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Electrical brain stimulation may help reduce violent crime in future – study
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.
[...] Using a procedure called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, [Prof. Olivia] 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.
Stimulation of the Prefrontal Cortex Reduces Intentions to Commit Aggression: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Stratified, Parallel-Group Trial (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3317-17.2018) (DX)
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(Score: 2, Informative) by CCTalbert on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:44PM (1 child)
I can't remember the name of the book now (somebody please let me know if you know it!)
The story goes that they implant electrodes in a man prone to violent outbursts... a computer monitors him and when he becomes angry it activates a mild pleasure stimulation to calm him down.
What happens is after a while his brain trains itself to become angry to trigger the stimulation.... these angry/stimulate events then increase in frequency until it hit a limit and the computer resets- at which time he'd rampage and kill. Lather, rinse, repeat, as the saying goes.
If I remember right this occurred some time after he'd been released as "cured".
Whacky fun....
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:28PM
You're most likely referring to The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.