Immigration, Empathy and Psychology. Written by Teagan Wall; animated, and hosted by Vanessa Hill. Produced by BrainCraft for PBS Digital Studios.
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“Criminal courts in the United States are facing a surge in the number of defendants arguing that their brains were to blame for their crimes and relying on questionable scans and other controversial, unproven neuroscience, a legal expert who has advised the president has warned.
Nita Farahany, a professor of law who sits on Barack Obama’s bioethics advisory panel, told a Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego that those on trial were mounting ever more sophisticated defenses that drew on neurological evidence in an effort to show they were not fully responsible for murderous or other criminal actions.
“In 1849, six years prior to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman visited the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowler & Wells (at the corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets) to get his head examined. This method of discerning one’s character by mapping and measuring the topography of the skull first appeared in 1796, with the research of a German neuroanatomist named Franz Joseph Gall who went on to publish The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular, with Observations upon the possibility of ascertaining the several intellectual and moral dispositions of man and animal by the configuration of their Heads.”
— “Amativeness, ideality, ‘God spot.’ On the seductive promise of phrenology and its progeny,” Jena Osman, Triple Canopy (navigate through it with the horizontal sliders).
“Most of the interesting things that the brain does involve many different pieces of tissue working together. Saying that emotion is in the amygdala, or that decision-making is the prefrontal cortex, is at best a shorthand, and a misleading one at that.”
— “Neuroscience Fiction,” Gary Marcus, New Yorker blog
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Image (“The American Male Mind”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Spend six minutes with the percussive brain of Human Beatbox champ Reeps One in this video by British researcher Carolyn McGettigan. Thanks to Duke biologist/bass player/blogger Princess Ojiaku for finding this gem.
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Remember “The End of History? Sigh. How quickly they forget.
We now we have The End of Memory. We forget more these days, but it’s okay. We’ve all out-sourced our long-term memories to search engines. That’s according to a new report by researchers from Harvard, Columbia and the University of Wisconsin:
“Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” Betsy Sparrow,Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner, Science (abstract)
A scientific study at Britain’s University College London finds that conservative brains have a larger “fear center” and smaller center of courage and optimism. No wonder the Tea Party hates science and foreigners.
Brain scans found that political conservatives tend to have a larger amygdala, often called the “primitive brain,” the structure responsible for emotions like fear. Conservatives also seem to have a smaller anterior cingulate, the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.
If this news makes you want to check your own amygdala, you can’t miss it. It’s that almond-shaped mass in the temporal lobes adjacent to the hippocampus.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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