9 thoughts on “Psychopaths”

    2. Or banking. Impossible to know, but I wonder how many of the utterly callous, dishonest spivs who infest the financial “industry” have this brain abnormality?

  2. Very interesting. Of course, the big question is whether the anatomic difference is a cause or an effect of the psychopathology. (For instance, could their brains have started off normal, but cultivation of bad patterns of behavior leads to subsequent brain changes.) The MRI studies can only establish a correlation. Nonetheless, this is fascinating.

  3. If Black Box A has a different output than Black Box B, one would expect to find differences upon looking inside each, no?

  4. This would seem to confirm other observations about psychopathy. It’s been noted that there is a vast array of traits psychopaths have, and most of them seem to have almost all of those traits, whereas normal people have very few. One leading theory (advanced by Steven Pinker and others) is that a master gene gets switched on, controlling a suite of traits that define the disorder.

    This brain scan finding says it might even be simplier than that, with a gene or development problem turning off a connection pathway between two areas of the brain. The range of behaviors that psychopaths exhibit might not be genetically coded trait by trait (as was suspected), and might not even be the result of a master gene turning all those traits on and off, but the result of a missing neural pathway.

    Perhaps people had some instinctive sense that this was the problem all along, as the common treatment for the disorder was to try to reconnect the two regions of the brain by using a bullet, knife, axe, or hammer to smack one region of the brain into the other.

  6. Sometimes you don’t need a big sample size, like when your result is “We observed that the group that couldn’t walk didn’t have legs. Though based on a statistically small sample, we posit people who ain’t go no legs ain’t doin’ no walkin’.”

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