The study helped to establish the difference in the structure of the brain of real villains and those who commit crimes on purpose.
Neurosurgeons at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute used brain scans to differentiate between people who deliberately committed crimes and those who broke the law by accident or carelessness.
American scientists scanned the brains of 40 people who were asked to carry a suitcase across a virtual border for a reward. Some participants in the experiment were warned that drugs were in the suitcase. Others did not know that they were being carried across the border, although they understood that they could break the law. In addition, the experiment varied the likelihood of being searched at customs.
Then a computer stepped in, analyzing images of the participants' brains. The analysis has produced promising results. Neurosurgeons led by Reed Montague argue that they can identify with a high degree of probability people who violated the law intentionally, that is, knowing that they are smuggling illegal substances across the border. In the same way, they were able to identify those who broke the law, not knowing that there were drugs in the suitcase, but wanted to take risks for a reward.
The discovery can have very large consequences, primarily, of course, for jurisprudence. Of course, it is foolish to hope that it is possible to reconstruct the mental state of a person several months after the commission of a crime and to establish exactly whether he committed it by accident or on purpose. However, writes the London Guardian, this is a starting point for further research. One thing is already clear: before talking about a breakthrough in the fight against crime, it is necessary to scan and check the pictures of hundreds and thousands of people in order to exclude the slightest accident.