Brain imaging can distinguish between knowing crime and recklessness

Brain imaging could determine whether a criminal has acted in a state of knowledge about a crime or in a state of recklessness, researchers have said.

The discovery, published this week, will have no immediate impact on court proceedings but marks an inroad into the emerging field of “neurolaw”.

Neuroscientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute say they have discovered the first neurobiological evidence of a detectable difference between the mental states of knowledge and recklessness, an exploration that historically has been confined to the courtroom.

In a study of 40 people, they identified brain responses indicating whether people knew they were committing crimes or if they were instead acting recklessly with the risk of committing a crime.

Scientists scanned the brains of 40 subjects and asked them to decide whether to carry a suitcase across the border, varying the probability that the suitcase contained drugs.

Using noninvasive functional brain imaging and machine-learning techniques, the scientists accurately determined whether the subjects knew drugs were in the case, making them guilty of knowingly importing drugs, or whether they were uncertain about it.

The study was informed by a judge and researchers at Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, the University of Kentucky, and Ohio State University.

Read Montague, director of the Institute’s human neuroimaging laboratory, said: “Scientists and lawyers speak different languages. A translation goes on when you bring these groups together that gives new meaning to interdisciplinary.

“Lawyers think of people as being conscious and deliberative, and the law sees people that way — you are an independent agent and you make choices for yourself. That picture ignores the scientific fact that 99 percent of the decisions made in your nervous system never make their way to consciousness. You are being driven by things to which you don’t even have conscious access — that difference was something we had to work through to design the experiment.”