Commentary: What Neuroscience Can Teach Lawyers About How Jurors Use Evidence
Lawyers USA › February 09, 2011
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Summary
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady learns to read defenses, score touchdowns and win games by running hundreds of plays and throwing thousands of passes every year. As with muscular and even intellectual skill, our brains also learn emotions and form our own idiosyncratic pattern of reasoning based on how we grew up and our practiced behaviors.
Dr. Antonio Dimasio, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has extensively studied how the brain uses feelings to maintain its equilibrium. Some of these studies indicate that the amygdala, located deep in the medial temporal lobes of the brain, plays a strong role in memory and emotional reactions. Some of the current studies show that emotion plays a much stronger role in our decisions than we previously thought.See the full content of this document
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Commentary: What Neuroscience Can Teach Lawyers About How Jurors Use Evidence
How does this model of the brain match how we usually think about a jury's evaluation of evidence? It doesn't. We normally think of jurors as blank white boards upon which we write all of our evidence and legal instructions. We acknowledge jurors' response to emotional images or language only wh...
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