Question: Does a MRI scan show differences between children with behaviour problems than those without?

Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Lots of studies (including some that I have worked on) will say Yes. In fact, I read an article today about how brain imaging studies could ‘identify children who will grow up to be killers’ – this is a load of rubbish. It is true that there are quite a few findings that suggest that children with behaviour problems have differences in their brain structure (i.e. the size of certain brain regions) and function (i.e. how much certain brain regions are activated by something like emotions), but we can’t use these differences to make crazy predictions like ‘children with these brain differences will grow up to be criminals’.

We don’t actually know for sure that behavioural problems are caused by the brain differences, or whether growing up with behavioural problems means that your brain develops in a different way. It makes sense that some brain differences mean that you might be more likely to be ‘antisocial’, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for these people. Children’s brains are ‘plastic’, this means that they are constantly developing and are actually quite easy to ‘change’, so just because there are differences at one point, it doesn’t mean that we can’t change that. Intervention studies that are looking at brain differences before and after treatment are on their way, this is still a very new area, and so I think we should remain hopeful that we can change brains as well as behaviour.