Barely one minute into his Penn Lightbulb Café talk on “The Anatomy of Violence,” Penn Professor Adrian Raine pointed to a slide projected on the screen behind him that showed the cracked skull of 19th century railroad worker Phineas Gage alongside a sepia-colored image of the maimed man.

In 1851, an ill-fated accident left Gage “psychopathic-like,” Raine said. A metal rod had torn through the man’s brain, damaging the pre-frontal cortex. This area controls decision-making, intense emotions, impulses, insight, and the ability to learn from mistakes.

It is the part of the brain that Raine called “our guardian angel of behavior.”

“If it is asleep,” he said, “the devil can come out.”

After the accident, Gage became impulsive, lost his inhibitions, drank and gambled heavily, and adopted an aimless lifestyle, losing all his friends.

In his talk, Raine covered the neuroscience of crime and its implications for societal views of moral responsibility, free will, and punishment. He is a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences’ departments of Criminology and Psychology, and the Department of Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine.

Next, Raine presented the case of Randy Kraft, who murdered 64 people in Southern California in the 1980s.

Raine pointed to a slide with a bird’s-eye-view of the prefrontal cortex of Kraft’s brain, which showed extensive brain activity unlike the brain scan of a murderer that lacked such activation.

He said this showed, in part, how Kraft was able to escape detection for 12 years. Kraft had good frontal cortical function, allowing him to plan and regulate his behavior.

The slide included an image of Raine’s own brain scan, which he joked is eerily similar to that of the multiple murderer.

The self-deprecating remark garnered a laugh from the packed house at the World Café Live. The venue is home to the 10-year-old Penn Science Café series and sister lecture series, the Penn Lightbulb Café.

Raine also addressed the moral dilemma of “helping or handcuffing” a mother who gives birth to a baby testing positive for heroin. In one case, Jamillah Falls was convicted in 2014 of assault and sentenced to six months in prison after her newborn tested positive for heroin and marijuana.

He appeared almost sheepish when he said to the audience, “I hope there’s no one here pregnant and taking drugs.”

Another case Raine presented involved a man with a tumor growing in the prefrontal cortex. Unlike Phineas Gage who lost his inhibitions, the man known as “Michael” became a predatory pedophile.

When neurosurgeons removed the tumor, Michael returned to normal and reunited with his family. But six months later, the tumor had grown back. His wife found child pornography on his computer and divorced him. The tumor was removed for the second time, and Michael again returned to normal, losing his “acquired pedophilia.”

Raine, the author of the 2013 book “The Anatomy of Violence: Dissecting the Biological Roots of Crime,” challenged the audience to ponder the ethics of punishing prisoners if the neural circuitry underlying their morality is compromised.

“The dominant model for understanding criminal behavior has been, for most of the twentieth century, one built almost exclusively on social and sociological models,” Raine wrote in “The Anatomy of Violence.” “My main argument is that sole reliance on these social perspectives is fundamentally flawed. Biology is also critically important in understanding violence, and probing through its anatomical underpinnings will be vital for treating the epidemic of violence and crime afflicting our societies.”