Is anybody in there?

The land of the free, the US, is also the largest prison in the world. What else do you call a country that tops the world in locking up its own citizens?

Al Jazeera reported earlier this year that the US incarcerated 743 for every one lakh citizens, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College, London. Rwanda and Russia come second and third, putting away 595 and 568 of every one lakh.

In 2008, The New York Times called the US the leader in producing prisoners, it being home to a quarter of the world's prisoners, though it has less than 5 per cent of the world's population.

Against this backdrop, it is understandable why David Eagleman, who teaches neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, US, and founded the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at the college, gives a racy account of how our brain makes us work, mostly without our knowledge, in Incognito . Eagleman is keen on persuading his fellow citizens, especially jurors and judges, of the possibly lesser culpability of prisoners. On almost every third or fourth page, he reminds readers how the legal system's idea of pinning a crime on someone is the wrong way of doing justice.

Why we do what we do

Alternatively, Incognito could have been titled ‘A Very Short Introduction to You'. For its core message is that we have no idea why we do what we do.

That elusive quality that we call consciousness is marginal to our behaviour and comes into play only when we are learning something from scratch.

The parts of the brain responsible even for things we assume to be voluntary, for most of our lives, work incognito.

Which is why, Eagleman says, blaming people for their bad character is partly wrong, as we are not responsible for most of our activities — ingenious or heinous.

However, we are able to study this hidden machinery of billions of neurons — that has as many connections in a cubic cm of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy — either when a part of it gets damaged or some gene or arrangement of genes changes.

Eagleman points out that the Freudian picture of the brain, as a three-tier cage from where hypersexual inmates sneak out now and then, is highly unreal.

Our brain is more like a fractured polity with several interest groups vying to push their agenda, he says.

This quarrelling melee works differently when we are asleep, puncturing the notion that our awake episodes create our dream stories.

Moulding behaviour

Much like in the Pink Floyd song, Is Anybody Out There? , the brain loves to create stories and give meaning to things that don't have any.

This evolutionary function, dubbed patternicity, or the tendency to seek pattern, helps it understand and react in unknown environments. But, in a twist to the song, it creates ways to prevent us from looking at it.

That is why, Eagleman says, introspection is a limited means of understanding what or who is inside.

Did I say who? Is anybody in there? Or is it just destructible material? Neuroscientists mostly believe that our brain is an extremely complex physical network of chemicals. No matter how comforting the idea of a soul or a mind is, there is no such thing beyond the physical organ, they say.

Eagleman says it is the environment in which the gene develops that matters. The society is as responsible for a crime as the doer.

His prescription has two remedies for the legal system.

First, punish only if the behaviour is modifiable — that is, prevent the convict from doing such acts again. Second, punish mostly by the way of “prefrontal workouts” — train the convict to suppress the urges in the short-term oriented frontal lobes that are generally responsible for criminal behaviour.

What is surprising is that despite acknowledging the equal role of social conditions in moulding behaviour, Eagleman does not even make a passing mention of any non-clinical way of tackling crime.

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