How Neuroscience Will Transform Criminal Justice Ladies and gentlemen, David Eagleman. Well, it’s a real pleasure to be here and just as a point of clarification, my 12th birthday is next week. Okay, well, I am really to be here and tell you guys about my favorite topic which is the intersection of neuroscience in the legal system. I've never had it introduced before by the moon illusion but I think it’s a nice idea. One way that you can prove the moon illusion to yourself is just holding up your thumb and comparing the size of the moon at the horizon and then when it’s at the top and you’ll see it’s the same size and I think the goal today is to see how we can hold out our thumb and look at the legal system and find out what the problems are there that maybe we’ve been overlooking so, this is your brain. It’s about three pounds. It’s the most complicated device that we’ve ever found in the universe. It’s made up of about ten billion cells that’s just in the cortex, just the outer part of your brain and those cells are about as complicated as a city. Each one of those cell has the entire human genome. It’s trafficking millions of proteins and each one of these cells makes connections to about 10,000 other neurons. So in total, what you have are trillions of connections in the brain and that means that if you already take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, you have as many connections in there as you have stars in the Milkyway galaxy, so it’s a very complicated system and this is what I and thousands of others have devoted our lives to trying to figure out. Since, this is going to be a short talk, I'm going to summarize everything we know in modern real science with four words which is You Are Your Brain and it’s a little bit of a generalization but I'm going to try to argue why we think this is the case. And essentially it’s because imagine you were to lose your pinky in an accident where you would be sad about that but you wouldn’t be any different as a person. If you lose an equivalent size chunk of brain tissue, that changes you completely. It changes your capacity for decision making, your capacity to speak language, your ability to see colors or name animals. So, we know that the brain is the densest representation of you in the body. Now, I'm going to try to give you a few examples to convince you at this point. How many people here know who Phineas Gage was? Okay, about a quarter of the people. For those who don’t, he was a young railroad worker about 120 years ago in Virginia and his job on the railroad was to use a metal tamping rod. He would put gunpowder in these little holes and sand on top of that and then tamp it down and they would use this to make explosions, to build the railroad. But one day, he accidentally caused the spark when he hit the tamping rod down and there was an explosion and the tamping rod blew through his head with such force that it cluttered to the ground 40 meters away. And the reason why Phineas Gage became a famous medical case is because he didn’t die. And in fact he didn’t even lose consciousness but what did happen with Phineas Gage is he became a completely different person. So, people who knew him said he’s no longer Phineas Gage. He is somebody else now. And in fact he went from being a nice guy and responsible citizen to—casting and gambling and sleeping with prostitutes and just became a totally different person that was unrecognizable. So in the intervening 120 years, we have seen many more of these natural experiments like this like all drive home this point that when your Biology changes, you change. You depend on the integrity of your Biology for your capacity for decision making. How many people who this is? Remember Charles Whitman? So, for those of you who don’t remember, in 1966, Charles Whitman climb to the top of the tower at the University of Texas at Austin and he brought with him guns and food and knives and he started shooting people indiscriminately from the top of