The Brain, the Criminal, and the Courts
By Eryn Brown Knowable Magazine On March 30, 1981, 25-year-old John W. Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and three other people. The following year, he went on trial for […]
Tag Archives: Neuroethics
Super-Intelligent Humans are Coming
By Stephen Hsu Nautilus In Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers for Algernon, a mentally challenged adult called Charlie Gordon receives an experimental treatment to raise his IQ from 60 to somewhere […]
The “Just Following Orders” Defense and the Brain
By Joshua Barajas PBS Newshour In a 1962 letter, as a last-ditch effort for clemency, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote that he and other low-level officers were “forced to serve as […]
Brain Scans in the Courtroom
By Andreas Kuersten The Scientist A group of men exit a city hotel and begin making their way to a waiting car. As they approach the vehicle, another man opens […]
Our Cognitive Dissonance in Understanding Gender
By Robert Sapolsky Nautilus Somewhere in the middle of the night in a Central African rainforest, a chimpanzee gives birth. Soon after, as the sun rises, mother and newborn sit […]
How Your Brain Decides Blame and Punishment
By Amy Wolf Vanderbilt University Juries in criminal cases typically decide if someone is guilty, then a judge determines a suitable level of punishment. New research confirms that these two […]
The Ethical Questions with Electronically Enhanced Brains
Editorial Financial Times Computing and neuroscience are coming together fast — a convergence illustrated vividly by the first use of a computer algorithm to process electrical signals in the human […]
Could we Give Criminals Corrective Brain Implants?
By Zoltan Istvan Motherboard The death penalty is one of America’s most contentious issues. Critics complain that capital punishment is inhumane, pointing out how some executions have failed to quickly kill […]
Why Don’t Animals Suffer From Schizophrenia, Just Humans?
By Brett Stetka Scientific American Many of us have known a dog on Prozac. We’ve also witnessed the eye rolls that come with canine psychiatry. Doting pet owners—myself included—ascribe all […]
A Quest to Map the Human Brain
By Gareth Cook The New York Times Magazine In 2005, Sebastian Seung suffered the academic equivalent of an existential crisis. More than a decade earlier, with a Ph.D. in theoretical […]
