Into the Mind of Terrorist & Violent-Extremist: A Neuroscience Perspective & Review on Radicalization

—Neuroscience studies are currently drawing the baseline on neurobiological mechanism behind the mind of terrorist and violent-extremist through several interdisciplinary research. As the current state of terrorism and radicalization has been continuously studied in diverse fields such as Sociology, Political Science, Criminology, Conflict Resolution, Economic Science, Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology and more, yet it seems there is just few approaches has been implemented to understand the complexities of terrorism and radicalization through bottom-up neurobiological analyses. This paper aims to provide comprehensive review of neuroscience research and approach on terrorism and radicalism through interdisciplinary studies. The database used for this literature review includes several international journal databases related to neuroscience, neurobiology, radicalization, terrorism, extremism, criminal psychology, and social neuroscience. From the mentioned journal database, it has been concluded that the integrative multi-layer approaches which included neuroscience perspective have giving more comprehensive empirical clarity on socio-genic level as well as new fruitful insights on neural basis and neurobiology mechanism which explained the mind of terrorist and violent-extremist, particularly on the contributions of genetic predictors, justice sensitivity, cognitive flexibility, neural basis and cognitive closure within radicalization process. More future multi-layer perspective-based studies are on demand to interpret and explore comprehensively the gene-culture reciprocal interaction on the radicalism and terrorism complexities