The neuroscience world has been buzzing as of late about a recent study, Association of Poor Childhood Fear Conditioning and Adult Crime, published in a recent issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The gist of the article is the claim that children at the age of 3 who had an abnormal amygdala were more likely to engage in criminal conduct as adults. There are problems with the study, however, as The Last Psychiatrist aptly points out.
But there's an additional observation worth noting: the amygdala has become hot again, but what it can explain about human behavior is limited.
Back in the 1990s, the amygdala was all the rage in the explanatory models of schizophrenia (with some renewed interested today). But as of late, the amygdala has become the focus of explanatory models of psychopathic behavior. And while it makes intuitive sense that the amygdala could be (and probably is) involved in both disorders, there's a larger lesson to be learned.
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s (before the widespread use of fMRI) the tool of choice in biological psychiatry was the EEG. Stories were written with much fervor that the EEG could peer inside the brain and explain the mind by describing the electrical impulses detected by the EEG apparatus. Soon, a particular type of brain wave was identified which seemed to have explanatory value in various behavioral models. The P300 wave had been around for a while, but the evolution of psychiatry from its psychoanalytic traditions to one dominated by biological psychiatry was well under way by the 1980s. Before long, researchers found that the P300 wave was abnormal in people with schizophrenia. Then it was observed that the P300 was abnormal in alcoholics, people who abused cocaine, depression, Alzheimer's, smokers, borderline personality disorder... and the list goes on.
The point is not that the P300 models were wrong in the descriptive sense- they were surely right. The issue is what localization models can explain. Inasmuch as the P300 is indeed abnormal in schizophrenia and a myriad of other behavioral disorders, the amygdala is likely involved in various behavioral phenomena as well. What that tells us about why people behave as they do, however, is quite limited and circumspect.
But there's an additional observation worth noting: the amygdala has become hot again, but what it can explain about human behavior is limited.
Back in the 1990s, the amygdala was all the rage in the explanatory models of schizophrenia (with some renewed interested today). But as of late, the amygdala has become the focus of explanatory models of psychopathic behavior. And while it makes intuitive sense that the amygdala could be (and probably is) involved in both disorders, there's a larger lesson to be learned.
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s (before the widespread use of fMRI) the tool of choice in biological psychiatry was the EEG. Stories were written with much fervor that the EEG could peer inside the brain and explain the mind by describing the electrical impulses detected by the EEG apparatus. Soon, a particular type of brain wave was identified which seemed to have explanatory value in various behavioral models. The P300 wave had been around for a while, but the evolution of psychiatry from its psychoanalytic traditions to one dominated by biological psychiatry was well under way by the 1980s. Before long, researchers found that the P300 wave was abnormal in people with schizophrenia. Then it was observed that the P300 was abnormal in alcoholics, people who abused cocaine, depression, Alzheimer's, smokers, borderline personality disorder... and the list goes on.
The point is not that the P300 models were wrong in the descriptive sense- they were surely right. The issue is what localization models can explain. Inasmuch as the P300 is indeed abnormal in schizophrenia and a myriad of other behavioral disorders, the amygdala is likely involved in various behavioral phenomena as well. What that tells us about why people behave as they do, however, is quite limited and circumspect.
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