David Eagleman and The Brain on Trial

Imagine for a second that anything you know about the motivations behind criminal activity. For most of us, myself included, our assessment of burglars, murderers, and other deviants is that they have made a choice to act this way (to break the law).

In a remarkable, provocative piece by David Eagleman, he suggests that criminal activity is ingrained in our brains. In no uncertain terms, Eagleman argues that how the human brain is wired ultimately determines how people will act. There is no such thing as free will.

The piece is long (but a must-read in its entirety). I pull a few significant quotes below.

The piece begins about Charles Whitman, a student at the University of Texas at Austin and a former Marine who killed 16 people and wounded 32 others during a shooting rampage on and around the university’s campus on August 1, 1966. The question was why? Eagleman begins to make his argument here, after Whitman’s suicide:


Perhaps the paragraph that tells the whole story of the piece:


It is fascinating to learn how changing brain chemistry affects our moods, emotions, and behaviors. A classic example:


Through the mini stories that Eagleman provides in his piece, he explains the lesson: there is no such thing as free will. Human behavior cannot be separated from our brain chemistry:


Now, it’s a little hard to digest that paragraph above. Cleverly, Eagleman begins to question you, the reader, on how you feel about this hypothesis:




At this point, Eagleman counters and perhaps worries that he is going to lose readers. Your ideas are crazy, you might think. But please read on, as Eagleman suggests:


Some overwhelming statistics about criminal behavior:


But what about the environmental effects? Surely someone growing up on the mean streets of Detroit would become more predisposed to crime than someone growing up in the quiet suburbs of Wichita, Kansas.


Eagleman further espouses on free will, and explains that it doesn’t exist with a striking example of Tourette’s syndrome:




So what’s the purpose of this essay? What can we conclude? Comparatively speaking, we know so little of our brains, that the field of neuroscience can be said to be in its infancy.

Today, neuroimaging [editor’s note: I studied medical imaging both in undergrad at Georgia Tech and at the Brain Imaging Center at California Institute of Technology; I am familiar with the subject matter and for what it’s worth, agree with Eagleman’s assessment] is a crude technology, unable to explain the details of individual behavior. We can detect only large-scale problems, but within the coming decades, we will be able to detect patterns at unimaginably small levels of the microcircuitry that correlate with behavioral problems. Neuroscience will be better able to say why people are predisposed to act the way they do. As we become more skilled at specifying how behavior results from the microscopic details of the brain, more defense lawyers will point to biological mitigators of guilt, and more juries will place defendants on the not-blameworthy side of the line.

Further conclusions from Eagleman. The wrong question to ask: how can we assign a blameworthiness scale in our legal system? Eagleman explain:



Speaking of wrong questions to ask, Eagleman brilliantly defends here:


And then we come to the meat of the essay, where Eagleman gives us an idea of a forward-looking legal system:



But Eagleman closes spectacularly:




I’ve highlighted the major sections of the essay, but of course, I encourage you to read the whole thing. It will change your perspective on how you view and think about criminality and our legal system. If for some chance it did not change your course of thinking, why not? Shout out in the comments.

14 thoughts on “David Eagleman and The Brain on Trial

  1. A lot to digest here, but I can’t help thinking about a quote by the gravely ill Christopher Hitchens: “…I don’t have a body. I am a body.” Thanks for this article.

  2. We have no self-control, then? Really?

    If you put a cookie in front of me, sometimes I will eat it. Sometimes, not. Can you tell which choice I will make?

    If I sit at a restaurant perusing the menu and make a decision, then change my mind at my wife’s suggestion, does that mean that I didn’t make a choice after all?

    If a smoker decides to get clean and resists the urge to light up a cigarette, even when his body is telling him to, even when he craves it, is he exercising free will?

    • >”We have no self-control, then? Really?”

      At no point is that stated, or even suggested–certainly nowhere in the full article. I’d suggest that perhaps you’re missing the point.

      But even in asking what I would submit is the “wrong” question, you do raise an interesting one: define “self” control. Which “self” do you mean? 🙂 The one you subjectively perceive as the one who wills things? E.g., “I’m raising my finger because I just chose to do so”?)

      (And what do you do then, for instance, with the objective fact of neurological backdating and temporal juggling done by perception to square what we think we did with what we think we did–there are many instances in the literature–and other recent revelations that undermine the solidity of that folk-wisdom, intuitive “self”?)

  3. You can’t, logically, argue that we have no capacity for choice AND AT THE SAME TIME ask people to change. I mean, if there’s no choice of any degree, then changing the legal system is a logical impossibility, right?

  4. We are our minds, but our minds and our bodies are obviously closely linked. If we are the sum of our genes and our past, then our actions can be explained through these avenues. This does not excuse our behaviour however.

    If a person kills or maims another person, then claimed that their past or biology made them do it, this is equivalent to admitting that they, as a biological (or causal) entity causes this action. It is right to look to fix or prevent such biological causes if possible, but they fail as excuses. They are but reasons.

    Fixing the person is one thing, but a murder causes damage to a comuity. Revenge through punishment sometimes seems like it will help: this is a false promise however. Revenge is a less effective cure for the victim than forgiveness, and this article seems to support that.

    The term “free will” is here used to apply to a freedom to have chosen ones own beginning. Though it might seem sensible to say that one did not chose ones birth, parents, life therefore one is not free, it makes the mistake of making freedom impossible for everyone, forever. For who could ever choose any of these things for themself?

    Therefore the essay is right, but for the wrong reason. We are as free as we need to be, but hate burns like a hot coal and so should be dropped to avoid future pain.

  5. […] David Eagleman and The Brain on Trial « Books I Read Imagine for a second that anything you know about the motivations behind criminal activity. For most of us, myself included, our assessment of burglars, murderers, and other deviants is that they have made a choice to act this way (to break the law). […]

  6. Casey Anthony was acquitted of murder because her defense argued she was abused by her family and learned to become a pathological liar, so she was found guilty of lying instead. The world who watched this televised drama unfold is outraged. Now we learn from her former fiance in post trial interviews, that Casey had been constantly berated by her mother for not doing anything to support herself and her child. In retrospect, it appears Casey’s motivation for the alleged murder of her child may have been her perceived economics straits. With the trial behind her, Casey is now free to gain a lot of money from book deals and she’s already talking of having another child. Alls well that ends well? This is leaving a very bad taste in the majority’s mind. I feel like the “brain model” of criminal justice is still missing a few pieces. Without question, social economic circumstances play a major role in criminal behavior, but one of the missing pieces may be self-concept. I think our society, based on capitalism and free enterprise, the “bella vita” such as it is, needs to pull back and assess what is the “ultimate good”? Basing criminal justice reform on hard sciences like brain science might just backfire if not tempered with the “intangible” … just food thought.

  7. Be careful how much credit you give Eagleman in this essay. He uses three highly controversial and somewhat dubious mental events to make his case. Whitman had a tumor, no doubt about that… but there is no indication that the tumor did anything but amplify what was already inside him. If the tumor activated his fight/flight area of the brain, then why wasn’t he fighting or flighting while he calmly shopped for his killing supplies? Tourette’s is misrepresented by Eaglemen – behavioral modification does work & most people “grow out” of Tourrette’s. Does a person “grow out” of diabetes? Cystic Fibrosis? And the Parkinson’s case of gambling? How many took the drugs but didn’t gamble away their life savings?

    I would encourage anyone to show us a “science” that A) builds its case on less than 1% of the subjects population (Tourettes), B) Holds a phenomenon to be true for the whole that only manifests in les the half the population (Parkinson’s drug), and C) uses a single violent case (Charles Whitman) to illustrate a universal truth, knowing full well that many shooters do not have tumors and many people with the exact same tumor do not become killers.

    This is BAD SCIENCE.

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