When there's damage to the brain, that changes how you behave in the world, how you see the world, how you proceed, how you act. Narrator: Jeffrey Burns and Russell Swerdlow investigated a comparable case in the year 2000. While neurologists at the University of Virginia Hospital, they met a remarkable patient we'll call Michael. He was a normal guy, you know, had a job and a wife, and was living a normal life. It looked like he was beginning to hoard pornography, including child pornography.
Things evolved to the point that there were improprieties with approaches to the stepdaughter. He was arrested and that led to a conviction this website. Narrator: The night before his prison sentence was to start, Michael complained of headaches, so he went to an emergency ward where the nurses noticed some disturbing behaviour . Russell: He remarked to a nurse that if I go home I will either kill myself, or I will rape my landlady, so they admitted him to the psychiatry service for that night. Narrator: That's where Swerdlow and Burns ran a battery of tests on Michael. During the exam, he was attempting to flirt with female members of the medial team, which I thought was very unusual for someone who is, who is about to go to prison. Narrator: Swerdlow suspected neurological damage, so he ordered a brain scan. What it revealed was a massive tumour. You can see the tumour growing off the skull base here. These are the back of the eye sockets. This is the right side, this is the left side, and you can see now the tumour in stark relief extending up through the frontal lobe mostly on the right, really displacing where the normal orbital frontal cortex would be, here is the cyst part of it. You can see here the left side of the brain being pushed over towards the left side of the skull because of the bulk of the tumour. We knew right away that this, this lesion, this damage to the brain was responsible for his behaviour. Is this a pedophilia centre of the brain? No, but it is an area that leads to the inability to inhibit urges and inhibit, you know, desires and inhibit, you know, bad choices. It was clear that putting this gentleman in prison wasn't going to cure his inability to conform within the norms of society. What he needed to conform within the norms of society was to have his tumour removed. Narrator: After surgeons removed or resected the tumour, Michael's pedophilia and other strange sexual behaviour disappeared. He didn't go to jail, but spent time in a rehabilitation program, and his wife took him back. The story has an interesting postscript because what happened is six months later he started developing an interest in pedophilia again, so his wife took him back to the doctors. It turns out the surgeons had missed a little piece of the tumour, which was now re-growing, so they resected it a second time and his sexual behaviour returned to normal a second time. Narrator: It turns out that Michael's tumour affected a lot more than impulse control. When his overall brain function was tested, the results were shocking. I had him copy this picture here, and this is what he came up with. And we had him copy this picture here, and this is what he was able to produce. This is before the tumour was resected. And I asked him to draw a clock and then to put the arms of the clock in so that the time said 20 minutes after 8, and this is what he, he generated, so not very good. I asked him to write a sentence and this is what he wrote. It's virtually illegible. Now after the tumour was resected, I had him do the same tasks, and this you can see here that there was dramatic change. And when he was asked to write a sentence again, he now wrote this, I am happy that my tumour was removed. Quite a big change. And putting him in prison wasn't going to fix this. Narrator: Cases like this raise serious questions about the role brain abnormalities can play in criminal behaviour.
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