Modern times is a lot about discovering what we used to know. It seems like every day there is a study overturning conventional wisdom by proving what we always knew to be true was, in fact, true all along.

According to a new study, pedophiles’ brains are “abnormally tuned” to find young children attractive.

Lead Researcher Jorge Ponseti from the University of Kiel in Germany says now it may be possible to diagnose pedophiles before they are able to offend.

The researchers found that pedophiles have the same neurological reaction to images of those they find attractive as those of people with ordinary sexual predilections. A pedophile’s relevant cerebral areas become engaged when they see children. When an adult finds someone attractive, their occipital areas become engaged, but this is inverted for pedophiles.

The researchers believe this is proof that there is a neural pattern behind a pedophile’s behavior.

Since the invention of writing, people have been jotting down this observation. Pedophiles are sexually attracted to children. Homosexuals are attracted to members of the same sex. Heterosexuals are attracted to members of the opposite sex. We have known this is nature since forever and then we forgot it somewhere in the middle of the last century. Instead, pedophiles were making poor choices or were the victims of their environment.

“The human brain contains networks that are tuned to face processing, and these networks appear to activate different processing streams of the reproductive domain selectively: nurturing processing in the case of child faces and sexual processing in the case of sexually preferred adult faces,” they noted in the study. “This implies that the brain extracts age-related face cues of the preferred sex that inform appropriate response selection in the reproductive domains: nurturing in the case of child faces and mating in the case of adult faces.”

The researchers analyzed data obtained from MRI scans of 56 male participants. That group included 13 homosexual pedophiles and 11 heterosexual pedophiles. The men were then exposed to high arousing images of men, women, boys, and girls. The participants were then asked to rank each photo in level of attractiveness. This led the researchers to conclude that the brain networks of pedophiles are activated by sexual immaturity.

“The critical new finding is that face processing is also tuned to face cues revealing the developmental stage that is sexually preferred,” the study stated.

Get back to me when you discover something we don’t know.