Click here for a pdf version.

Probing Culture’s Secrets, From Capuchins to Children

Michael Balter

LONDON—Scientists once designated culture as the exclusive province of humans. But that elitist attitude is long gone, as evidenced by a recent meeting* here on how culture, usually defined as the passing on of traditions by learning from others, arises and changes. The 700 attendees, a mixture of researchers and members of the public, heard talks on cultural transmission in fish, meerkats, birds, and monkeys, as well as in extinct and living humans. Researchers probed questions such as what sparks cultural trends and how complex traditions are transmitted, and most agreed that studies of both animals and children will provide important clues. “The field of cultural evolution ranges from fish to humans and includes child development,” says meeting co-organizer Andrew Whiten, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.
But why do certain cultural trends, such as fashions, begin and catch on? Even science finds it hard to answer that question. At the meeting, anthropologist Susan Perry of the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, described her team’s work observing white-faced capuchin monkeys since the early 1990s at several sites in Costa Rica. The monkeys have adopted a number of local traditions, some directly related to foraging for food, such as either cracking or rubbing woody capsules of Luehea fruits to get out their seeds. But other traditions have no clear survival purpose, such as sniffing each other’s fingers and inserting them into a companion’s nose, or biting off a big chunk of another monkey’s fur and holding it in the mouth while he or she playfully tries to get it back. Although foraging traditions tend to be long-lasting, Perry has found that, perhaps like some human fashions, these more mysterious capuchin trends tend to last only about 10 years or so before fading.
In one group of capuchins, the team’s long-term observations have allowed them to witness a rare event: the emergence of a new tradition. In what Perry calls a “bizarre” and “high-risk” ritual, the monkeys poke each other’s eyeballs. One monkey will insert his or her long, sharp, dirty fingernail deep into the eye socket of another animal, between the eyelid and the eyeball, up to the first knuckle. In videos Perry played for the meeting, the monkeys on the receiving end of the fingernail, typically social allies, could be seen to grimace and bat their eyelids furiously (as did many members of the audience) but did not attempt to remove the finger or otherwise object to the treatment. Indeed, during these eye-poking sessions, which last up to an hour, monkeys insisted on the finger being reinserted if it popped out of the eye socket.
Why would the monkeys do something potentially dangerous? Perry suggests that capuchins, which, like humans, are highly cooperative and live in large groups, use this apparently pain-inflicting behavior to test the strength of their social bonds. Back in the 1970s, evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi of Tel Aviv University in Israel suggested that some animals engage in certain behaviors to solidify alliances, and researchers have observed some examples. For example, some male baboons will hold each other’s testicles before teaming up to fight higher-ranking individuals, apparently to establish trust before going into battle.
When it comes to the capuchins, “this is a plausible hypothesis,” Whiten says, especially because more functional explanations do not seem to explain the eye poking. Nevertheless, Whiten adds, “it is difficult to test directly.”
Perry notes that capuchin behaviors such as eye poking and cracking fruit capsules are true traditions, but they don’t ratchet up into the kinds of complex culture prevalent in every human society, from language to literature to sophisticated technology. Animal traditions lack this cumulative cultural evolution.
How do humans wind up the cultural ratchet? At the meeting, Derek Lyons, a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine, presented new data on a phenomenon in young children that he and others think may be key to humans’ faithful transmission of complex culture: “overimitation,” or the tendency to copy the actions of an adult even when they are unnecessary for achieving a goal. No other animal has been shown to copy in this way, Lyons and others say.
Lyons’s work builds on a landmark 2005 study by Whiten and primatologist Victoria Horner, now at Emory University in Atlanta. They demonstrated that when young chimpanzees and children are shown how to retrieve a reward from a box using a series of both relevant and irrelevant steps, the chimps skipped the unnecessary steps, whereas children tended to imitate everything. Recent work by another team suggests that overimitation is universal in human children (http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/05/kids-overimitate-adults-regardle.html). Lyons and his co-workers reported further work in 3- to 5-year-old children in 2007 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For example, children were shown how to retrieve toy turtles from transparent plastic containers using irrelevant steps such as tapping the container with a feather and relevant steps such as opening the container’s door. The children continued to overimitate even when they were led to believe that the experiment was over or when they were explicitly told to avoid “silly” extra steps.
Why do children do this? In London, Lyons played a new series of videotaped experiments with children of the same ages in which he attempted to, as he put it, “snap them out of ” their overimitative tendencies. In one experiment, a puppet orangutan named Felix, stationed at an opening on the other end of the box, competed with the children to see who could get the toy turtle out of the box first. Again, Lyons showed each child how to get the turtle while mixing in irrelevant actions such as tapping the box and pushing unnecessary levers. The children, who could not see what Felix was doing, continued to perform most of Lyons’s irrelevant actions, even when Felix kept winning and getting the turtle.
The only way to avoid overimitation, Lyons found, was to convey that one of his actions was unintentional. When he pretended to get a call from his mother on his cell phone and “accidentally” flipped a useless lever while gesturing during the supposed conversation, the children did not flip that lever.
These findings are inconsistent with earlier hypotheses that children overimitate to please adults, Lyons said. Rather, he concluded, they support something he called “automatic causal encoding” (ACE), in which a child assumes that the adult knows what he or she is doing and that each step in the procedure is necessary. “ACE is an important mechanism kids use to bootstrap their knowledge of complex artifacts,” he says. Archaeologist Dietrich Stout of Emory University, who studies prehistoric tool making, says ACE may have been important for the cultural transmission of stone-tool technologies in early hominins. “Certain things, like the internal workings of the plastic box or the precise force with which to hit a stone core, are not directly available to the observer,” Stout says. He agrees with Lyons that such a strategy is “a logical approach when confronted with a complicated, unfamiliar artifact.”
Uta Frith, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, concurs. “This is an example of actions for which we cannot see rhyme or reason but which we believe are important and relevant to us,” Frith says. “I am persuaded that this is the secret of the evolution of human culture.”
— ——–

Mind and Matter :  How Irrational Rituals Bring Us Together,

Alison Gopnik,

Human beings love rituals. Of course rituals are at the center of religious practice.  But even secularists celebrate the great transitions of life with arbitrary actions, formalized words and pecluliar outfits.  To become part  of my community of hard-headed, rational , scientific Ph.D.s, I had to put on a weird gown and even weirder hat, walk solemnly down the aisle of a cavernous building, and listen to rhythmically intoned Latin.

Our mundane actions are suffused with arbitrary conventions, too.  Grabbing food with your hands is efficient and effective, but we purposefully slow ourselves down with cutlery rituals.  In fact, if you’re an American, the chances are that you cut your food with your fork in your left hand, then transfer the fork to your right hand to eat the food, and then swap it back again.  You may not even realize that you’re doing it.  That elaborate fork and knife dance makes absolutely no sense.

But that is the central paradox of ritual.  Rituals are intentionally useless, purposefully irrational.  So why are they so important to us

The cognitive psychologist Christine LeGarre at the University of Texas at Austin has been trying to figure out where rituals come from and what functions they serve.  One idea is that rituals declare that you are a member of a particular group.

Everybody eats, but only Americans swap their knives and forks.  (Several spy movies have used this as a plot point).  Sharing your graduation ceremony marks you as part of the community of Ph.D.’s more effectively than the solitary act of finishing your dissertation.

The fact that rituals don’t make practixal sense is just what makes them useful for social identification.  If someone just puts tea  in a pot and adds hot water then I know only that they are a sensible person who wants tea.  If instead they kneel on a mat and revolve a special whisk a precise number of times, or carefully use silver tongs to drop exactly two lumps into a china cup, I can conclude that they are members of a particular aristocratic tea culture.

It turns out that rituals are deeply rooted and they emerge early.  Surprisingly young children are already sensitive to the difference between purposeful actions and rituals, and they adopt rituals for themselves.

In a new paper forthcoming in the Journal Cognition, Dr. LeGare and colleagues showed 3- to 6-year old children a video of people performing a complicated sequence of eight actions with a mallet and a pegboard.  Someone would pick up the mallet, place it on one side, push up a peg with her hand etc.  Then the experimenters gave the children the mallet and pegboard and said “Now it’s your turn.”

You could interpret this sequence of actions as an intelligent attempt to bring about a particular outcome, pushing up the pegs.  Or you could interpret it as a ritual.

Sometimes the children saw a single person perform the actions twice.  Sometimes they saw two people perform the actions simultaneously.  The identical synchronous actions suggested that they two people were from the same group.

When they saw two people do exactly the same thing at the same time, the children produced exactly the same sequence of actions themselves.  They also explained their actions by saying things like “I had to do it the way that they did.”  They treated the actions as if they were a ritual.

When they saw the single actor, they were much less likely to imitate exactly what the other person did. Instead, they treated it  like a purposeful action.  They would vary what they did themselves to m ake the pegs pop up in a new way.

Dr. LeGare thinks that, from the time we are very young children, we have two ways of thinking about people – a “ritual stance” and an “instrumental  stance.”  We learn as much from the irrationaly and arbitrary things that people do, as from the intelligent and sensible ones.
— —-

Sense and Superstition

By JANE L. RISEN and A. DAVID NUSSBAUM

SUPERSTITIOUS people do all sorts of puzzling things. But it’s not just the superstitious who knock on wood. From time to time, we all rap our knuckles on a nearby table if we happen to let fate-tempting words slip out. “The cancer is in remission, knock on wood,” we might say.

In fact, it’s so common we often don’t think about it. But it’s worth asking: why do people who do not believe that knocking on wood has an effect on the world often do it anyway? Because it works.

No, knocking on wood won’t change what happens. The cancer is no more likely to stay in remission one way or the other. But knocking on wood does affect our beliefs, and that’s almost as important.

Research finds that people, superstitious or not, tend to believe that negative outcomes are more likely after they “jinx” themselves. Boast that you’ve been driving for 20 years without an accident, and your concern about your drive home that evening rises. The superstitious may tell you that your concern is well founded because the universe is bound to punish your hubris. Psychological research has a less magical explanation: boasting about being accident-free makes the thought of getting into an accident jump to mind and, once there, that thought makes you worry.

That makes sense intuitively. What’s less intuitive is how a simple physical act, like knocking on wood, can alleviate that concern.
In one study, to be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, one of us, Jane L. Risen, and her colleagues Yan Zhang and Christine Hosey, induced college students to jinx themselves by asking half of them to say out loud that they would definitely not get into a car accident this winter. Compared with those who did not jinx themselves, these students, when asked about it later, thought it was more likely that they would get into an accident.

After the “jinx,” in the guise of clearing their minds, we invited some of these students to knock on the wooden table in front of them. Those who knocked on the table were no more likely to think that they would get into an accident than students who hadn’t jinxed themselves in the first place. They had reversed the effects of the jinx.

Knocking on wood may not be magical, but superstition proved helpful in understanding why the ritual was effective. Across cultures, superstitions intended to reverse bad luck, like throwing salt or spitting, often share a common ingredient. In one way or another, they involve an avoidant action, one that exerts force away from oneself, as if pushing something away.

This pushing action turns out to be important, because people’s beliefs are often influenced by bodily feelings and movements. For example, other research shows that people tend to agree with the same arguments more when they hear them while they are nodding their head up and down (as if they were saying “yes”) rather than shaking it from side to side (as if they were saying “no”).

Because people generally push bad things away, we suggest that they may have built up an association between pushing actions and avoiding harm or danger. This led us to speculate that when people knock on wood, or throw salt, or spit, the ritual may help calm the mind, because such avoidant actions lead people to simulate the feelings, thoughts and sensations they experience when they avoid something bad.

To test this, in our knocking-on-wood experiment we asked some people to knock down on the table and away from themselves, while we had others knock up on the underside of the table, toward themselves. Those who knocked up engaged in an approach action, not an avoidant one. Despite knocking on wood, people who knocked up failed to reverse the perceived jinx; if anything, their concerns were made worse compared with people who did not knock at all.

Next we tested whether avoidant movements would have the same effect in situations free from the baggage of superstition. Instead of having participants knock down on wood after jinxing themselves, we had them throw a ball (also an avoidant action, but not one associated with a superstition). We conducted two studies, one in Chicago and another in Singapore. We found that the act of throwing a ball also reduces people’s concerns following a jinx, in either culture. Even pretending to throw a ball has the same effect as actually throwing it.

While almost any behavior can be turned into a superstitious ritual, perhaps the ones that are most likely to survive are those that happen to be effective at changing how we feel. We can seek to rid ourselves of superstitions in the name of enlightenment and progress, but we are likely to find that some may be hard to shake because, although they may be superficially irrational, they may not be unreasonable. Superstitious rituals can really work — but it’s not magic, it’s psychology.

Jane L. Risen and A. David Nussbaum are, respectively, an associate professor of behavioral science and an adjunct assistant professor of behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Click here for a pdf version.

 Click here for a pdf version.

The Criminal Mind

Adrian Raine

Advances in genetics and neuroscience are revolutionizing our understanding of violent behavior—as well as ideas about how to prevent and punish crime

April 26, 2013,website, The Wall Street Journal 4/27-28/2013.P C1,2

The scientific study of crime got its start on a cold, gray November morning in 1871, on the east coast of Italy. Cesare Lombroso, a psychiatrist and prison doctor at an asylum for the criminally insane, was performing a routine autopsy on an infamous Calabrian brigand named Giuseppe Villella. Lombroso found an unusual indentation at the base of Villella’s skull. From this singular observation, he would go on to become the founding father of modern criminology.

Lombroso’s controversial theory had two key points: that crime originated in large measure from deformities of the brain and that criminals were an evolutionary throwback to more primitive species. Criminals, he believed, could be identified on the basis of physical characteristics, such as a large jaw and a sloping forehead. Based on his measurements of such traits, Lombroso created an evolutionary hierarchy, with Northern Italians and Jews at the top and Southern Italians (like Villella), along with Bolivians and Peruvians, at the bottom.

These beliefs, based partly on pseudoscientific phrenological theories about the shape and size of the human head, flourished throughout Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lombroso was Jewish and a celebrated intellectual in his day, but the theory he spawned turned out to be socially and scientifically disastrous, not least by encouraging early-20th-century ideas about which human beings were and were not fit to reproduce—or to live at all.

The racial side of Lombroso’s theory fell into justifiable disrepute after the horrors of World War II, but his emphasis on physiology and brain traits has proved to be prescient. Modern-day scientists have now developed a far more compelling argument for the genetic and neurological components of criminal behavior. They have uncovered, quite literally, the anatomy of violence, at a time when many of us are preoccupied by the persistence of violent outrages in our midst.

The field of neurocriminology—using neuroscience to understand and prevent crime—is revolutionizing our understanding of what drives “bad” behavior. More than 100 studies of twins and adopted children have confirmed that about half of the variance in aggressive and antisocial behavior can be attributed to genetics. Other research has begun to pinpoint which specific genes promote such behavior.

Brain-imaging techniques are identifying physical deformations and functional abnormalities that predispose some individuals to violence. In one recent study, brain scans correctly predicted which inmates in a New Mexico prison were most likely to commit another crime after release. Nor is the story exclusively genetic: A poor environment can change the early brain and make for antisocial behavior later in life.

Most people are still deeply uncomfortable with the implications of neurocriminology. Conservatives worry that acknowledging biological risk factors for violence will result in a society that takes a soft approach to crime, holding no one accountable for his or her actions. Liberals abhor the potential use of biology to stigmatize ostensibly innocent individuals. Both sides fear any seeming effort to erode the idea of human agency and free will.

It is growing harder and harder, however, to avoid the mounting evidence. With each passing year, neurocriminology is winning new adherents, researchers and practitioners who understand its potential to transform our approach to both crime prevention and criminal justice.

The genetic basis of criminal behavior is now well established. Numerous studies have found that identical twins, who have all of their genes in common, are much more similar to each other in terms of crime and aggression than are fraternal twins, who share only 50% of their genes.

(Donta Page’s brain scan, left, shows the reduced functioning of the ventral prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain that helps regulate emotions and control impulses—compared to a normal brain, right.)

In a landmark 1984 study, my colleague Sarnoff Mednick found that children in Denmark who had been adopted from parents with a criminal record were more likely to become criminals in adulthood than were other adopted kids. The more offenses the biological parents had, the more likely it was that their offspring would be convicted of a crime. For biological parents who had no offenses, 13% of their sons had been convicted; for biological parents with three or more offenses, 25% of their sons had been convicted.

As for environmental factors that affect the young brain, lead is neurotoxic and particularly damages the prefrontal region, which regulates behavior. Measured lead levels in our bodies tend to peak at 21 months—an age when toddlers are apt to put their fingers into their mouths. Children generally pick up lead in soil that has been contaminated by air pollution and dumping.

Rising lead levels in the U.S. from 1950 through the 1970s neatly track increases in violence 20 years later, from the ’70s through the ’90s. (Violence peaks when individuals are in their late teens and early 20s.) As lead in the environment fell in the ’70s and ’80s—thanks in large part to the regulation of gasoline—violence fell correspondingly. No other single factor can account for both the inexplicable rise in violence in the U.S. until 1993 and the precipitous drop since then.

Lead isn’t the only culprit. Other factors linked to higher aggression and violence in adulthood include smoking and drinking by the mother before birth, complications during birth and poor nutrition early in life.

Genetics and environment may work together to encourage violent behavior. One pioneering study in 2002 by Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of Duke University genotyped over 1,000 individuals in a community in New Zealand and assessed their levels of antisocial behavior in adulthood. They found that a genotype conferring low levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), when combined with early child abuse, predisposed the individual to later antisocial behavior. Low MAOA has been linked to reduced volume in the amygdala—the emotional center of the brain—while physical child abuse can damage the frontal part of the brain, resulting in a double hit.

Brain-imaging studies have also documented impairments in offenders. Murderers, for instance, tend to have poorer functioning in the prefrontal cortex—the “guardian angel” that keeps the brakes on impulsive, disinhibited behavior and volatile emotions.

Of course, not everyone with a particular brain profile is a murderer—and not every offender fits the same mold. Those who plan their homicides, like serial killers, tend to have good prefrontal functioning. That makes sense, since they must be able to regulate their behavior carefully in order to escape detection for a long time.

So what explains coldblooded psychopathic behavior? About 1% of us are psychopaths—fearless antisocials who lack a conscience. In 2009, Yaling Yang, Robert Schug and I conducted structural brain scans on 27 psychopaths whom we had found in temporary-employment agencies in Los Angeles. All got high scores on the Psychopathy Checklist, the “gold standard” in the field, which assesses traits like lack of remorse, callousness and grandiosity. We found that, compared with 32 normal people in a control group, psychopaths had an 18% smaller amygdala, which is critical for emotions like fear and is part of the neural circuitry underlying moral decision-making. In subsequent research, Andrea Glenn and I found this same brain region to be significantly less active in psychopathic individuals when they contemplate moral issues. Psychopaths know at a cognitive level what is right and what is wrong, but they don’t feel it.

What are the practical implications of all this evidence for the physical, genetic and environmental roots of violent behavior? What changes should be made in the criminal-justice system?

Let’s start with two related questions: If early biological and genetic factors beyond the individual’s control make some people more likely to become violent offenders than others, are these individuals fully blameworthy? And if they are not, how should they be punished?

Take the case of Donta Page, who in 1999 robbed a young woman in Denver named Peyton Tuthill, then raped her, slit her throat and killed her by plunging a kitchen knife into her chest. Mr. Page was found guilty of first-degree murder and was a prime candidate for the death penalty.

Working as an expert witness for Mr. Page’s defense counsel, I brought him to a lab to assess his brain functioning. Scans revealed a distinct lack of activation in the ventral prefrontal cortex—the brain region that helps to regulate our emotions and control our impulses.

In testifying, I argued for a deep-rooted biosocial explanation for Mr. Page’s violence. As his files documented, as a child he suffered from poor nutrition, severe parental neglect, sustained physical and sexual abuse, early head injuries, learning disabilities, poor cognitive functioning and lead exposure. He also had a family history of mental illness. By the age of 18, Mr. Page had been referred for psychological treatment 19 times, but he had never once received treatment. A three-judge panel ultimately decided not to have him executed, accepting our argument that a mix of biological and social factors mitigated Mr. Page’s responsibility.

Mr. Page escaped the death penalty partly on the basis of brain pathology—a welcome result for those who believe that risk factors should partially exculpate socially disadvantaged offenders. But the neurocriminologist’s sword is double-edged. Neurocriminology also might have told us that Mr. Page should never have been on the street in the first place. At the time he committed the murder, he had been out of prison for only four months. Sentenced to 20 years for robbery, he was released after serving just four years.

What if I had been asked to assess him just before he was released? I would have said exactly what I said in court when defending him. All the biosocial boxes were checked: He was at heightened risk for committing violence for reasons beyond his control. It wasn’t exactly destiny, but he was much more likely to be impulsively violent than not.

This brings us to the second major change that may be wrought by neurocriminology: incorporating scientific evidence into decisions about which soon-to-be-released offenders are at the greatest risk for reoffending. Such risk assessment is currently based on factors like age, prior arrests and marital status. If we were to add biological and genetic information to the equation—along with recent statistical advances in forecasting—predictions about reoffending would become significantly more accurate.

In a 2013 study, Kent Kiehl of the University of New Mexico, looking at a population of 96 male offenders in the state’s prison system, found that in the four years after their release, those with low activity in the anterior cingulate cortex—a brain area involved in regulating behavior—were twice as likely to commit another offense as those who had high activity in this region. Research soon to be published by Dustin Pardini of the University of Pittsburgh shows that men with a smaller amygdala are three times more likely to commit violence three years later.

Of course, if we can assess criminals for their propensity to reoffend, we can in theory assess any individual in society for his or her criminal propensity—making it possible to get ahead of the problem by stopping crime before it starts. Ultimately, we should try to reach a point where it is possible to deal with repeated acts of violence as a clinical disorder.

Randomized, controlled trials have clearly documented the efficacy of a host of medications—including stimulants, antipsychotics, antidepressants and mood stabilizers—in treating aggression in children and adolescents. Parents are understandably reluctant to have their children medicated for bad behavior, but when all else fails, treating children to stabilize their uncontrollable aggressive acts and to make them more amenable to psychological interventions is an attractive option.

Treatment doesn’t have to be invasive. Randomized, controlled trials in England and the Netherlands have shown that a simple fix—omega-3 supplements in the diets of young offenders—reduces serious offending by about 35%. Studies have also found that early environmental enrichment—including better nutrition, physical exercise and cognitive stimulation—enhances later brain functioning in children and reduces adult crime.

Over the course of modern history, increasing scientific knowledge has given us deeper insights into epilepsy, psychosis and substance abuse, and has promoted a more humane perspective. Just as mental disorders were once viewed as a product of evil forces, the “evil” you see in violent offenders today may someday be reformulated as a symptom of a physiological disorder.

There is no question that neurocriminology puts us on difficult terrain, and some wish it didn’t exist at all. How do we know that the bad old days of eugenics are truly over? Isn’t research on the anatomy of violence a step toward a world where our fundamental human rights are lost?

We can avoid such dire outcomes. A more profound understanding of the early biological causes of violence can help us take a more empathetic, understanding and merciful approach toward both the victims of violence and the prisoners themselves. It would be a step forward in a process that should express the highest values of our civilization.

—Dr. Raine is the Richard Perry University Professor of Criminology, Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime,” to be published on April 30 by Pantheon, a division of Random House.

Dr. Raine is the Richard Perry University Professor of Criminology, Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime,” to be published Tuesday by Pantheon, a division of Random House.

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2013, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Criminal Mind.

— —-

Timothy Brown  << Conservatives worry that acknowledging biological risk factors for violence will result in a society that takes a soft approach to crime, holding no one accountable for his or her actions. Liberals abhor the potential use of biology to stigmatize ostensibly innocent individuals. >>
—–
If there were a Pulitzer Prize for sweeping generalizations, I think this passage might deserve the honor.

I, for one, am a conservative, and my worry is that liberals will make brain scans and genetic screening mandatory prerequisites to getting a permit to own a firearm.
Which would NOT prevent the criminally insane from actually owning or using guns.
But it would create a huge barrier for those who are neither sociopathic nor criminal: “So, you want to own a gun, do you? I’m from the government, and I think you might be crazy. Therefore, you need to have your head examined.”

Harold Richard  Hey Man, Ima Demo and I think the same as you on this. I also own a gun now and want to buy another firearm. 
Why don’t we just dream up some Pre-Cog computer software and install it on one of those Superduper Supercomputers. Then we can just lock up people at birth based on their genetics and brain shape. Oh wait, maybe we already have and haven’t been told about it yet.
Minority Report here we come

John Mcrae  Concepts of the impulsive violent psychotic, the impulsive violent mentally ill, and the impulsive violent evil person (possessed) have interested many but remained largely elusive for the past several centuries. In 1843, the M’Naghten Rule separated the insane from the criminal at common law, and is still largely in vogue ……although probably not valid. 
Responsibility after a violent act, whether the impulse be psychotic, criminal, or evil requires protective custody for the safety sake of society. The social fetish of need to assign criminal responsibility in accord with a rigorous protocol while ignoring the dangerous mentally ill, or confusing criminality with evil needs update…..as evidence mounts of multiple genetic, developmental, and imposed conditions triggering the impulse.
As the death penalty becomes increasingly challenged, so to should the effect of the Miranda warning, and petition for habeus corpus. Responsibility can be judged and protective custody imposed….but then a prudent delay in sentencing, even of a few years, to ferret out and weigh all factors of uncertainty where the criminal code calls for prolonged incarceration or execution should be routine. A few offenders will soon be identified who can be treated…..at the discretion of the supervising court. The cost for such would not be greater than the current costs of exhaustive appeal of capital crimes, nor lifetime imprisonment expense. 
The difficulty is that no one can demonstrate the efficacy, the risk, nor the benefit of such until it is tried…..being human behavior and unperfected hypothetical science. In the 1950s, small almost anecdotal experience with early stereotactic ablative ‘psychosurgery’ showed promising results with far less recidivism. Then came the ‘liberated’ 60s doing way with two centuries of improving more humane protective custody of the mentally ill as well as the career criminal. Today, sixty years later technology has greatly intensified the power of such inquiry…..and social consequences of the libertine ignoring of the problem are demanding answers. The facts are that there are psychotics, criminals, and evil persons.

check out http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/23/qa-criminologist-adrian-raine-on-the-marathon-bombs-the-biology-of-violence/

Jay Martin  “No other single factor can account for both the inexplicable rise in violence in the U.S. until 1993 and the precipitous drop since then.”
I believe the authors of “Freakonomics” laid out a much more believable theory regarding the drop in crime starting in the 90s. That being Roe v Wade 1973

Kevin Fisher   Assuming that all behavior is based on brain physics it’s not a total surprise that technology has developed to the point that behavioral aberrations and variations can be “seen” with modern scanning methods.
That doesn’t free any of us from responsibility for what our brain is doing. Those with a criminally aberrant brain must be dealt with as criminals if (and only if) they commit a crime. 
However, it may suggest a certain amount of compassion toward criminals whose brain configuration was caused by factors outside of their control – whatever that mans, with lots of interesting questions regarding free will. In the end, that doesn’t imply leniency in sentencing or other measures needed to protect the public

Kevin Kilty   This was interesting to read, but when the author says that this knowledge puts us on difficult terrain he is a master of understatement. In addition to the worry about eugenics, and the potential to justify permanent incarceration using narrow and not very robust measures, there is also a worry about using it to deal with inconvenient differences of opinion. One does not have to search very hard for Prof. Raines colleagues in academia referring to “conservative” or libertarian thinking as a pathology

Kevin Kilty   “Randomized, controlled trials in England and the Netherlands have shown that a simple fix—omega-3 supplements in the diets of young offenders—reduces serious offending by about 35%….”How many people were involved in the trial, has it been replicated, when was it done, and is the measure a risk measure, or an odds measure? How am I to view such statements if they are so vague

Paul S. Boyer  Well, removing revenge from the hands of the aggrieved is one of the functions of punishment. It has the function of preventing continuous vendetta.
Revenge is one of the legitimate functions of punishment. It is also possible in some societies for the victim (or the family of the victim) to forgive the perpetrator, which they sometimes do (usually for a price). This turns simple revenge into forgiveness, or a fine. The point is that the case is then closed, and a vendetta avoided.
It used to be considered an advance in civilization to consider crime not just as a personal wrong to the victim, but an offense to “society.” Thus the criminal would pay a “debt to society.” This, again, would take revenge away from the aggrieved, and put it into “official” hands which are supposed to be more dispassionate, and to apply more uniform, accepted standards.
It is foolish Utopianism to imagine that the revenge motive can simply be dreamed away. Not even brain research can eliminate it, for it is in human nature. Indeed, it is in the nature of our closest primate relatives, as well as in many other, less closely related animals. There is a clear reason in evolution for the revenge behavior, for it acts to remove a proven threat

Lisa Partridge   “No other single factor can account for both the inexplicable rise in violence in the U.S. until 1993 and the precipitous drop since then.”
Weren’t the Grateful Dead active from the late 60s until the early to mid 90s?
Look, mom! I’m a neurocriminologist!

Ezra Blumenthal   Violent behavior is NOT criminal, -in fact the real criminals of the world are seldom violent. For example, when the Catholic Pope encouraged forced conversion of native Americans into Catholicism, the Pope (whoever it was) could hardly be considered ‘violent’, although his decision resulted in much pain and death among native Americans. Similarly, when the Americans dropped Atomic Bombs and killed millions of civilians in Japan, the American general was probably calm and calculating, as were the generals giving the order to drop Napalm on Vietnamese people who had done nothing wrong against America. 
If we consider financial crooks, like the Swiss Bankers (UBS, for example), who help Americans and Germans to cheat on taxes, we can really see the difference between ‘criminal’ and ‘violent’. The average Swiss is probably well dressed, and pretty civilized, although the Swiss are the biggest criminals in the world as they go around helping thugs and dictators hide their loot :)
Catching a genetically violent person may be useful, but it would be far more useful if we could catch white collar criminals, …. or scan the brain of a politician or a banker or a lawyer, to tell us when he is lying! Well, some would say they are always lying…. but still, maybe we could tell when they really really lying 🙂

                 Click here for a pdf version.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                  Click here for a pdf version.

The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling

Ta-Nehisi Coates      Jul 17 2013, 7:00 AM ET, The Atlantic

Yesterday Richard Cohen wrote this:

“In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk.

Still, common sense and common decency, not to mention the law, insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior. Even still, race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.

I wish I had a solution to this problem. If I were a young black male and were stopped just on account of my appearance, I would feel violated. If the police are abusing their authority and using race as the only reason, that has got to stop. But if they ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work.”

It is very important to understand that no one is asking the NYPD to “ignore race.” If an officer is looking for an specific suspect, no one would ask that the NYPD not include race as part of the description. But “Stop And Frisk” is not concerned with specific suspects, but with a broad class of people who are observed making “furtive movements.”

With that said, we should take a moment to appreciate the import of Cohen’s words. They hold that neither I, nor my twelve year old son, nor any of my nephews, nor any of my male family members deserve to be judged as individuals by the state. Instead we must be seen as members of a class more inclined to criminality. It does not matter that the vast, vast majority of black men commit no violent crime at all. Cohen argues that that majority should unduly bear the burden of police invasion, because of a minority who happens to live among us.

Richard Cohen concedes that this is a violation, but it is one he believes black people, for the good of their country, must learn to live with. Effectively he is arguing for a kind of racist public safety tax. The tax may, or may not, end with a frisking. More contact with the police, and people who want to be police, necessarily means more deadly tragedy. Thus Cohen is not simply calling for my son and I to bear the brunt of “violation,” he is calling for us to run a higher risk of death and serious injury at the hands of the state. Effectively he is calling for Sean Bell’s fianceé, Trayvon Martin’s parents, Amadou Diallo’s mother, Prince Jones’ daughter, the relatives of Kathryn Johnston to accept the deaths of their love ones as the price of doing business in America.

The unspoken premise here is chilling — the annihilation of the black individual. To wit:

“Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.”

I think we would concede that it would be wrong of me to assume that every Jewish person I meet is good at chess, physics or medicine. This year I am working at MIT where a disproportionate number of the students are Asian-Americans. It would be no more wise for me to take from that experience that individual Asian-Americans are good at math, then it would be for anyone to look at the NBA and assume I am good at basketball. And we would agree with this because generally hold that people deserve to be seen as individuals. But by Cohen’s logic, the fact of being an African-American is an exception to this.

Perhaps the standards should be different when it comes to public safety and violence. But New York City’s murder rate is as low as it has been in 50 years. How long should a racist public-safety tax last? Until black people no longer constitute a disproportionate share of our violent criminals, one assumes. But black people do not constitute such a group — victims of hundreds of years of racist state policy constitute that group. “Black on Black” crime is the racecraft by which the fact of what was done to us disappears, and the fact of our DNA becomes criminalized.

I think Richard Cohen knows this:

“The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday, but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.”

This paragraph is the American approach to racism in brief. Cohen can name the root causes. He is not blind to history. But he can not countenance the import of his own words. So he retreats to cynicism, pronouncing the American state to bankrupt to clean up a problem which it created, and, by an act of magic, lays it at the feet of something called “culture.”

To paraphrase the old Sidney Harris cartoon, the formula for weak-sauce goes something like this

(Forced Labor + Mass Rape)  AUCTIONING YOUR CHILDREN
+ (Poll tax + Segregation + Grandfather clause)  THE KLAN
+ (Redlining + Blockbusting + Race Riots)  CUTTING YOU OUT OF THE NEW DEAL
–  THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS
= “Meh, you figure it out.”

An capricious anti-intellectualism, a fanatical imbecility, a willful amnesia, an eternal sunshine upon our spotless minds, is white supremacy’s gravest legacy. You would not know from reading Richard Cohen that the idea that blacks are more criminally prone, is older than the crime stats we cite, that it has been cited since America’s founding to justify the very kinds of public safety measures Cohen now endorses. Black criminality is more than myth; it is socially engineered prophecy. If you believe a people to be inhuman, you confine them to inhuman quarters and inhuman labor, and subject them to inhuman policy. When they then behave inhumanely to each other, you take it is as proof of your original thesis. The game is rigged. Because it must be.

You should not be deluded into thinking Richard Cohen an outlier. The most prominent advocate of profiling our current pariah classes — black people and Muslim Americans — is now being mentioned in conversations to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Those mentions received an endorsement from our president:

Kelly hasn’t spoken about whether he wants the post, but in an interview with Univision, the president said he’d want to know if Kelly was considering a job change.

“Ray Kelly’s obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” Obama said. “And the federal government partners a lot with New York, because obviously, our concerns about terrorism often times are focused on big-city targets, and I think Ray Kelly’s one of the best there is.

What you must understand is that when the individual lives of those freighted by racism are deemed less than those who are not, all other inhumanities follow. That is the logic of Richard Cohen. It is the logic of Barack Obama’s potential head of the DHS. This logic is not new, original or especially egregious. It is the logic of the country’s largest city. It is the logic of the American state. It is the logic scribbled across the lion’s share of our history. And it is the logic that killed Trayvon Martin.

———————

Comments:
———————
Josh Jasper

When I was living in Singapore, I was in the minority as a white person, but when a white person committed a crime, white teens were not pulled over and harassed by the police. Were they were doing it wrong? Of course not. No white American living anywhere outside the US would tolerate being treated the way our police treat black people.

Cohen’s argument is easily demolished, and has a clear core of white supremacy.

Cohen has won 4 Pulitzer Prizes. My mind stops after that fact. I can go no further. I’m lost.

Avatar

I lived in South Africa for about two years and experienced some pretty terrifying official harassment. While on holiday in Mozambique, my wife and I traveled to the capital, Maputo. On the very first night, we walked out of the hotel to find a place to have a drink and not fifty yards from the entrance, a soldier with an AK-47 (or some other sort of assault rifle) shouted at us, ran across the avenue, and demanded to see our passports (in English, no less). As we naturally didn’t have them on us, we were threatened with a fine, and failing to pay that was going to result in jail. A truck with some seats bolted in the cab then pulled up, along with three to four other soldiers with AK-47s. After a few tense minutes of negotiation where he told me to get into the truck and I refused to pay or go to jail, they left. Twice in the next three days this happened again (though this time with police officers who only had pistols). I also watched other white families get harassed and pay fines.

Harassment of white Americans happens

caton

You weren’t harassed because you were white, you were extorted because you were a foreign tourist in a country that is still recovering from a pretty ruinous civil war, and your whiteness marked you out as someone who probably had a little more money than others. The fact that this happened right outside a hotel backs this premise up. This sort of thing happens even in developed countries, try going through customs in Dubai without being shaken down for a few grand.

Tyler

I actually have been to Dubai, but didn’t get shaken down. Been to lots of places, and the shakedowns only happened in India and southern Africa. But I don’t see how their civil war, which ended more than 20 years ago and they no doubt are still recovering from, excuses such behaviour.

I may not have been harassed because I was white, but I was profiled because I was white; indeed, I was accurately profiled as being a foreigner and having money to pay fines/bribes. Similar to what Mr Coates was arguing, to these officials, I was reduced to the characteristics of my race.

The wrongs are different, as you note, and do not compare to systematic profiling. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but at no point did I argue they did, either; I was responding to a previous commentator who argued that it never happens to white Americans.

exitr

But your story somewhat confirms Josh Jasper’s point. Yes, harassment of white Americans happens. But you, in fact, did not “put up with” the treatment of the Mozambican police offer – and you were able to enforce your rights in large part due to your status as an American citizen. See how that works for a black teenager stopped by a cop in the U.S.

Tyler

Ah, yes, rereading it now, I agree with you; I did stand my ground, knowing they were not very likely to do anything to me. That said, I cannot stress enough that four soldiers with AK-47s is enough to get most Americans handing over all their cash

To download a pdf click here.

What Science Really Says About the Soul

by Stephen Cave

Nathalie was hemorrhaging badly. She felt weak, cold, and the pain in her abdomen was excruciating. A nurse ran out to fetch the doctor, but by the time they arrived she knew she was slipping away. The doctor was shouting instructions when quite suddenly the pain stopped. She felt free—and found herself floating above the drama, looking down at the bustle of activity around her now still body.

“We’ve lost her,” she heard the doctor say, but Nathalie was already moving on and upwards, into a tunnel of light. She first felt a pang of anxiety at leaving her husband and children, but it was soon overwhelmed by a feeling of profound peace; a feeling that it would all be okay. At the end of the tunnel, a figure of pure radiance was waiting with arms wide open.

This, or something like it, is how millions imagine what it will be like to die. In 2009, over 70 percent of Americans said they believe that they, like Nathalie, have a soul that will survive the end of their body.1 That figure may well now be higher after the phenomenal success of two recent books describing vivid near death experiences: one from an innocent—the four year old Todd Burpo—the other from the opposite: a Harvard scientist and former skeptic, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander.2 Both argue that when their brains stopped working, their souls floated off to experience a better place.

This is an attractive view and a great consolation to those who have lost loved ones or who are contemplating their own mortality. Many also believe this view to be beyond the realm of science, to concern a different dimension into which no microscope can peer. Dr. Alexander, for example, said in an interview with the New York Times, “Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body; it is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn’t.”3

But he is wrong. The evidence of science, when brought together with an ancient argument, provides a very powerful case against the existence of a soul that can carry forward your essence once your body fails. The case runs like this: with modern brain-imaging technology, we can now see how specific, localized brain injuries damage or even destroy aspects of a person’s mental life. These are the sorts of dysfunctions that Oliver Sacks brought to the world in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.4 The man of the title story was a lucid, intelligent music teacher, who had lost the ability to recognize faces and other familiar objects due to damage to his visual cortex.

Since then, countless examples of such dysfunction have been documented—to the point that every part of the mind can now be seen to fail when some part of the brain fails. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has studied many such cases.5 He records a stroke victim, for example, who had lost any capacity for emotion; patients who lost all creativity following brain surgery; and others who lost the ability to make decisions. One man with a brain tumor lost what we might call his moral character, becoming irresponsible and disregarding of social norms. I saw something similar in my own father, who also had a brain tumor: it caused profound changes in his personality and capacities before it eventually killed him.

The crux of the challenge then is this: those who believe they have a soul that survives bodily death typically believe that this soul will enable them, like Nathalie in the story above, to see, think, feel, love, reason and do many other things fitting for a happy afterlife. But if we each have a soul that enables us to see, think and feel after the total destruction of the body, why, in the cases of dysfunction documented by neuroscientists, do these souls not enable us to see, think and feel when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed?

To make the argument clear, we can take the example of sight. If either your eyes or the optic nerves in your brain are sufficiently badly damaged, you will go blind. This tells us very clearly that the faculty of sight is dependent upon functioning eyes and optic nerves.

Yet curiously, when many people imagine their soul leaving their body, they imagine being able to see—like Nathalie, looking down on her own corpse surrounded by frantic doctors.6 They believe, therefore, that their soul can see. But if the soul can see when the entire brain and body have stopped working, why, in the case of people with damaged optic nerves, can’t it see when only part of the brain and body have stopped working? In other words, if blind people have a soul that can see, why are they blind?

So eminent a theologian as Saint Thomas Aquinas, writing 750 years ago, believed this question had no satisfactory answer.7 Without its body—without eyes, ears and nose—he thought the soul would be deprived of all senses, waiting blindly for the resurrection of the flesh to make it whole again. Aquinas concluded that the body-less soul would have only those powers that (in his view) were not dependent upon bodily organs: faculties such as reason and understanding.

But now we can see that these faculties are just as dependent upon a bodily organ—the brain—as sight is upon the eyes. Unlike in Aquinas’s day, we can now keep many people with brain damage alive and use neuroimaging to observe the correlations between that damage and their behavior. And what we observe is that the destruction of certain parts of the brain can destroy those cognitive faculties once thought to belong to the soul. So if he had had the evidence of neuroscience in front of him, we can only imagine that Aquinas himself would have concluded that these faculties also stop when the brain stops.

In fact, evidence now shows that everything the soul is supposed to be able to do—think, remember, love—fails when some relevant part of the brain fails. Even consciousness itself—otherwise there would be no general anesthetics. A syringe full of chemicals is sufficient to extinguish all awareness. For anyone who believes something like the Nathalie story—that consciousness can survive bodily death—this is an embarrassing fact. If the soul can sustain our consciousness after death, when the brain has shut down permanently, why can it not do so when the brain has shut down temporarily?

Some defenders of the soul have, of course, attempted to answer this question. They argue, for example, that the soul needs a functioning body in this world, but not in the next. One view is that the soul is like a broadcaster and the body like a receiver—something akin to a television station and a TV set. (Though as our body is also the source of our sensory input, we have to imagine the TV set also has a camera on top feeding images to the distant station.)

We know that if we damage our TV set, we get a distorted picture. And if we break the set, we get no picture at all. The naive observer would believe the program was therefore gone. But we know that it is really still being transmitted; that the real broadcaster is actually elsewhere. Similarly, the soul could still be sending its signal even though the body is no longer able to receive it.

This response sounds seductive, but helps little. First, it does not really address the main argument at all: Most believers expect their soul to be able to carry forward their mental life with or without the body; this is like saying that the TV signal sometimes needs a TV set to transform it into the picture, but once the set is kaput, can make the picture all by itself. But if it can make the picture all by itself, why does it sometimes act through an unreliable set?

Second, changes to our bodies impact on our minds in ways not at all analogous to how damage to a TV set changes its output, even if we take into account damage to the camera too. The TV analogy claims there is something that remains untouched by such damage, some independent broadcaster preserving the real program even if it is distorted by bad reception. But this is precisely what the evidence of neuroscience undermines. Whereas damage to the TV set or camera might make the signal distorted or fuzzy, damage to our brains much more profoundly alters our minds. As we noted above, such damage can even change our moral views, emotional attachments, and the way we reason.

Which suggests we are nothing like a television; but much more like, for example, a music box: the music is not coming from elsewhere, but from the workings within the box itself. When the box is damaged, the music is impaired; and if the box is entirely destroyed, then the music stops for good.

There is much about consciousness that we still do not understand. We are only beginning to decipher its mysteries, and may never fully succeed. But all the evidence we have suggests that the wonders of the mind—even near-death and out of body experiences—are the effect of neurons firing. Contrary to the beliefs of the vast majority of people on Earth, from Hindus to New Age spiritualists, consciousness depends upon the brain and shares its fate to the end.

References

1. What People Do and Do Not Believe In, The Harris Poll, December 15, 2009
2. Burpo, T and Vincent, L. 2010. Heaven is For Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. Thomas Nelson Publishers; Alexander, Eben. 2012. Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Simon & Schuster.
3. Kaufman, L. 2012. “Readers Join Doctor’s Journey to the Afterworld’s Gates.” The New York Times, November 25, page C1.
4. Sacks, Oliver. 1985. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. New York: Simon & Schuster.
5. Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam Publishing.
6. Descriptions of heaven also involve being able to see, from Dante to Heaven is For Real, cited above.
7. Aquinas’s views on the soul can be found in his Summa Theologica and elsewhere. Particularly relevant to the question of the soul’s limited faculties are Part 1, question 77, article 8 (“Whether all the powers remain in the soul when separated from the body?”) and supplement to the Third Part, question 70, article 1 (“Whether the sensitive powers remain in the separated soul?”), in which he writes: “Now it is evident that certain operations, whereof the soul’s powers are the principles, do not belong to the soul properly speaking but to the soul as united to the body, because they are not performed except through the medium of the body—such as to see, to hear, and so forth. Hence it follows that such like powers belong to the united soul and body as their subject, but to the soul as their quickening principle, just as the form is the principle of the properties of a composite being. Some operations, however, are performed by the soul without a bodily organ—for instance to understand, to consider, to will: wherefore, since these actions are proper to the soul, the powers that are the principles thereof belong to the soul not only as their principle but also as their subject. Therefore, since so long as the proper subject remains its proper passions must also remain, and when it is corrupted they also must be corrupted, it follows that these powers which use no bodily organ for their actions must needs remain in the separated body, while those which use a bodily organ must needs be corrupted when the body is corrupted: and such are all the powers belonging to the sensitive and the vegetative soul.”

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/13-03-20/