PayDay
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C:Orwellian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/12/how-to-spot-a-murderers-brain
"We must view our gods among men not mainly in terms of their mental differences, but also in relation to the cultural forces which produce them."
The implication of neurocriminology, though – where it differs from the crude labelling of phrenology, say – is that the choice it presents is not an either/or between nurture and nature, but a more complex understanding of how our biology reacts with its environment. Reading Raine's account of the most recent research into these reactions, it still seems to me quite new and surprising that environmental factors change the physical structure of the brain. We tend to talk about a child's development in terms of more esoteric ideas of mind rather than material brain structures, but the more you look at the data the clearer the evidence that abuse or neglect or poor nutrition or prenatal smoking and drinking have a real effect on whether or not those healthy neural connections – which lead to behaviour associated with maturity, self-control and empathy – are made. The science of this is called epigenetics, the way our environment regulates the expression of our innate genetic code.
One result of epigenetics might be, Raine suggests, that "social scientists can actually win from this. I mean, if a child experiences a murder in his or her neighbourhood, we have found that their test scores on a range of measures go down. There is something happening in the brain as a result of that experience of violence to affect cognition. So social scientists can have their cake and eat it. They can say look, we can prove that these environmental social factors are causing brain impairment, which leads to some real, measurable problems."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/12/how-to-spot-a-murderers-brain
"We must view our gods among men not mainly in terms of their mental differences, but also in relation to the cultural forces which produce them."
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