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guy who he was talking about out of virginia who had the large tumor in his brain and chose to act on but didn't have control over having the tumor in his brain. how do we take account for that in law? that's, i think, the interesting struggle that neuroscience presents us with, but it doesn't change the issue of free will. in fact, we have just as robust of evidence from neuroscience that supports this concept of action which is what we punish for in law to begin with. >> and, doctor, would you like to comment on that last? >> no. [laughter] >> i would like to raise an issue. theore...

nanosecond. how do we study people like him? we can transport him out from the present to the hospital. one of the things my lab does, we built a really nice trailer in new mexico. here is my trailer. i live in a trailer in mexico. [laughter] this trailer has a really nice mri in it. we work with inmates to volunteer force studies and how to make them better. what we have found is that individuals to have those psychopathic traits, only about a third of all inmates will score really high on the straights. they have reduced gray matter density in these areas. this is the same area whe...

like you have control over whether or not you like chocolate cake? raise either hands. fewer, right. so there are two different things going on that we often conflate when we talk about free will. one is your predispositions to preferences and desires, ok. that may be impulsivity, that may be violence, that may be anti-social personality disorder, that may be a preference for chocolate cake, a preference for sugar. i did my 23 and me profile. if you don't know what this is, it's a neat genetic thing that you go online, it tells a lot of things about predispositions for entertainment ...

their desires and those who are not. and so if you can't define and it's not just simply defining in the brain, but it's defining it genetic, environmentally, contextually, you're defining it in terms of time, if you study their brain today but they committed the act six months ago, a year ago or 10 years ago, so the legal question ultimately is not theoretically whether we can distinguish preferences from action, but whether we can identify those either before the fact or after the fact that had that inability to control their actions. >> yeah, but what we do know is that even like ...

person is an automoton, usually you can. the law has a bright line. it says if you engage in a wongful action, there is a defense called the insanity defense which never works as most of us know because we don't recognize it. should we recognize it, that's an interesting question. should we have a more robust concept of diminished responsibility in light of the understanding that some people have less control over their preferences and desires or should we have better sentencing schemes or get rid of incarceration and come up with different models of trying to deal with punishment on...