Research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that using minimally invasive electrical currents on the prefrontal cortex can reduce the desire to carry out physical and sexual assault and increase the perception that such violence is morally wrong.
timulating the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for controlling complex ideas and behaviors, can reduce a person’s intention to commit a violent act by more than 50 percent, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania and Nanyang Technological Universitypublished in the Journal of Neuroscience. What’s more, using such a minimally invasive technique, called transcranial direct-current stimulation, increased the perception that acts of physical and sexual assault were morally wrong.
“The ability to manipulate such complex and fundamental aspects of cognition and behavior from outside the body has tremendous social, ethical, and possibly someday legal implications,” says Roy Hamilton, a neurologist at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and the senior paper author.
It’s viewing violent crime from a public-health perspective, adds psychologist Adrian Raine, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and co-author on the paper. “Historically we haven’t taken this kind of approach to interventions around violence,” he says. “But this has promise. We only did one 20-minute session, and we saw an effect. What if we had more sessions? What if we did it three times a week for a month?”
The researchers zeroed in on the prefrontal cortex—and specifically, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the top, front area of the brain—because it’s well-documented that antisocial individuals have deficits in this region, says Olivia Choy, an assistant professor in psychology at NTU in Singapore and the lead author on the paper.
“If an offender’s brain is scanned, we don’t really know if it’s the brain deficit that leads to the behavior or if it’s the other way around,” says Choy, who earned her doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees from Penn. “One of the main objectives of this study was to see whether there was a causal role of this brain region on antisocial behavior.”