Clear up this fuzzy thinking on brain scans

摘要

Neuroscience could not save Edwin Hart Turner. After years on death row, the double murderer was executed by lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman on 8 February, despite last-minute legal appeals including brain scans that, his defence claimed, showed that he was mentally ill and therefore unfit for the death penalty. Whether or not we neuroscientists like it, our field has become the new genetics, the latest scientific field to be used and sometimes hijacked to explain human behaviour.