It could be a shocking way to treat future criminals. Scientists have found that a session of electrical brain stimulation can reduce people’s intentions to commit assaults, and raise their moral awareness.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore explored the potential for brain stimulation to combat crime after noting that impairment in a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex has been linked to violent acts.
They recruited 86 healthy adults and gave half of them 20 minutes of brain stimulation before asking the whole group to read two hypothetical scenarios, one describing a physical assault, the other a sexual assault. Immediately afterwards, the participants were asked to rate the likelihood that they might behave as the protagonist had in the stories.
For those who had their brains zapped, the expressed likelihood of carrying out the physical and sexual assaults was 47% and 70% lower respectively than those who did not have brain stimulation. In the first scenario, Chris smashes a bottle over Joe’s head for chatting up his girlfriend, and in the second, a night of intimate foreplay leads to date rape.
Prof Olivia Choy, a psychologist at NTU, said that while neuroscientists long ago established a link between impaired activity in the prefrontal cortex and antisocial behaviour, it was unclear whether the reduced brain activity was a trigger for violent acts. “We wanted to test if there is a causal role for that brain region,” she said.
Using a procedure called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, Choy and her colleagues Adrian Raine and Roy Hamilton at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered a 2 milliAmp current to the prefrontal cortex of volunteers to boost the region’s activity.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
