Neuroscience and Neurocriminology: Methodological Principles of Integration

Abstract

The development of neurosciences determined the emergence of many innovative branches of scientific knowledge, «transformed» the appearance of scientific disciplines of various profiles. Today it is announced that there is a characteristic «neuromolecular style of thinking» among representatives of various sciences. In the criminological context, there is an intensification of development and the quite natural attractiveness of the traditional problem of the ratio of biological and social in criminal behavior. In this area, the neurophysiological basis of research, converged by the use of modern neurotechnologies and the further development of theoretical and methodological principles on the new quality of such research, allows us to take a different look at the existing methodology for assessing the causes and conditions of individual criminal behavior. In the Russian criminological school, these issues received an impetus due to the development of both a foreign doctrine based on extensive empirical material and the formation of its own neuroscientific schools. At the same time, the key problems of neuroscience, despite their revolutionary breakthrough, today do not have generally recognized fundamental solutions in explaining the entire mechanism of activity of the higher functions of the brain and nervous system. At the same time, psychiatric research, including their modern neuroscientific context, is an attempt to prove the unambiguous presence of an organic basis for mental deviations and is related closely to the achieved results in the field of neuroscience. They have great significance for criminology and the further development of integrative knowledge in the field of personal properties of the person who committed the crime. Experts note the ambiguity of existing interpretations of integrative knowledge of psychiatry, accompanying the modern discussion about the possibility of neuroprotection in this scientific field. Neurocriminology and its further potential despite all its independence are thus determined to a large extent by the general context of the existence and development of neuroscience.