Free Murderous Minds by Dean Haycock

evolution of our human ancestors may have come before changes in the neocortex and were central to the development of our current behaviors, including social and sexual behaviors.
    Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., a Professor of Science at New York University, is an authority on the biological mechanisms of emotional memory as well as being the lead singer for the rock band “The Amygdaloids,” for which he also writes songs. After studying the neurobiological underpinning of emotion for much of his forty-year-long career, he concludes that: “There is no emotion system. There are systems that are responsible for the various functions we label as ‘emotional’ but there is not an emotion system.” 22 The inspiration for LeDoux’s rock band is an important component of many of these systems. But it is also one of the most misrepresented in popular media.
    The Limbic System Celebrity
    The amygdala has become a celebrity among the limbic structures of the brain. If it were a person, it would have an entourage. The hypothalamus and the frontal cortex sometimes join it on the pop-neuroscience A-List, but other regions of the brain, like the cerebellum, never walk the red carpet of popular neuroscience with the amygdala, which makes frequent appearances in the popular media. A search for “amygdala” on the Huffington Post website, for example, delivered more than 5,100 hits in the fall of 2013, making it far more popular than the prefrontal cortex and the hypothalamus, which scored 722 and 221, respectively.
    You may not yet have heard of the criminal Aaron “Amygdala” Helzinger. Batman has. Aaron once overpowered the comic book hero after Aaron’s amygdalae were removed (his incompetent neurosurgeon was aiming for his hypothalamus) in an attempt to reduce his violent rages. 23 Incomprehensibly, this psychosurgery left Aaron with extraordinary strength.
    A character on the other side of the law, a district attorney, accused a police officer of being a racist on “Attack of the Xenophobes,” 24 an episode of the television series Boston Legal. The officer faced prosecution after he shot and killed an unarmed black youth whose can of soda he mistook for a pistol. The evidence against the officer came straight from a hospital/ neuroscience lab. He was shown pictures of people of different ethnic backgrounds while having an fMRI brain scan. The fictional scientist/ expert witness testified that he “measured the response in the part of his brain that controls fear. It’s called the amygdala.” The defendant’s response to pictures of African-Americans, according to the fictional witness and fictional prosecutor, proved the officer was guilty.
    Asked if fMRI allowed him to tell what someone is thinking, the expert explained, accurately, that it did not. Instead, it allowed him to tell how someone is feeling “and specifically, we can identify responses associated with sociopathic tendencies. Here we determined the defendant was racist” because his amygdala lit up during the test. Furthermore, the expert swore he could measure it “with extreme accuracy.”
    Like Batman’s opponent, “Amygdala” Helzinger, the case brought by the Boston Legal prosecutor is a good example of bad neuroscience. Many popular cultural and infotainment accounts of neuroscience are oversimplified. The fictional jury in the television show and their creators, the show’s writers David Kelly and Craig Kurt, clearly knew this. Perhaps they were up on the scientific literature, because they seemed to know that there is no credible evidence showing that fMRI can be used in this way to “tell how someone is feeling.” It shows blood flow patterns in the brain, which reflect brain-cell activity. Neuronal activity in an isolated part of the brain is not the same thing as a feeling or an emotion. It is an indication of activity in one component of an emotion system, as LeDoux points out. It is an indication that a specific part of the brain appears to