Sunday e-mail 24th March

Neuroscience and how to tinker with the brain; what to expect this week

Now that we know all about the Explosively Violent Lobotomy it’s time to cogitate briefly on neuroscience. What is it, what does it mean for crime, and what does it mean for you? (And if you don’t know about it, there’s another thing you don’t know. You don’t know what you’re missing. Check out last weeks newsletter now! You can get there from here.)

Broadly, neuroscience is the study of how the nervous system is organised and how it works. The basic building-blocks of the nervous system are special biological cells called neurons (or neurones if you went to a posh university): hence the name. Neurons communicate with each other, building pathways that allow you to do all kinds of wonderful things, from seeing your laptop, to drinking your coffee or planning a hold-up. The very structures in your brain are composed of neurons doing just that: speaking to each other, sending messages, exciting or inhibiting activity in other neurons.

You may have heard of cognitive neuroscience. It is the special area of research concerned with finding out how the functions of the (physical) brain can give rise to (abstract) thoughts, perceptions, and plans. When Phineas Gage suffered massive trauma to his brain, functions like response inhibition were affected. In other words, when Gage felt such emotions as fear or anger, he was unable to do anything but respond to them. He no longer had the psychological capacity to ignore them.

No surprise, then, that some psychologists have pointed to certain kinds of frontal lobe damage as the ultimate cause of impulsive crimes like assault or petty theft. Maybe certain criminals are simply unable to control their urges, because they lack the requisite hardware to do so.

This naturally raises the question of whether such criminals can truly be said to have free will, and, if not, whether we can truly hold them responsible for their crimes. We discussed that very topic in a now-classic newsletter called How You Became Raskolnikov (and, if you haven’t read that particular piece of pandemonious prose, what are you waiting for?)

No surprise, either, that there has been interest in ‘fixing’ criminals. If their brains make them bad, perhaps we can tinker with the hardware and make them good again. This week’s brilliant bullet list features five such tinkerings:

TREPANNING: One treatment for disease of the cranium’s insides is to literally drill or scrape a hole into it, thus exposing what lies beneath. So-called ‘lunatics’ were treated in this way, and so too were ‘demoniacs’ – that is, those who had been possessed. If a demon had taken up residence inside the skull, the hole would provide a convenient exit.

ELECTROCONVULSIVE THERAPY: Two or three times a week, direct current is applied to the head. The hope is to cure psychological syndromes that have otherwise proven resistant. Depression is just one example. In the case of the author Ernest Hemingway, the result was suicide. ECT was used a great deal in the second quarter of the last century. At length, the public began hearing negative reports (they heard about Hemingway among others), and anti-depressants became much more widely available.

CORPUS COLLOSOTOMY: This means literally severing the bundle of fibres that connect the two halves (or hemispheres) of the brain. It is sued to treat epilepsy, because it prevents electrical signals from travelling across the brain.  Split-brain patients effectively have two different ‘consciousnesses’. The left may literally not know what the right is doing. For example, a patient shown a picture in their left visual field will be unable to name what they see. That is because only the right hemisphere has processed the information and cannot pass the information to language-processing centres in the left. Most bizarre is so-called ’Alien Hand Syndrome’, in which some patients are unable to control the behaviour of one hand. Some have to tie it to the bedpost to ensure it doesn’t attack them in the night.

DEEP-BRAIN STIMULATION: A surgeon makes small holes in the skull and puts electrodes into the brain. The current produced by the electrodes affect the activity of certain areas of the brain, which also, of course, runs on electricity. The treatment may be used for Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, and many other psychological syndromes.

LOBOTOMY: This is the severing of pathways that run from the frontal cortex to the rest of the brain.  The frontal cortex is particularly well developed in primates and, especially, human beings. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Phineas Gage, which we looked at in the last newsletter. The subject this Wednesday is another case of lobotomy, if anything even weirder and more wonderful than Phineas Gage…

…SO BE HERE NEXT TIME, CRIME & PSYCHOLOGY FAN! YOU DARE NOT MISS THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF…THE BRAIN BURGLAR!! If you’re late, the cool kids will leave without you!!

Be brilliant! Beep, bop, or blip a bright blue button below. You know it makes sense! See you on Wednesday. All the cool kids will be here.