The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath

&quot;Psycopath&quot; has no clinical meaning. The closest equivalent is Antisocial Personality disorder. In extreme cases, an antisocial can be a Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, but that&#x27;s not always the case.<p>It&#x27;s worth pointing out that there is also such thing as an Antisocial personality <i>style</i>, meaning that a person has antisocial traits, but can keep them in check well enough to function in society. They tend to do well in roles that require aggression, and can make excellent entrepreneurs, attorneys, and politicians. In fact, people are frequently surprised to find out that some of their most prized traits are Antisocial, they have some antisocial friends, and that they probably have one or two Antisocial heroes. Martin Luther King Jr and Mother Theresa leap to mind.<p>TL;DR - It&#x27;s simplistic to say &quot;Trait A bad, Trait B good&quot;. There are plenty of narcissists, sociopaths, and paranoids that have done great things for society.

I&#x27;ve always viewed psychopaths as a sort of social predator, Something that would naturally spring up in any kind of environment subject to evolution. If you had a planet of sheep, you&#x27;re going to eventually get sheep that eat other sheep. Morality is never involved in a strategy to survive. Likewise in a social environment, preying on others is effective.<p>With no moral aversion to such behaviour, I had basically assumed all psychopaths would establish some kind of predatory behaviour in their lives. Manipulation, plagiarizing, discrediting, blackmailing, ect.<p>On one level, it&#x27;s not surprising to me to see an outlier such as Mr. Fallon, but I can&#x27;t shake it. When you have those tendencies as part of who you are, then the question really becomes &quot;why didn&#x27;t you act on them?&quot; Oh your mother loved you a whole bunch? I see. The human spirit is just indomitable isn&#x27;t it? Uh huh.<p>I suspect the simplest answer is: &quot;he did.&quot;<p>It would raise my spirits to know that pro-social psychopaths exist. Seeing as the incidence of psychopathic symptoms on average is about 1&#x2F;100 people. I&#x27;ve also learned not to believe something because I wish it to be true.<p>I fall on the nature side of the debate. It&#x27;s a scary world.

Intriguing article, but I feel that Fallon might be a bit too hard on himself: once you think X you start interpreting everything so that obviously it corroborates X. &quot;I forgot my wife&#x27;s birthday&quot; suddenly implies &quot;I don&#x27;t care about other people&#x27;s emotions because I&#x27;m a psycho&quot; instead of the explanation that is probably more sensible, namely &quot;I can be forgetful sometimes&quot;.<p>Maybe he should revisit his initial hypothesis that brain scans are quackery...

So now he is a candidate for Special Ops :-) More seriously, its another data point in the nature vs nurture debate and one where even he points out, he is very competitive and can be rude even to children. Advice, don&#x27;t cut this guy off on the freeway :-).<p>One wonders how many people &quot;discover&quot; they are psychopaths when they do something psychopathic and it gives them a huge endorphin rush and then they want to do it again? If this guy got into a competitive situation and ended up literally beating his opponent into a bloody pulp, would his brain chemistry make it feel to him like the best sex [1] he had ever had? And then would he be able to not do it again? <i>That</i> is the interesting bit for me, while I am a big fan of the nurture hypothesis, can nature override it? And does it?<p>[1] Pick what ever primal rewarding activity you want here, sex seems to be a fairly common one.

While the concept of psychopathy is interesting, people shouldn&#x27;t be lulled into believing that this category is more well defined than it really is.<p>E.g. people often associate psychopathy with criminality, and yet only the part of the psychopathy test that directly relates to past criminal behavior, is predictive of future criminal behavior.<p>I feel like psychopathy as a category is almost made for people who want an easy answer for the relationship between science and morality.

Interesting, but this story feels very incomplete without some interviews with his family and his grad students. (Not that they would feel free to talk openly.)

He broke the blinding on a study? The monster!

Makes you wonder what&#x27;s going to show up when (if?) diagnostic scans like this become widely available to consumers.

He talks about all his behavior alleles (?) but gives us no idea of a baseline in the general population.<p>He talks about how his brain has this same scan as a psychopath, but doesn&#x27;t tell us how many people have this same scan in the general population.<p>It is all glossed over for a good talk.<p>This science has now evolved into books. I saw him on NOVA originally. Who would know who he is outside his academia world, if not for this silly discovery ?<p>This is such poor science. I&#x27;d question if having him look over a stack of brain scans to find correlations with certain behaviors to be of value. Seems like you&#x27;d be better off finding some layperson, teach them how to read these heat map type things and let them find the correlations. Like A&#x2F;B testing for the brain. Then you don&#x27;t have all these biases leading to book deals. chuckle.

It scared me when I found out such a high percentage of people are sociopaths. I know many are non-violent and live within social norms, but it still unsettles me. How can you have empathy for someone who has no empathy for you or anyone else? Someone who has no guilt?

I took care to read the fine submitted article and then share it among Facebook friends of mine (who include psychologists who study human behavior genetics and neuroscientists) before commenting here. Two things come to mind after reading the comments posted earlier here.<p>1) Most people who have read about genetic influences on human behavior have not read the masters, but rather their disciples. The masters of behavior genetics research take care to write about the concept of &quot;reaction range,&quot; the variety of possible behavior patterns that MIGHT arise from an individual with a given genotype under differing environmental influences. It is apparent that the reaction range for many human behaviors is very broad even if genotype is fixed.[1]<p>2) Simply adding some brain-scan data to some hypothesis pulled out of a hat will make even the most wild and crazy hypothesis more plausible to lay readers. Neuroscience is hard, and so far there are not a lot of neuroscience conclusions about human behavior that are well replicated and well backed up by theory.[2]<p>[1] The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182<p><a href="http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ).pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu&#x2F;JJBAReprints&#x2F;PSYC621&#x2F;...</a><p>looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection.<p>&quot;Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes.&quot;<p>[2] The book Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brainwashed-Seductive-Appeal-Mindless-Neuroscience/dp/0465018777" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Brainwashed-Seductive-Appeal-Mindless-...</a><p>explains the gaps in current knowledge about neuroscience of human behavior and why a few brain scans in a few subjects don&#x27;t tell us much about brain function before other study methods are applied to the problem.

Sigh. This is one of those scientific subjects that has become a popular topic in the mainstream, and with it come a lot of misconceptions. So it&#x27;s not surprising to me how many comments are skeptical of what this guy writes. It&#x27;s unfortunate because the article sums what we almost certainly know about the phenomenon, albeit in a way that is clearly geared to promote his book. It&#x27;s marketing, but things he says are based on a fair amount of decent science. It&#x27;s just that long tables of statistical data and lectures on neurophysiology don&#x27;t sell as many books as amusing personal anecdotes.

This is exactly why I find the field of epigenetics[1] absolutely fascinating -- we are so much more than just the sum of our genes. <i>Everything</i> in our lives matters: our childhood, the stuff we eat, how much we sleep (or don&#x27;t), how much physical exercise we have (or don&#x27;t)... all these things have an influence on the levels of gene expression and that&#x27;s what decides everything.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Epigenetics</a>

Sorry mate, off to the gas chamber with you. Genetics is destiny, and we have to think about national security, the children, and what the insurance companies think.

He just went ahead and broke the blinding to look up who the scan belonged to? Is he allowed to do that even if he knows it belonged to a member of his family?

Antisocial personality disorder and (Hare&#x27;s) psychopathy are defined largely by behavior, so this title is extremely misleading. However, I supposed &quot;neuroscientist discovers that his brain shares some anatomical similarities to known psychopaths&quot; isn&#x27;t as catchy a title.

I tought psychopathy was defined defined by unacceptable social behavior, i.e. &quot;pro-social psychopath&quot; does not make a lot of sense.

What I see in this article is a huge lack of knowledge on the subject, not by the author but by the human kind as a whole.

Had to watch ad from Goldman Sachs, prior to the reading.The manipulations of &#x27;Pro-social&#x27; psychopaths.

I guess this is what talking to hundreds of psychopaths does to you...

This scientist seems to be using this Just So Story for self-promotion, and he has done so for years.[1][2]<p>He has also attempted to profit personally.[3]<p>He seems to have the expertise to know that this story is flimsy, and not well-founded in science. Using an unvalidated method in this way could be considered unethical itself. [4]<p>Dr. Fallon&#x27;s record of behavior might suggest a pattern of anti-social behavior. His job as a tenured UC professor is, in part, to educate the public. Instead he seems to give us sci-fi.<p>Of course, I&#x27;m just being totally silly, and so is he (not sure about all the writers he has duped over the years.)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127888976" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;templates&#x2F;story&#x2F;story.php?storyId=1278889...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/jim_fallon_exploring_the_mind_of_a_killer.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;jim_fallon_exploring_the_mind_of_a_...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Inside-Neuroscientists-Personal/dp/1591846005" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;The-Psychopath-Inside-Neuroscientists-...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-ethics-of-public-diagnosis-using.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;neurocritic.blogspot.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-ethics-of-public...</a>

I learned nothing from this article but that neuroscience and psychology don&#x27;t really have any concrete definition for psychopathy and they don&#x27;t seem to have much predictive insights on it at all. Fascinating.

Makes me wonder if scientists and supporters of vivo animal testing are unwitting psychopaths, not just simply having low moral intuition.