Slashdot Mirror
The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Joseph Stromberg writes at the Smithsonian that one afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world. 'Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer's and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk,' writes Fallon. 'I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological.' When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own. When he underwent a series of genetic tests, he got more bad news. 'I had all these high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy,' he says, such as a variant of the MAO-A gene that has been linked with aggressive behavior. It wasn't entirely a shock to Fallon, as he'd always been aware that he was someone especially motivated by power and manipulating others. Additionally, his family line included seven alleged murderers, including Lizzie Borden, infamously accused of killing her father and stepmother in 1892. Many of us would hide this discovery and never tell a soul, out of fear or embarrassment of being labeled a psychopath. Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon has gone in the opposite direction, telling the world about his finding in a TED Talk, an NPR interview and now a new book published last month, The Psychopath Inside. 'Since finding all this out and looking into it, I've made an effort to try to change my behavior,' says Fallon. 'I've more consciously been doing things that are considered "the right thing to do," and thinking more about other people's feelings.'"
If he were a psychopath, he'd not be disturbed by it. Of course, maybe he's only faking being disturbed by it to promote his career.
In the US are psychopaths. The med school selection process encourages it. The pay/power scales back it up.
maybe psychopaths are not as one-dimensional as you think.
The most troubling aspect of this story is that the person felt that he needed to change his behaviour when he learned society would diagnose him as abnormal, despite having been a functional member of society and a respected scientist for several decades with his behaviour as-is.
Spot on.
We ALL have psychopathic tendencies, empathic tendencies, etc ad nauseum. All of us learn, from the cradle, what is "acceptable" behavior, and what is not. We are all born with the potential to become almost anything, good or bad. Some of us have to work hard to learn some things, others of us just follow our natural inclinations.
We actually NEED all of these traits, IMHO. Consider the doctor - if he's psychopathic, then he's probably a cold, analytical, unfeeling kind of guy. Is that necessarily a "bad thing"? Absolutely not - those traits are good things in a scientist. He isn't going to allow stupid feelings, opinions, or emotions stand in the way of his research.
Sure, there is probably some point, or degree, at which being psychopathic makes you totally worthless to society. Where is that point?
Lizzie Borden probably had some value, up until she committed murder. PERHAPS had she been properly evaluated, and received counseling, she might have understood herself, and the people around her better. Being better able to relate with her family and acquaintances, she may have made more intelligent decisions. Or not - each person remains an individual after all. We each make conscious decisions to get along with people, or not to get along.
IMHO, we, as a race, developed all of our traits and tendencies for a reason. Even our worst traits have value under certain conditions and circumstances. Our best traits can actually work against us in other conditions and circumstances.
I wonder how many slashdotters have ever taken a test, only to learn things about themselves that they didn't know. A leadership course in the Navy included a self-evaluation test, that was never turned in to the instructors. The purpose of the test was to reveal to the student which type of leadership he could use most effectively. You may, or may not, imagine my surprise to learn that I was primarily an authoritarian. (note that being 'primarily' authoritarian doesn't preclude other tendencies) Once I understood that somewhat important fact, I was able to improve my leadership ability tremendously.
We could probably all benefit from a little self analysis.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Most doctors in the US are psychopaths.
It would be worth studying why assertions like this get an instant mod-up from the geek without a single citation to support them.
Granted, my knowledge of psychopathy is based in psychology and not neurology, but rather than degrees of psychopathy it's better to think of types of psychopaths. While there is a scale or spectrum of psychopathy, measured by the Revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R, or PCL-YV for the Youth Variation), subjects are generally extremely psychopathic or not at all. To be deemed a psychopath a subject need a score >= 30, 40 is the maximum. For a simple comparison, the typical 'career criminal' scores, on average, a 20 on the PCL-R. For the true psychopaths, it is the type of psychopathy that is of primary importance. Of the ten basic subtypes of psychopaths, only two --malevolent psychopaths and tyrannical psychopaths-- are characterized by overt anti-social behavior and violence, the two rarest but the two most commonly associated with the term 'psychopath' in popular culture. The rest are more driven by material gains (this isn't necessarily 'better', but it is much more common and probably, given my extremely limited knowledge of the subject, what drives Dr. Fallon if he is a true psychopath). The two violent subtypes are predominantly characterized by sadism and extreme self-aggrandizement, respectively (murderous variants of these two types rarely kill only one victim, as the violence amuses them). For example, sexually sadistic serial killers such as Ted Bundy are malevolent psychopaths; a serial killer like the Zodiac Killer who taunts authorities and views his (not a sexist pronouns, 80% of psychopaths are men) victims as inferior i.e.: the Zodiac 'hunting people' and his belief that after his death "ALL THEI [sic] HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES."
But, again, this understanding is psychological not neurological. However, there is most likely a genetic component, as psychopathy appears equally across social classes and family environments. Further, psychopaths cannot be successfully treated psychologically. In fact, treatment generally exacerbates their qualities and makes them better psychopaths be teaching them to recognize, and thus better mask, their distinctive psychopathic traits.
He explains in his TED talk that a relative informed him of his family's history of psychopathy after he developed an interest in the topic - this prompted him to perform neural scans of himself and family members. Whether he became interested in psychopathy because he had some suspicions about himself (as a neuroscientist, he would've had a course or two in psychopathology in grad school, and would have had a reasonable understanding of how antisocial personality disorder is formally defined; this isn't to mention the likelihood of other exposure to this topic) is another question altogether. If someone with a doctorate in a subdiscipline of psych showed antisocial personality disorder traits that qualify him as having this disorder under DSM criteria, it's pretty hard to believe that he wouldn't have been able to give himself a provisional diagnosis in accordance with these traits, although as a neuroscientist, being able to associate the neural scans to the symptoms probably helped him to convince himself.