Announced the results of the study.
Charles Manson, the leader of the bloody sect, which organized a series of nine killings in 1969, is dead. And many people want the scientists examined his brain.
Unstable behavior of Charles Manson, strange looks and the murder of the wife of Hollywood legend raised him in the public consciousness from a racist murderer to a kind of countercultural anti-hero. Undoubtedly the most infamous murderer-generation rock-and-roll should be at least strange, right?
But the fact that the researchers did not expect to find anything unusual in the skull Manson.
Jens Foyle, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida and an expert in the field of the relationship between brain and behavior, told Live Science that although he believes that the brain of Manson’s worth exploring, he does not expect any extraordinary results.
“There are two options that we expect to find in the brain of Manson,” said Foyle. “The first is the most obvious, there is reason to believe that his brain was a tumor”.
It is not unexpected to detect a tumor in the brains of murderers. In 1966 Charles Whitman, a student at the University of Texas, Austin, was suffering from severe depression.
He killed his mother, washed his hands and wrote a note in which he expressed regret about their actions. He then killed his wife.
The next morning, Whitman downloaded a bunch of weapons and ammunition in the truck, climbed to the top floor of the University campus and killed 14 people, wounding another 30.
The autopsy revealed a tumor in Whitman’s brain, which was pressing on areas associated with self-control, although the allegation if it was the cause of his behavior remains in question.
Dr. Foyle says that there is no reason to expect that a similar defect was in the brain of Manson, not least because the brain tumor was not discovered for more than 40 years after his arrest.
Foyle made some guesses about what might look like a brain, seriously. For example, the amygdala – the brain region involved and control of emotions probably showed signs of less activity, during the life of Manson.
Foil doubt that the study of the brain Manson will shed light on the murder. The physical structure of the human brain do not change enough to fully explain someone’s behavior.
And even if the coroner were to cut the skull Manson and finds atrophied amygdala observed in the brains of other killers, neuroscientists can not be sure that these defects were in 1969.
“One thing people forget is that everything you do changes your brain,” said Foyle.
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