The BART Foundation’s mission is to promote better outcomes for brain injury survivors by answering three questions – which alternative therapies are likely to work, where can they be found, and how can they be afforded? One of the ways we fulfill our mission is by carefully watching global research and clinical trial outcomes and sharing that information, in user-friendly language, with the TBI/ABI community.
Today, we’d like to share with you a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School that sheds light on the neural roots of violence and moral decision-making. The study is published in the June 2025 issue of Molecular Psychiatry. In this post, we will share segments of the article. The entire piece is behind a paywall, and a login subscription is needed.
To understand the link between criminal behavior and brain injuries from strokes, tumors, or TBI, researchers compared the brain scans of 17 individuals involved in criminal cases with 706 individuals diagnosed with other neurological symptoms, including memory loss or depression. The researchers found that injury to a specific brain pathway on the right side, called the uncinate fasciculus, was commonly found in people with criminal behavior and who had committed violent crimes.
“When this connection is disrupted through TBI/ABI, the person’s ability to regulate emotions and make more choices may become severely impaired,” said Christopher M. Filley, MD, professor emeritus of neurology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “While it’s widely accepted that brain injury can lead to problems with memory or motor function, the role of the brain in guiding social behaviors like criminality is more controversial. It raises complex questions about culpability and free will,” said Isaiah Kletenik, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
The specific pathway connects the brain regions linked to reward-based decision-making with those that process emotions. When the link is damaged, it may lead to difficulty in controlling impulses, anticipating consequences, or feeling empathy, all of which can contribute to harmful or criminal actions.
The researchers also found that not everyone with this type of TBI/ABI becomes violent. However, the damage to this region may play a role in the new onset of criminal behavior after injury. Kletenik noted that the findings raise crucial ethical questions. “Should brain injury factor into how we judge criminal behavior? Causality in science is not defined in the same way as culpability in the eyes of the law. Still, our findings provide useful data that can help inform this discussion and contribute to our growing knowledge about how social behavior is mediated by the brain.”
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