Sublime

Looking to the future, some neuroscientists envision a dramatic transformation of criminal law. David Eagleman, for one, welcomes a time when “we may someday find that many types of bad behavior have a basic biological explanation [and] eventually think about bad decision making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes

Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain (as shown by Damasio, Greene, and a wave of more recent studies).

Evolutionarily speaking, the prefrontal cortex is more recent than the amygdala, which is sometimes called the reptilian part of the brain.

The DLPFC tells us how our present experience relates to the past and how it may affect the future—you

Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain supports mental processes; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind-sets of those around us.

Criminal lawyers, not surprisingly, are increasingly drawing on brain images supposedly showing a biological defect that “made” their clients commit murder.

A big lesson of recent neuroscience is that models precede observations; they determine what we see as well as what sense we make of it. The mark of smart government, then, is that it has many models and constantly refines and improves them. A government that shares its intelligence with society also shares its models and encourages people to make