Chapter 2: Neuroscience

For this first impression, I chose “Exploring the mind of a Serial Killer”. This stuck out to me the most because I have been interested in criminal shows and have taken a couple of forensic courses in the past year.
Jim Fallon uses this Ted Talk to tell the audience about a research study he was part of. The research study looked at the brains of serial killers. They had given Fallon brains to study without telling him who they were from and then he would look at the different parts to come up with his conclusion. In the ted talk he gave the audience a look at slides of some of the results he had. A couple of these slides showed the common links between serial killers included, damage to the brain, MAO-A gene, and violence in childhood.

The most intersting part was to see how his research ended up affecting his own life. While telling his mother about some of his research she told him about his ancestors that were serial killer. Based on his research and family tree he was influenced to start studying his own children, nieces, and nephews to see how they would turn out.

Jim Fallon and his evidence ia trust worthy because he is a professor at the University of California. He also studied behavior through genes and neurotransmitters for 35 years. Fallon was also able to use his own family tree as evidence to support his theory.

If violence is a trigger of serial killers, does violence in videogames also influence the young minds of future serial killers?

I would do scans on boys of the same age. I would run the same tests Fallon did on boys who have a lot of interactions with violent video games and those who don’t at age 10. From there was can see how videogames trigger the brain. If the reaction is simmilar to those who are serial killers or not.

One thought on “Chapter 2: Neuroscience

  1. Great post, this TED talk sounds very interesting as well! I agree that Jim Fallon is a credible source of information regarding this topic, as you mentioned his 35 years of experience in the field. It is also reassuring that he has been a college professor at the University of California, teaching neuroscience and psychiatry. This demonstrates credibility for any information he teaches or discovers, as it is backed by a very well- known institution. His own connection between the topic of serial killer brains and his family tree may actually create a certain bias in his research, so this may not be as trustworthy. Fallon may have more of an attachment or desirable outcome for the results he finds while researching his own family, which could alter the data. I like your research idea, especially because I am sure researchers would in fact find a correlation between brains of boys who play violent video games frequently and brains of serial killers. You may need to widen the range of your sample group to include boys and girls instead of only boys. If only boys are studied, this may bias the results and attribute the similarity to violence in video games when it may just be the male gender causing the similarities. You could also go another direction and interview former serial killers, questioning how often they played violent video games as children. This idea may also create a bias though, especially if the serial killers either give inaccurate answers to the survey questions or if some choose not to participate. While the observation of brain activity eliminates the participation and response biases that the survey would create, the experiment would be incredibly time consuming to gather data about enough children who play violent video games. You could perform a longitudinal study, tracking them from childhood to adulthood in order to observe the effects, but this would also be time consuming in order to obtain more valuable research.

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