The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1617230154
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Compelling, essential reading for understanding the underpinnings of psychopathy.” — M. E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath
For his first fifty-eight years, James Fallon was by all appearances a normal guy. A successful neuroscientist and professor, he’d been raised in a loving family, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and lots of friends. Then he learned a shocking truth that would not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but would lead him to question the very nature of his own identity.
While researching serial killers, he uncovered a pattern in their brain scans that helped explain their cold and violent behavior. Astonishingly, his own scan matched that pattern. And a few months later he learned that he was descended from a long line of murderers. Fallon set out to reconcile the truth about his own brain with everything he knew as a scientist about the mind, behavior, and personality.
tasks such as spatial processing. The external world—up, down, left, right, close up, far away—is mapped onto the cortex in the upper part of the posterior area, called the superior parietal cortex. People with damage to this brain area on one side will ignore the other half of their sensory world. So they may only perceive the numbers on the left side of a clock dial, but not the right side. Given a blank circle, they will fill in the numbers on the dial from 1 to 12, but these will all be drawn
for protection and aggressive genes spread, increasing the violence and repeating the loop. Over generations, we end up with warrior societies. It’s a speculative idea but one that’s important to consider and study further. I’m a committed scientist—a neuroscientist who studies the anatomy and function of the brain—and this fact has shaped the way I view behavior, motivation, and morality for my entire adult life. In my mind, we are machines, albeit machines we don’t understand all that well,
brain. Oxytocin reduces the amygdala’s fear response in social situations and allows for trust. It’s released in high concentrations during childbirth, nursing, and sex, particularly in women. Vasopressin allows for pair bonding, particularly in men. Voles that have vasopressin receptors in the reward centers of their brains become monogamous. Studies in the laboratories of Elizabeth Hammock and Larry Young at Emory University, Bhismadev Chakrabarti and Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of comedian Sacha
increase aggression, but its effect on its own is much smaller. Those several months following birth are sometimes called the “fourth trimester,” and this extended period of what should have been prenatal development means that early environment for a human infant is particularly important. In fact, the most vulnerable time for a human’s brain development in terms of environmental impact is from the period of birth and for several months after, in this fourth trimester. It is in this time
infer a bit about my own genes based on the long and multipronged family history of murder. So in the talk I discussed what I knew generally about the brains of psychopathic killers at that time. I also discussed the findings from Avshalom Caspi’s lab connecting the warrior gene to early abuse. I presented the hypothesis that this behavioral three-legged stool might be the basis of dangerous psychopathic behavior. I also briefly proposed a mechanism for transgenerational violence, that