Week 7 Neuro Reverie

“The headline on Sky News on April 26, 2010 read: ‘Murdered Gangster’s Brain Donated to Science: Scientists Have Been Given the Chance to Get Inside the Mind of One of Australia’s Most Notorious Gangsters.’ It was reporting the fact that Roberta Williams had given ‘experts’ permission to examine the brain of her husband, Carl Williams, who had been murdered in Melbourne’s maximum security Barwon Prison less than three years into a thirty-five year sentence. ‘I believe it’s to help with research,’ Mrs. Williams is quoted as saying, ‘and might help explain why guys like Carl do the violent things they do.’”

-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 165). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Who can fathom the thoughts of a notorious murdering gangster? Who can fathom any thought that does not stem from their own brain in the present moment? I picture a team of neuroscientists, suiting up as they prepare to enter into a dead mind that once thought dark thoughts. They are going to shrink to the size of brain cells and venture into the mind of Carl Williams like hikers venturing into wilderness. “What is there to find?” they wonder as their latex gloves began to coax sweat from eager, clammy hands. They will find dim and endless forests, pools of love at the base of extraordinary mountains and mazey caves without exits leading into them. They will see the cancerous growth of violence protruding from the earth like the head of a stone giant aroused from buried sleep. They will see the tense expression of anger and sadness, his behemoth fears, the innocence that fuels his rampant trample over the beauty around him. He sculpted a criminal mind with looming silence and the pounding of his massive fists.