The current definition of mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) is in flux. Presently, there are at least three working definitions of this disorder in the United States, with no clear consensus. Functional neuroimaging, such as single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and positron emission tomography (PET), initially showed promise in their ability to improve the diagnostic credibility ...

In some criminal law cases, the defendant is assessed by a forensic psychiatrist or psychologist within the context of an insanity defense. In this article I argue that specific neuroscientific research can be helpful in improving the quality of such a forensic psychiatric evaluation. This will be clarified in two ways. Firstly, we shall adopt the approach of understanding these forensic assess...

In this contribution an empirical approach is used to gain more insight into the relationship between neuroscience and criminal law. The focus is on case law in the Netherlands. Neuroscientific information and techniques have found their way into the courts of the Netherlands. Furthermore, following an Italian case in which a mentally ill offender received a penalty reduction in part because of...

Currently, potential jurors' racial biases are measured by explicit questioning--a poor measure because people often hide their views to adhere to social norms, and people have implicit views they are not consciously aware of. In this experiment, we investigated whether two alternative methods of measuring racial bias--a standard black/white, good/bad implicit association test (IAT) and neural ...

In this nascent age of “neurolaw,” “neuromarketing,” “neuropolicy,” “neuroethics,” “neurophilosophy,” “neuroeconomics,” and even “neurotheology,” it becomes necessary to disentangle the science from the scientism. There is a host of cultural entrepreneurs currently grasping at various forms of authority through appropriations of neuroscience, presented to us in the corresponding dialects of neu...