News and Commentary Archive

Explore recent scientific discoveries and news as well as CLBB events, commentary, and press.

Mission

The Center for Law, Brain & Behavior puts the most accurate and actionable neuroscience in the hands of judges, lawyers, policymakers and journalists—people who shape the standards and practices of our legal system and affect its impact on people’s lives. We work to make the legal system more effective and more just for all those affected by the law.

Putting a Number on Pain

By Tom Ulrich | Vector, Boston Children’s Hospital’s science and clinical innovation blog | July 30, 2014

“How much pain are you in?” It’s a harder question than you think. Tools for assessing patients’ pain—be they children or adults—rely on their perception: a subjective measure that eludes quantification and can change in response to any number of emotional, psychological or physiological factors.

Being able to objectively quantify pain could open the door to better pain management (especially for patients with chronic or neuropathic pain), better anesthetic dosing during surgical procedures, better understanding of addiction (and how to avoid it) and more.

To do so, we need measurable markers: physiologic parameters that reliably and quantitatively change during the experience of pain. But according to pain researcher David Borsook, MD, PhD—of Boston Children’s Hospital’s departments of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine and Radiology—discovering such markers requires a better understanding of the larger context and of events that trigger pain, a perspective he refers to as “systems neuroscience.” Continue reading »

How Solitary Confinement Hurts the Teenage Brain

The Atlantic | Laura Dimon | June 30, 2014

Lately, Josh has been having delirious dreams, often waking in cold sweats, panicked and disoriented. “I started to feel like I was going crazy,” he said. The episodes are unpleasant, but they’re not unfamiliar; they’re reminiscent of the time he spent in solitary confinement as a teenager 16 years ago.

Josh’s story is a glimpse into a troubling practice that is sometimes considered too cruel for adults, and even more so when used on minors. The effects are damaging and lasting, and ultimately, they’re not just a problem for the child, but for society as a whole. Continue reading »

A lesser-known dementia that steals personality

By Erika Hayasaki | The Atlantic | January 9, 2014

While Alzheimer’s usually affects older people, and is detected as a person begins to lose memory, frontotemporal dementia causes people to lose their personalities first, and usually hits in the prime of their lives — the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

Over the last decade, new research in patients with frontotemporal dementia and other illnesses, has helped neuroscientists understand more about the roles different parts of the brain play in where our personalities come from.

A study released in October by Dr. Brad Dickerson, [Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett,] and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry pinpointed regions in the brain that showed atrophy from frontotemporal dementia and found that those with the most damage to the “perception network” (amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, superior temporal, and fusiform cortex) also showed the most prominent difficulty responding to social cues, facial expressions, and eye gaze, and had the most trouble interpreting gestures and body language—the kind of cues that sarcasm relies on.

Read the full article at The Atlantic Monthly.