what makes a serial killer in their brain

What makes a serial killer in their brain serial#

The political manipulation of such hypotheses in the eugenics movement eventually saw them wholly outlawed and discredited.Īs one result, after the second world war, crime became attributable to economic and political factors, or psychological disturbances, but not to biology. Lombroso discovered a hollow part of the killer's brain, where the cerebellum would be, from which he proposed that violent criminals were throwbacks to less evolved human types, again identifiable by ape-like physical characteristics.

What makes a serial killer in their brain serial#

The divisive thinking was developed further in 1876 by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian surgeon, after he conducted a postmortem on a serial murderer and rapist. Phrenology was widely influential in criminal law in both the United States and Europe in the middle of the 1800s, and often used to support crude racial and class-based stereotypes of criminal behaviour. The idea was first proposed by the infamous Franz Joseph Gall, who claimed to have identified over- or underdeveloped brain 'organs' that gave rise to specific character: the organ of destructiveness, of covetousness and so on, which were recognisable to the phrenologist by bumps on the head.

For all Raine's rigour, his discipline of 'neurocriminology' still remains tarnished, for some, by association with 19th-century phrenology, the belief that criminal behaviour stemmed from defective brain organisation as evidenced in the shape of the skull. The reason for this delay seems mired in ideological enmities. That book, The Anatomy of Violence, a clear-headed, evidence-based and carefully provocative account of Raine's 35 years of study, has only now appeared. Similarly, when, 15 years ago, at the urging of his friend Jonathan Kellerman, the child psychologist and crime writer, Raine put together a proposal for a book on some of his scientific findings, no publisher would touch it. When Raine presented a far less controversial paper in 1994 to a peer group, one that showed a combination of birth complications and early maternal rejection in babies had significant correlation with individuals becoming violent offenders 18 years later, it was denounced as 'racist and ideologically motivated' and, according to Nature magazine, was simply further strong evidence that 'the uproar surrounding attempts to find biological causes for social problems will continue'. The advancing understanding of neuroscience suggested that such a deficiency would result in an increased likelihood of a number of behaviours: less control over the limbic system that generates primal emotions such as anger and rage a greater addiction to risk a reduction in self-control and poor problem-solving skills, all traits that might predispose a person to violence.Įven two decades ago, these were difficult findings to publish, however.

In particular, the murderers' brains showed what appeared to be a significant reduction in the development of the prefrontal cortex, 'the executive function' of the brain, compared with the control group.

However limited the control, the colour images, which showed metabolic activity in different parts of the brain, appeared striking in comparison. He conducted PET scans of 41 convicted killers and paired them with a 'normal' control group of 41 people of similar age and profile. His most comprehensive study, in 1994, was still, necessarily, a small sample. When Raine started doing brain scans of murderers in American prisons, he was among the first researchers to apply the evolving science of brain imaging to violent criminality. There was also another good reason why Raine headed initially to California: there were more murderers to study than there were at home. In America, there seemed more open-mindedness on the question and, as a result, more money to explore it. To suggest otherwise, as Raine felt compelled to, having studied under Richard Dawkins and been persuaded of the 'all-embracing influence of evolution on behaviour', was to doom yourself to an absence of funding. In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. His emigration was prompted by two things. In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. Scans of a normal brain, left, beside that of murderer Antonio Bustamante, who was spared the death penalty after a jury was shown these pictures.