When watching this short video of Dr. Nicole Vincent, Macquarie University Research Fellow, talk about neurolaw, I was glad she ended by saying that the field (a combination, she says, of law, philosophy, and neuroscience) is still developing, and not yet ready to be deployed in courtrooms.
She believes that neuroscience may in the future be able to help in the courtroom in at least four areas:
- determine when a defendant is lying
- predict or determine propensity for future criminal behavior
- determine sanity
- devise treatments
Dr. Michael Gazzaniga also thinks the science is not advanced enough to be of help in the criminal justice system. I attended his talk last week at the annual conference of the Association for Psychological Science titled "We Are the Law: The Human Mind, Free Will, and the Limits of Determinism." From my notes, just a few of the things he said:
- Neuroscience is of little or no use in the courtroom today
- Part of the problem is individual variation--It is very hard to go from what we may know about the many, or averages, to the individual alleged criminal
- William James thought simple determinism was preposterous
- If you believe in free will, research shows you will act in one way; if you don't, you will act in another manner
- Reductionism is pitted against emergence; emergent properties may show that we are at the wrong level of analysis [Emergence was a popular concept at the conference this year: my blog post about emergence]
- The brain is sequential and dynamic; not only does A lead to B, but also A and B are having a conversation
- Brains are not free, but people are
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