Is there such a thing as temporary insanity? Is there such a thing as the Twinkie defense?

Or using premenstrual syndrome as a criminal defense? And what does this tell us about

the differences between brains, yours and other peoples, or even between

yours one day and yours the next day? How does the legal system wrestle with the science? And how are

the law and the science like two different people with very different ways of looking at the world.

Welcome to the inner cosmos. With me, David Eagleman, I'm a neuroscientist and author at

Stanford. And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand

why we believe the things we do and behave in the ways that we do

and why there's such a variety in the ways that people see the world and how we try to structure

legal systems around that fact. Now today we're picking up on the trial of Andrea Yates, who was a young woman in Houston, Texas, who had five beautiful children, and one day she murdered them one by one by drowning them in the bathtub.

Now, if you haven't heard the previous episode, please go back to that one to get the full background on that story.

Andrea was suffering from a psychosis, which is a mental disorder characterized by a disconnection from reality.

And at her trial, her lawyers pled the insanity defense, or specifically not guilty by reason of insanity.

Now, as a reminder, the prosecution hired on a psychiatrist who said, yes, Andrea clearly has mental troubles, but I think she did this particular act more purposefully, because if she was

unable to distinguish right from wrong, which is one of the prongs of the insanity defense,

then she wouldn't have made sure she waited until her husband was gone before doing it.

And she wouldn't have suffered regret. And Dietz said, there was an episode of law and

order, which is a show that Andrea watched regularly, in which a woman drowns her children in the

bathtub so she can be free to be with her lover. So Andrea's case brings to the forefront

some of the deep questions about the insanity defense.

How do we know when we should judge someone's actions to stem from a mental disorder like a

psychosis versus judging the person to just be more devious? We can't really know what is happening

...