How Does Brain Regulate Behavior

I advocate for you to choose to not proceed with the fMRI scan. The fMRI scan has not be proven to be accurate in distinguishing whether or not a person is spontaneous lying or telling a reversed lie, also there is a serious difference between a deception and telling a lie and, if you are a constant liar there will be a vast amount of white matter in your brain. There are too many limitations with today’s technology and there is too little information on how exactly fMRI scans prove your innocence in the crime. There is a hypothesis that inferrers that the brain strains to tell a lie and that blood flows to the sector of the brain that is doing the most work (Stix, 2008). This theory has not been proven as to date and there’s no information confirming the credibility of the

Overall, this article describes numerous cases of people’s personality and behavior being drastically affected by various forms of brain damage, particularly to the frontal lobe. This is consistent with what we have learned about Phineas Gage and his dramatically changed personality. As such, the author, David Eagleman, concludes that humans are not really “free” and that we are all products of our brains’ physical state, meaning that the notion of all humans being equal in their decisions is fundamentally flawed. He therefore proposes modifying the criminal justice system so that sentencing is customized more for the particular offender, taking into account the functionality of the criminal’s brain,

Is our justice system fair? Is our justice system truly set out to do what it was meant to do? Or are there social factors and memory errors that come into play that can change a conviction outcome. In today’s court rooms we have, Defense attorneys, Prosecutors, judges, juries, evidence, forensics experts, witness testimonies, and of course the human memory. What better type of evidence than the human memory, right? Unfortunately, human memory is subject to the power of suggestion and unable to truly recall an event when told to recall. In other words, the story may not be the same as the one that actually happened the day of that event because many variables come into play like cross examinations and the way a question can be asked can alter the answer or how the event was perceived. The main focus of this paper is to see how the human brain is not able to effectively recall events which could possibly convict an innocent person of wrong doing. Also how lawyers use the misinformation effect to their advantage. In order to understand how something as simple as a question can decide a person’s faith we must first answer some questions. First, How does memory actually work and how is memory retrieved when your need to answer a question or being cross examined? Second, how does the misinformation effect play a role when a witness needs to testify against the defense or vice versa? Third, how can structuring a word or sentence effect the outcome of a conviction?

This is due to the fact that police officers will have evidence taken from the defendant’s brain scans, which produces “70 to 90 per cent of accuracy”. Thus, the defendant would have been proven guilty, before commencing trials. As well as, it is believed here that the use of brain scans by police and evidence would misdirect the Jury, as Dr Farahany states that jurors often tend to believe that science is the objective truth, therefore showing that if police officer are given the right to use brain scans on suspects, evidence taken from the scans in court would be regarded more sufficient than “witness interviews, testimony by the accused under cross examination, and even the person's body language”. United States v. John W. Hinckley Jr. present the above argument due to Jury not finding Hinckley not guilty by the reason brain scan image was central to jury’s decision.

In the article brain on fiction, A very interesting article by Annie Murphy Paul appeared in the New York Times yesterday. It was titled “Your Brain on Fiction” and deals with how the written word affects our brains. In the article, she talks about several studies done with functional MRIs (fMRI). A functional MRI looks at brain activation by revealing changes in blood flow. If a certain area of the brain is stimulated, then that area will receive increased blood flow and this can be measured with a functional MRI. Such testing is currently being looked at to perhaps develop a more reliable lie detector. It appears that different parts of the brain activate when someone is remembering an event as opposed to making it up. Hopefully, this technique

Neuroscience evidence has impacted some cases in the history. In 1991, the structural neuroimaging evidence was presented in the criminal proceeding, Herbert Weinstein was being tried for second-degree murder, he was the primary suspect in his wife’s death. It was believed that during the heated argument, he strangled her and threw her body from the window of their apartment to make it look like a suicide (Rojas-Burke, 1993). His defense attorney claimed that Weinstein is not responsible for his actions due to a mental defect. Where a large cyst located in his membranous casing of his brain had increased the pressure on his frontal cortex, metabolic imbalances in the region that resulted to decreased his ability to tell right from wrong.

Humans have used deception and trickery as a means of protection, survival, and personal gain from the very beginning. At the primitive level this deception was required, for example, by using camouflage to catch prey. Move forward several thousand years, and human deception can result in massive profit gains, injury or death to others, and identity fraud, among many others. Across different civilizations a variety of techniques were devised to seek the truth from those who wished to deceive others. Currently a new technology aims to more accurately read minds by using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, by mapping the brain’s activity. The implications of this technology are immense; however there are many ethical hurdles to be crossed before it can become more mainstream. This paper examines the practicality as well as the ethical hurdles of using fMRI for lie detection.

It is very rare to study something that is as fascinating yet as bewildering as the distinctive paradox, that is the human brain. Every individuals conflicting behaviour and elaborate character that make them the person they are must have a justification. I originally established a fascination in forensic psychology as I read about a sequence of homicides committed by Gary Ridgway, otherwise known as the “Green River Killer”. Upon discovery of this case, questions began to pervade in my head about what may be the cause for an individual to execute such things, and just how someone’s mind could be so peculiarly dissimilar to my own.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain brings up interesting points about the brain and legal jurisdiction. There are no “main characters”, rather Eagleman discusses an intriguing idea throughout the book. The idea of the criminal system using neurology is unheard of, but makes perfect sense. Eagleman describes the brain and its connections to personality and decisions in his book.

Many young adolescents who have committed horrendous crimes have been a huge topic amongst the Supreme Court. Whether young adolescents are viewed as innocent, naive children to the public, this not changed the fact they can commit brutal crimes. In spite of the fact that adolescents have committed brutal crimes such as murder, one needs to understand that their brains are not as fully developed as an adult brain would be. Adolescents should not be trialed to a life sentence or attend adult prisons; however, they should be punished for their actions and undergo rehabilitation programs to help them be prepared to fit in with the rest of society.

For example, a “relatively high proportion of criminals meet the criteria for psychopathy, a condition that is associated with frequent acts of deception and with alterations in both structural MRI and fMRI studies” (Farah et al., 2014). Furthermore, we also need to account for individual differences in the neural systems involved in lying (Farah et al., 2014). For now, we should stick to more reliable structural neuroimaging technology, such as MRI or CT scans, as evidence to support that someone has suffered brain trauma and disease and may not be culpable of their actions (Moriarty,

Due to its primary role in processing memory and emotional reactions, over the last decade and a half psychologists have been linking the amygdala to psychopathy. It is involved in aversive conditioning and instrumental learning and is thus involved in all the processes that, when impaired, produce the same functional impairments displayed by psychopaths. Two famous studies conducted by Tiihonen and Kiehl respectively have confirmed this. Tiihonen used a volumetric MRI to test and confirm the positive correlation between low amygdaloid volume and a high degree of psychopathy in violent criminals (measured by the Hare checklist-revised) while Kiehl used a functional MRI to prove reduced amygdala response during an emotional memory task in individuals who scored high on the Hare checklist-revised. However, both these studies along with numerous others were conducted using violent offenders as subjects rather than individuals with psychopathy. Although many psychopaths do exhibit violent tendencies, not all violent offenders are necessarily psychopaths. A study conducted by Raine is one of the few that did focus only on individuals exhibiting psychopathy. In his study Raine was able to show reduced prefrontal grey matter in his test subjects. Unfortunately though, he was unable to differentiate between grey matter in different regions of the prefrontal cortex. It is however clear that there is one region of the frontal cortex that could be

This article from the Journal of Forensic Sciences examines the detection of deception and how it is altered by audio electrodermal biofeedback training. In the study, 68 undergraduate volunteers were required to commit a fake murder and then completed five lie detector test to determine the facts involved with the act. Moreover, the detection of deception was significantly higher in the subjects that received simultaneous auditory biofeedback during the lie detector tests. Results suggest that this type of biofeedback is helpful in determining whether or not an individual is being dishonest. Furthermore, this article should examine subjects who have actually committed crimes rather than mocked them; to improve reliability of the results found

This physical sensation is tied linked to deception when individuals display signs of stress during investigative questioning. Polygraph accuracy, however, is widely criticized as a result of questioner bias and sole reliance on the PNS for detecting deception. Empirical evidence stems from cases in which individuals remain calm while lying and are able to pass polygraph exams easily. Such was the case the release of the Gary Ridgway, who passed a polygraph following the murder of roughly 48 women. While there is much warranted criticism of the accuracy of polygraph testing in lie detection, it was only recently that psychologists like Langleben began to use MRI technology to determine consistent patterns of cognitive activity specific to deception. From various fMRI studies conducted over the past decades, there has been a surge empirical evidence to support the claims that fMRI use in lie detection is far more accurate and reliable than outdated polygraph

Forensic neuropsychology is a rapidly growing subspecialty of clinical neuropsychology in which the results of clinical neuropsychological assessments are used to address legal questions in the courtroom (Horton & Hartlage, 2003). Neuropsychology was defined by Meier (1974) as “the scientific study of brain behavior relationships,” neuropsychological performance may be influenced by both organic and environmental variables (Horton & Puente, 1986). Contemporary neurodiagnostic imaging methods such as positron emission tomography (PET) scanning and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can often clearly identify structural brain lesions (Kertesz, 1994), but in more subtle cases (e.g., mild concussion) neuroimaging is inadequate at identifying changes