Our last post focused on Raine’s essay “The Criminal Mind,” featured in the April 27, 2013 Wall Street Journal, in which he discussed how advances in our understanding of the genetic, neurological and environmental bases of violence are influencing our view of and approach to crime.

Now another large media outlet, CNN, has run not one, but two segments featuring Raine’s work.

In a segment entitled “The Anatomy of Violence: A look inside the minds of killers,” CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta talked to Raine and discussed his work’s possible relevance in understanding why the Boston Marathon bombings occurred.

The segment opens with footage of the bombings, over which Gupta says:

“In the wake of tragedy come the inevitable questions. What makes a killer? Is there a switch that turns on a rampage? And why? Why would someone do this?”

Adrian Raine then appears on the screen and says that to simply label a person that commits such acts “evil” is “13th-century thinking.” Gupta introduces Raine, explaining that Raine believes there are “biological explanations for violence” and Raine then explains why he believes that brain dysfunction may partly explain the Boston Marathon bombings.

One interesting condition that Raine mentions that he found relevant, given that the older of the two brothers charged with the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was a very skilled boxer, is a recognized brain abnormality called Cavum Septum Pellucidum. Raine says that this condition, in which a maldeveloped limbic system fails to normally put pressure on and thus fuse the leaflets of the Septum Pellucidum, predisposes to a psychopathic personality marked by fearlessness and the ability to commit remorseless violence. For whatever it is worth, he says it has also been found in boxers.

In fact, in reading Wikipedia’s page about Cavum Septum Pellucidum, I became aware that perhaps the most famous fictional boxer of all time, Rocky Balboa, was specifically told in Rocky V that he had this very condition.

I could only find video of the scene in which Rocky receives this diagnosis online in Italian. And the translation has “pellucidum” apparently incorrectly transformed into “pelliculum,” which may be why the poster put a question mark at the end of the video’s title of “Cavum Septum Pelliculum?” You can see an English translation here. But here is the clip.

Gupta then shows us, using imagery from a psychopath’s brain, the smaller amygdalae found in psychopaths in Raine’s research, which also contribute to the fearlessness and disinhibition that could enable one to commit harmful acts like the Boston bombings.

Gupta also discussed the possible link between Raine’s work and the Boston Marathon bombings in another segment on the CNN program The Lead with Jake Tapper.

During the segment, which begins with the lower third title again saying “The Anatomy of Violence: A look inside the minds of killers,” host Tapper says, in reference to those bombings, that we are trying to “understand this unmitigated evil.” In that spirit, he asks Gupta about the bombers, Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev themselves, as well as about the three men later arrested for having attempted to help Dzhokar cover up his involvement. Gupta mentions having spoken to Adrian Raine about this topic and says it may be relevant to understand that Dzhokar and the three arrested later, all being just 19 years old, may have had a combination of fully developed and fueled emotional brain centers along with not-yet-fully-developed judgment centers in their frontal lobes.

The title in the lower third then changes to “The Mind of a Terror Suspect: Could brain chemistry have played role in bombings?”

Tapper raises the issue of whether defense attorneys will use our increased insight into the genetic and neurological underpinnings of harmful behavior to argue that their clients’ actions should be excused. Gupta calls our advancing understanding of the biological roots of crime and violence “an emerging science” and then offers two examples that really highlight the difficulty of assigning appropriate levels of blame to those that commit harmful acts while suffering from certain biological conditions.

• First, Gupta mentions that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, in which a mother’s drinking during pregnancy harms the developing fetus’ brain, leads that baby in later life to have a much higher likelihood of committing crimes and a nineteen times greater chance than otherwise of ending up in prison.
• Gupta also mentions how a brain tumor can drastically change an otherwise normally-functioning person’s behavior.

This is one of the first times I have seen ponerologic material discussed so explicitly on CNN. However, it isn’t the first. For instance:

• In the wake of the Newtown school shootings, I saw Erin Burnett interview Dr. James Fallon about the biological markers of psychopathy and whether he expected them to be discovered post-mortem in shooter Adam Lanza.

• I also saw a recent segment in which anchor Don Lemon intereviewed criminal profiler Jim Clemente and forensic psychiatrist Helen Morrison about the prevalence of sociopathy. (I tried to find video of this latter segment to share on this site but it seems it was never posted online. However, the transcript of the segment can be found about 1/4 of the way down the page of this transcript of Lemon’s entire show that night.)

But it was really nice to see Sanjay Gupta, who I believe is deservedly highly regarded as a physician, scientist and journalist, covering this topic from a professional and medical perspective. This is the type of coverage I would love to see more of on CNN and similar networks. And I’m glad that I have seen a lot more of it in the past few months than I can remember ever seeing before.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a sizeable piece by Raine as its “Saturday Essay.”

The title of the essay is “The Criminal Mind” and underneath the title it says “Advances in genetics and neuroscience are revolutionizing our understanding of violent behavior—as well as ideas about how to prevent and punish crime.”

It doesn’t get much more relevant to ponerology than that. And it’s heartening to see Raine given a platform to share his extremely important and provocative ideas in The Wall Street Journal just in advance of the release of his book The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime.

Raine’s essay touches on:

• The history of criminology as a science and its sometimes unfortunate devolution into pseudoscience
• The rise of neurocriminology
• The roles of genetics, environmental and developmental factors and brain structure and function in the emergence of aggression and antisocial behavior
• The political and social implications of a focus on biological bases for crime
• Recommendations for legal policies that account for our growing ponerologic understanding by both assigning appropriate levels of responsibility to offenders and optimally protecting the rest of society from the threats they pose
• Measures – including some relatively non-invasive ones – that can help significantly reduce the likelihood of harmful behavior in children that display signs of severe aggression

The article is accompanied by the video below. In it, Raine explains the relationship between diminished prefrontal cortex activity and violence, how such prefrontal dysfunction originates and possible treatments for such conditions, as well as how those with normal prefrontal activity but undersized amygdalae can also commit violence in a more planned and calculating fashion.

Raine also offers his opinion in the video about the Tsarnaev brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon.

It reads “Kids Can Be Psychopathic, Too.”

The article focuses heavily on – and introduced me to – the work of Adrian Raine, a professor of criminology, psychiatry and psychology on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerry Lee Center of Criminology.

Raine is the author of the textbook The Psychopathology of Crime: Criminal Behavior as a Clinical Disorder. And, as described in the article, he holds two highly controversial and enormously challenging beliefs:

• He believes that we will soon be able to use medical tests to determine whether a child is predisposed to grow up to be a psychopath.
• And he also believes that, once we are able to do that, we should screen children for traits linked to psychopathy.

The Philly Mag article itself is well worth the read, as it offers a fascinating look at:

• A brief historical overview of criminology and the nature vs. nature debate
• Structural and functional differences in the brains of psychopaths as opposed to those of non-psychopaths
• How psychopaths are responsible for crime at levels vastly disproportionate to their numbers
• What separates successful from unsuccessful psychopaths
• Genes influencing brain structure that are associated with antisocial and aggressive behavior
• Raine’s research showing certain differences among young children, which he believes are innate and biologically-based, that help predict which ones will exhibit future aggression and criminality
• Why, when it comes to the “chicken or egg” question regarding biological differences and psychopathy, Raine falls on the “biology as cause” side of the debate
• Why many resist biological explanations of “bad” behavior
• Interventions that might help children predisposed to criminal behavior
• Responses from others to Raine’s suggestion that we screen children for psychopathy-linked traits

I highly recommend taking the time to check it out.

But I bring up that article here in order to preface a new and exciting development regarding Adrian Raine that has come to my attention.

One other phenomenon that Hingston’s piece touches on is the recent explosion of media – including films (such as We Need to Talk About Kevin) and television shows (such as Dexter) – dealing with the subject of psychopathy. The article credits Raine’s investigations into the brains of criminals – neurocriminology research – for providing the platform for this explosion. If attributing this credit to Raine is appropriate then it is only fitting that his work will now serve as the basis for a television show in an even more direct manner.

Raine has a new book schedule for release on April 30, 2013 entitled The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime.

According to TV Guide, the highly successful producers of the show Homeland, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, sold a show based on that book to CBS and will write and executive produce a pilot episode.

Deadline.com reports that a third Homeland producer, Alex Cary, has also joined the team.

Another Deadline.com article reports that the pilot will be directed by Mark Pellington (perhaps best known for his work on the powerful video for the Pearl Jam song “Jeremy”) and that David Harewood, who appears in the cast of Homeland (and whose brief but theatrical appearance as the Prince of Morocco in Michael Radford’s film version of The Merchant of Venice I found memorably amusing), is the first actor cast for it. It describes the show as featuring “Raines, a criminal psychologist with an expertise in sociopaths”

It should be very interesting to see how the pilot is received and if the show can go on to further promote Adrian Raine’s deeply important work and provide even more public awareness and education regarding research into the biological roots of aggression and harm and other ponerologic themes.