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.
By Joshua Buckholtz and David Faigman | Current Biology | September 2014
Abstract:
Stunning technical advances in the ability to image the human brain have provoked excited speculation about the application of neuroscience to other fields. The ‘promise’ of neuroscience for law has been touted with particular enthusiasm. Here, we contend that this promise elides fundamental conceptual issues that limit the usefulness of neuroscience for law. Recommendations for overcoming these challenges are offered.
In the summer 2014, Court Review, the journal of the American Judges Association, published a special issue on law and neuroscience. Court Review is distributed quarterly to an audience of over 2,200 judges in the United States. This special issue featured shortened versions, adapted from longer pieces, made accessible to the judiciary, on topics such as decision-making, brain imaging evidence, adolescent brain development, and pain in the law. Continue reading »
By Carey Goldberg | WBUR CommonHealth | August 7, 2014
(part of the Brain Matters series)
The final installment of WBUR’s Brain Matters series featured work from two CLBB faculty, Joshua Buckholtz and Joshua Greene. The tDCS research by Buckholtz discussed below was made possible through a grant from CLBB’s Law and Neuroscience Pilot Fund program, which supports scientists to engage in innovative research at the interface of neuroscience and the law.
Harvard brain scientist Joshua Buckholtz has never forgotten a convict he met back when he was an undergrad conducting psychological tests in prisons. The man had beaten another man nearly to death for stepping on his foot in a dance club.
“I wanted to ask him,” he recalls, “‘In what world was the reward of beating this person so severely, for this — to me — minor infraction, worth having terrible food and barbed wire around you?’ ”
But over the years, Buckholtz became convinced that this bad deed was a result of faulty brain processing, perhaps in a circuit called the frontostriatal dopamine system. In an impulsive person’s brain, he says, attention just gets so narrowly focused on an immediate reward that, in effect, the future disappears. Continue reading »
By David Salisbury | Vanderbilt University Research News | 3 August 2014
Issues of crime and punishment, vengeance and justice date back to the dawn of human history, but it is only in the last few years that scientists have begun exploring the basic nature of the complex neural processes in the brain that underlie these fundamental behaviors.
Now a new brain imaging study – published online Aug. 3 by the journal Nature Neuroscience has identified the brain mechanisms that underlie our judgment of how severely a person who has harmed another should be punished. Specifically, the study determined how the area of the brain that determines whether such an act was intentional or unintentional trumps the emotional urge to punish the person, however gruesome the harm may be. Continue reading »
While brain science has helped to characterize many aspects of the human experience, there is no consensus about whether it could also be used to help address some of society’s “big” problems.
On Thursday, April 17, 2014, CLBB hosted a conversation at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center of Harvard Medical School, with experts in psychology, philosophy and neuroscience to debate whether neuroscience has anything useful to add to our understanding of thorny ethical and legal questions, such as whether addiction should be considered a “brain disease,” the nature of free will, and how societies should determine personal responsibility. Video of the event is included below in its entirety and at our Vimeo page.
A recurring theme of the evening’s discussion was how to determine which level of analysis – from molecules and genes to brain structures and systems to individuals and social systems – is the most important to consider for understanding the mind. While all panelists agreed that any discussion of the brain’s contribution to behavior should be embedded within a multi-level approach, there was considerable disagreement around whether the brain’s contribution should be considered privileged or not. Continue reading »
