Neuroscience, neuroimaging and the law.

Violence is a phenomenon we are daily confronted with in the media and everyday life. Yearly more than one and a half million of humans are reported to lose their lives due to violence. Violence has links to aggression, an almost universal phenomenon in animal kingdom that may in some instances serve the purpose of survival of species (e.g., the maternal aggression for defending offspring). Violence is classified according to target and mode. Our focus here is on the individual violent behavior toward others and contributions from neuroimaging to understanding its putative neurobiological underpinnings and reframing the “nature-nurture” debate. Historical tracing of the nature-nurture discussion concerned with the etiology of individual violent and criminal behavior reveals back and forth shifts from biological to environmental determinism. At one pole of the dialectics, we find incisive arguments for an incorrigible biological determinism, at the other, an embracement of a naı̈ve environmental causality (Heide and Solomon, 2006; Caspi et al., 2010). Despite persistence of terminologies such as “genes of violence” or “born to be criminal” in both scientific literature and media, a careful review of recent advances in neuroscience, genetics, epigenetics and neuroimaging nowadays paints a more nuanced and complex picture of the current neuroscientific understanding of the underpinnings of the individual violent behavior. Individual violent behavior can be viewed as a complex behavior that arises from a dynamic and likely time-sensitive interplay between genes and environment (including personal and cultural environment). Advances in the epigenetic field have taught us that genes (nature) and environment (nurture) cannot anymore be seen as separate, additive entities. Instead environmental factors can influence gene expression and brain development and synaptic plasticity in a time-dependent fashion. This suggests a role for time-sensitive environmental manipulations and opens a pathway of hope for designing violence prevention strategies.