Why was Mauritio Gucci killed by his wife? And even though there was a good movie about it recently,

what was the part of the movie that was left out? Who was Charles Whitman? And what did changes

in his brain have to do with him becoming a school shooter? And what does any of this

have to do with Friedrich Nietzsche or guessing which sex offender is going to re-offend, or the

notion of culpability? Where does the study of the brain overlap with how we think about our

legal system.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University,

and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life.

In the last episode, we talked about all the ways in which your unconscious brain drives the show of what's

happening in your life. We feel like we make free decisions, that we have free will, but it turns

out that your actions, your beliefs, who you are, these are all driven by mechanisms well

below the access level of your conscious mind.

So given that foundation, we're now going to explore what this means for us on a societal level.

Today we're going to talk about the intersection of brain science, which is playing out in labs all over the world, and the legal

system, which plays out on streets and courthouses all around the world. These are usually

thought of as separate issues, but in fact, they are inseparable. What happens when someone commits a crime and it might have something to do

with a disease or defect in their brain? Do we punish them differently? We can't just let them off the hook,

right? Because the job of the legal system is to keep everyone safe. So what is the right thing to do here? So today I'm going to give

you the argument why we can't keep pretending like everyone is exactly the same on the inside

and that we all act from our own free will because modern neuroscience suggests these are bad

assumptions.

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