The Anatomy of Violence (52 page)

Changing the brain to change violence may not necessarily require drugs or any invasive form of therapy—or even more benign
biological interventions such as nutritional change. Let’s turn back to
biofeedback and
Danny. By feeding back to him his brain activity, he was able to learn how to increase activation of the prefrontal cortex. That gave him agency and the ability to better regulate his behavior. But can biofeedback like this really stop violence?

Research on individuals with
antisocial personality disorder claims to show that intensive
EEG biofeedback involving from 80 to 120 sessions does improve their behavior.
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That is promising, but the clear
limitation is that to date much of the evidence is based on case studies. Randomized controlled trials are needed to more conclusively demonstrate efficacy. We still have a long way to go with this particular biological intervention.

But
Buddha may help put us on the path to permanent
brain change without drugs or invasive treatment. Mind over matter. Maybe
meditation can change the brain for the better.

The technique itself is fairly simple. You would have one training session for eight weeks, each one lasting about two hours. You would practice the technique one hour a day at home, six days a week.
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You would be taught to become more aware—or more mindful—of your internal mental and bodily state.
Attention might, for example, be focused on breathing, becoming more aware of your present-moment experiences, and mindfully going through your whole body’s sensations and feelings. You are taught to take a compassionate, nonjudgmental stance to yourself—to not, for example, beat yourself up during training if your mind wanders from the task. Later on you would be taught to become aware of yourself in the here and now.
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Doing all that will change your brain—permanently. In 2003, a leading neuroscientist,
Richie Davidson, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, performed a breakthrough meditation study. People were randomized into either a
mindfulness training group or a control group that was put on a waiting list for training. Richie demonstrated that just eight weekly sessions of mindfulness training enhanced left
frontal EEG activity.
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Manipulate the brain through mindfulness, and better mood and psychological
functioning can result.

One study from Davidson’s group showed how focusing on a mental state of compassion and loving kindness for others enhanced brain regions involved in
empathy and mind-reading. Participants’ ability to process emotional stimuli was enhanced, bringing on line the
amygdala and the
temporal-parietal junction of the brain.
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Functional imaging research has also shown that expert meditators have greater activation in brain regions involved in attention and inhibition.
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It’s not just that meditation changes the brain during the time of meditation. People who have practiced meditation over a long period later show that at rest—in a non-meditation state—their brain has shifted toward increased attention and alertness as measured by gamma activity—a form of high-frequency EEG activity involved in consciousness, attention, and
learning.
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The more hours of practice, the greater
the
brain change taking place. Meditation is producing long-lasting positive effects on the brain.

Mindfulness practice changes not just brain function but also brain structure. One study scanned subjects before and after an eight-week mindfulness course, with controls again being put on a waiting list. The mindfulness group showed a significant increase in the density of cortical
gray matter after treatment—a tangible physical change.
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Enhanced areas included the
posterior cingulate and the temporal-parietal junction, areas involved in moral
decision-making. The hippocampus was also enhanced, an area critical for
learning,
memory, conditioning, and aggression regulation
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and that is impaired by extreme stress.
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So even though the hippocampus reaches full maturity early in life,
⁹⁵
its structure can still be enhanced through later environmental change. Another brain-imaging study documented that extensive meditators have increased cortical thickness in the prefrontal cortex compared to controls.
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Mindfulness remodels the brain—physically.

Hold in your mind for a while the evidence that meditation can change your brain. Now let’s ask whether it changes crime and violence. Perhaps surprisingly, meditation training with prisoners has been going on for quite some time.
Transcendental Meditation (TM)was made popular during the swinging ’60s by its founder,
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a charismatic figure who was a guru to the
Beatles. By the beginning of the 1970s it was already practiced in
California prisons.
⁹⁷
Since then meditation studies have spread to Texas,
⁹⁸
Massachusetts,
⁹⁹
and India.
¹⁰⁰
Scientific reviews have argued that meditation in prisoners reduces their anxiety and stress levels, increases their psychological well-being, and reduces their anger and hostility. More important, one literature review on meditation in offenders has argued for not just a reduction in post-release
drug and
alcohol use, but also reduced recidivism.
¹⁰¹
Even women arrested for
domestic violence have shown reduced aggression, alcohol use, and drug use after twelve sessions of mindfulness training.
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One large-scale study gave mindfulness training to 1,350 inmates and showed significant reductions in their hostility, aggression, and other negative moods. Interestingly, the improvements were stronger in women than in men. Among the men, improvements were stronger for minimum-security prisoners than for maximum-security prisoners—although all groups did improve. It seems that meditation most helps offenders who are not so severely
criminal. One recent randomized
controlled trial in normal adults, most of whom were female, showed that
mindfulness significantly reduces anger expression and improves the ability to regulate emotions.
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It might be therefore that this intervention could particularly help female offenders.

What are we to make of this? The claims are intriguing, but the reality is that we sorely need a randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that mindfulness training really can reduce violence. Unlike the studies by
Davidson and others on brain change, no such study appears to have been conducted on offenders. Granted, Transcendental Meditation has a funky past, with its prior claims of levitation abilities and other supernormal powers. Mindfulness meditation, with its origins in
Buddhism, might also seem quirky by association with the TM movement. Yet there is now unquestionably a strong body of scientific support—based on randomized controlled trials—documenting its efficacy in reducing anxiety and stress,
¹⁰⁴
substance use,
¹⁰⁵
depression, and
smoking,
¹⁰⁶
and in increasing positive emotions.
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It’s a promising technique that is gaining in scientific credibility, and it cannot be ignored.

Let’s suppose for a minute that it’s not all pie in the sky. Now put in your mind the hypothesis that mindfulness and other meditation techniques can really reduce violence. How might mindfulness and other meditation techniques work? What might be the mechanism of action? Recall that you are taught to become more aware of your own thinking.
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You become increasingly conscious of when you are beginning to feel angry over a disparaging comment someone makes to you. You become better able to regulate your thoughts before you boil over in a rage. You become more attuned to the very first moments when, say, your partner made that critical comment that cascaded into a steady stream of unpleasant thoughts and associations. You become aware of your heart racing and your face flushing, and how negative emotions then rear their ugly heads. You are taught to become more accepting of these feelings, to control the urge to act, and to step back from your first instinctive emotional reactions. Because you have become adept at experiencing the negative thoughts and emotions that you felt when the argument started, you have learned to habituate or acclimate to them. That means you can better control your urge to lash out. By being more mindful of your anger at an early stage, you are better able to control and regulate it—at a point in time when your anger is more
manageable and has not yet reached its crescendo.

If you think back at the neuroscience we looked at—the studies
that document both the short-term and the long-term
brain changes that occur with mindfulness—the effect of meditation begins to make some sense. Meditation enhances left
frontal brain activity. That meshes with the fact that enhanced left frontal brain activation occurs when people experience positive emotions
¹⁰⁹
and is associated with reduced anxiety.
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It also increases frontal cortical thickness, and we know that this area is not just important in emotion regulation, but is also structurally and functionally impaired in offenders. Note also that meditation enhances brain areas important for moral
decision-making as well as areas involved in
attention,
learning, and
memory. We have seen that offenders have impairments in these cognitive functions. Meditation is improving brain areas involved in functions that are deficient in offenders, and that’s why it may help.

Mind over brain matters. Brain over behavior matters. What matters to me is that hopefully in journeying through the anatomy of
violence you have appreciated three important points. First, there is a basis to violence in the brain. Second, the biosocial jigsaw mix is critical. Third, we really can change the brain to change behavior.

In that third point we have options that run the gamut from concrete
surgical
castration to almost spiritual mind-over-matter training. In between these extremes we have prenatal nursing
interventions, early environmental
enrichment,
medication, and
nutritional supplements that can all make a difference.

Based on the biosocial model I’ve outlined here, we have promising techniques to block the foundational processes that result in the brain dysfunctions that in turn predispose an individual to violence. That has not been fully recognized within the traditional study of crime—and it really needs to be if we are to be sincere about stopping the suffering and pain associated with violence. We can wait until the milk is already spilled and we have to deal with the adult recidivistic offender who is so very hard to change. That’s where we are today. Or we can invest in broad-based prevention programs that start in infancy and can benefit everyone—a
public-health approach to violence prevention.

Ultimately, it is up to the public to make that decision. If you want my personal view—based on everything I have learned in my thirty-five-year career in research and practice—it would be this: the best investment that society can possibly make in stopping violence is to
invest in the early years of the growing child—and that investment must be biosocial in nature. You cannot successfully intervene without addressing the brain.

Don’t get me wrong. Biology is not the sole answer to stopping violence and never will be.
Larry Sherman, a world-renowned experimental criminologist at
Cambridge University, and others have marshaled systematic evidence from randomized controlled trials documenting that some traditional psychosocial and behavioral treatment programs
can
make a modest difference in offending.
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What I am arguing here does not negate the positive work done to date by experimental criminologists. What I am saying, however, is that we can go one better with biological interventions that take into account the anatomy of violence—and break the mold that is today giving birth to violent offenders in droves. We have much research ahead of us to develop new and innovative biosocial interventions, but we now have a base on which to build—if we are willing to.

Imagine how society would change if for once we could cure crime. Can you picture a future where suddenly we crack the biological code to violence? How would that change how we think about violence? How would it affect our sense of culpability, punishment, and free will? Would it lead to changes in the law? We’ll see in the next chapter that this future isn’t so far away.

Michael—or Mr.
Oft, as we will refer to him here—was pretty much your everyday, run-of-the-mill middle-aged American guy. In his early career he worked as a correctional officer, later earning a master’s degree and becoming a schoolteacher in Charlottesville, Virginia. He liked teaching, and he liked kids. By all accounts he genuinely loved and cared for both his second wife, Anne, and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Christina, whom he had known since she was seven years old. He got on fabulously well with her. Oft had no prior psychiatric history, nor any history of deviant behavior. He was not much different from you or me—until the clock moved toward the turn of the century in late 1999.

At the age of forty, his behavior slowly but surely changed. He’d never previously been interested in massages, but now he began to frequent massage parlors. He also began to avidly collect child
pornography. Then the once-innocent act of putting his stepdaughter to bed changed in an unspeakable way.

As Christina recollects, Mr. Oft used to sing her lullabies before he tucked her in. But after his wife took a part-time job that kept her out of the house until ten p.m. two evenings a week, the usual bedtime practices became a little more sultry and sordid. Oft began to get into bed with Christina, and began to touch and fondle her.

Like many children suffering from abuse at the hands of a trusted
relative, Christina was very confused. She knew that she loved her stepfather—but she also knew that what he was doing was wrong. She would argue with him over it, and it increasingly bothered her. But Michael’s changes were growing. Normally engaging and likeable, he was becoming more short-tempered. On Thanksgiving Day in 1999 he pulled out some of his wife’s hair in a fight. Oft was clearly a man in decline.