Brains On Trial Premiered on PBS Fall 2013
Please turn on your Flash Player
The robbery of a convenience store by a teenager high on cocaine goes horribly wrong,
and he is now on trial for attempted murder. The case is fiction, but the trial
– presided over by a distinguished US District Judge – is being conducted as if
it were real. The unfolding trial is the backbone of an exploration by Alan Alda
of the brains of many of the participants in a trial such as this, including the
defendant, key witnesses, jurors and judge. By visiting and participating in some
dozen experiments in brain science, Alda gains insights into how, and even what,
the trial participants are thinking – insights that may one day influence how the
criminal justice system operates, and in some cases are already doing so. Read More>>
Among the questions neuroscience is now addressing are these. Can brain scans tell:
If a witness is lying? If someone remembers a face? How two people can see the same
event yet remember it differently? If racial bias can be detected in a person’s
brain? Why teenagers are so impulsive? Why drugs distort decision-making? What someone
is feeling? If they have a moral flaw? If any of us really has free will?
At a time when the incarceration rate in the US is some five times higher than most
other nations (almost one in a hundred, as compared, for instance, with less that
one in a thousand in Sweden), the question of whether the insights from neuroscience
can help reform our criminal justice system is critical.
In conversations with many of the nation’s leading neuroscientists, as well as with
legal scholars, Alan Alda illuminates this question with his unique blend of curiosity
and humor.
Read Less>>
Funded by:
