient’s right field of vision. Registered by the verbal left side of the brain, the patient would correctly identify that he saw an apple. When the image was flashed to the left visual field, the right side of the brain was unable to express what it had seen: The patient claimed to have seen nothing. But when asked to with their left hand choose what they had seen from a bag of objects, the patient was able to reach down and pick out an apple.
On this foundation, Gazzaniga went on to study concepts such as free will and neuroethics. He named the function in the left brain “the Interpreter”, observed its task of constantly narrating acts that are already committed and raised the question: how responsible are we for our actions?
“Do we have to have a guilty mind in order to be convicted?” Gazzaniga asked as he sat down in the lobby of Seed.
Gazzaniga heads the Law & Neuroscience Project, a committee formed to investigate how our new knowledge of neurobiology can be used and misused. Among other issues, Gazzaniga looks at the use of brain scans to determine a mental state. It’s about the idea of going “straight to the brain” to look for answers, and how neuroscience can be used to probe deeper than we can with behavioral psychology.
Surprisingly, public acceptance is currently way ahead of the science:
“Show Joe Six-pack a brain image of a criminal and they often quickly conclude it proves the legal argument being made at the time,” says Gazzaniga.
Neurolaw provides a lens through which we can see criminal acts as functions of a specific brain state, called forth by preceding and current situations. So do the notion of guilt rest in the intent? It’s a tricky question when experiments show that even the feeling of intent - and the memory of having had intent - can be induced in patients to the patients’ full conviction, much like the split- brain patients’ left halves would construct logical narratives explaining what the disconnected right brain was doing and why.
The philosophical challenge for the field of neurolaw is daunting. Fully integrating what neuroscience research imply into our understanding of human behavior, would have massive consequences. As Seed editor Joe Kloc asked at the end of the talk:
“The notion of determining what went wrong, fixing people, and letting them out would change law as we know it?”
“That’s right on the money,” says Gazzaniga.
Gazzaniga is now on his fifth decade surrounded by examples of the malleability of consciousness, of free will as an evasive concept. So how is neuroscience affecting our sense of self?
“We definitely see this march toward accepting the idea of determinism. My own way of thinking about the issue can be summed up by saying Brains are determined, but people are free. If you think about that, you will see what I mean.”