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The Book of the Week is “Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain” by David Eagleman, published in 2011. This hodgepodge of a volume jumped from one subject to another on brain function in connection with: legal issues, technological advances in brain-screening, materialism and reductionism. The author argued that those last two ideologies will never fully explain the world’s most complicated neurological problems because humans are just too complicated.
The term “cognitive reserve” means multiple redundancies of brain power. One who seeks brain challenges throughout his or her life, possesses more of it than someone who doesn’t. An autopsy of the former kind of person might show physical manifestations of senility, but he or she might have had no behavioral symptoms of senility when they were alive.
Someone with “anosognosia” has delusional thinking. He truly believes he’s doing what he’s doing. As is well known, a world leader who has anosognosia can be dangerous.
AI statistics-software (hereinafter referred to as “AI”) in any subject-area of life (including brain-related ones) can generate credible evidence that there is a physical cause for a suspect’s behavior. In the future, this will result in more creative legal arguments to defend criminal-suspects. Physical causes can include genetic mutation, stroke, tumor, or chemical imbalance in the brain, or combination thereof.
Traditionally, elected officials in law enforcement had meted out punishment or ordered rehabilitation for a perpetrator, pursuant to the views of political donors. BUT, the predictive power of AI is ushering in a new era of sentencing-guidelines (that proves what works in reducing recidivism) based on numerical data rather than on the biased, unduly-influenced opinions of psychiatrists and parole-board members.
However, there is the danger that a hacker, or disgruntled or unduly-influenced employee could still lie with statistics, for their own selfish purposes.
Read the book to learn more about brain function (and dysfunction).