Welcome to the new Psychology Today blog "Neurisprudence"! Neurisprudence is a term we came up with to describe our present area of inquiry-the intersection of neuroscience and law, or ‘jurisprudence.' At the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law has begun to move forward with research and experiments into this fascinating area, and Psychology Today invited us to share some of our thoughts on this topic. We, the authors of Neurisprudence, are Dr. David Eagleman, neuroscientist and director of the Initiative, and Jyotpal Singh, law student and research fellow with the Initiative. We sincerely thank Psychology Today for this opportunity and thank you, our readers, for giving us your attention. We hope to educate and inform you, but, more importantly, we hope to share the excitement we feel for this intellectual exploration of which we are all now a part.
Our Initiative hopes to address the question of how new discoveries in neuroscience should inform the way we make laws, punish criminals, develop rehabilitation, and conduct civil and criminal trials. Our main objective is to develop experiments and produce data that inform these legal policies; however, here, in this blog, we will do more general questioning and exploring of ideas. There are a multitude of emerging questions in this area including: Is it a legitimate defense to claim that a brain tumor ‘made you do it'? Do the brains of minors have the same decision-making and impulse control as adult brains - and how should that change punishment? Can novel technologies such as brain imaging be leveraged for rehabilitation? How should juries assess responsibility, given that most behaviors are driven by systems of the brain that we cannot control?
