Psychopaths: Defining Who We Are By Our Neural Activity

By: Juan Pablo Moreno

            
           Throughout our lives we may encounter, maybe, someone who shares a particular personality trait with us; some one but hardly ever some two.  And even when we meet this person, we immediately realize that, despite our similarities, we are completely different people.  This should not surprise anybody, our unique neural structure changes and adapts with experience.  Yet, how then can we explain humanity’s natural tendency to expect a certain behavior out of everyone? No matter how terrible your week has been, you are expected to, at least, smile back to the annoying, old lady who randomly begins conversations with strangers at the grocery store – it’s the moral thing to do.  And this is it: No matter how unique the nearly seven billion people on this planet are, we are expected to be moral human beings who behave according to a universal rule of conduct.  We have a name for those who do not meet this expectation.  Throughout his book, The Psychopath Inside, James Fallon explores the biological factors that contribute to what we call a “psychopath.”

            I believe the main reason people act in similar fashions is due to “normal” – or common – distribution of neural activity.  Our minds produce unique thoughts due to its intricate and distinctive connections, yet these connections eventually form similar higher-order structures, or brain regions that, when used properly, produce the overall common human behavior.  James Fallon, an acclaimed neuroscientist who studied the brains of young psychopaths for years before ironically realizing his wasn’t too different, claims he can distinguish between a normal person and a psychopath by simply looking at an fMRI of his or her brain – more specifically, people’s neural activation patterns.  I read an article about psychopathy recently that also places importance on neural activity when discriminating between a normal brain and that of a psychopath.

            “Psychopaths' brains unable to fully process punishment” by James McIntosh from Medical News Today discusses some astonishing findings regarding psychopathy.  The article focuses on understanding why criminal psychopaths have a higher rate of recidivism and are practically immune to rehabilitation programs.  It mentions that in contrast to non-psychopathic criminals, psychopaths act in an emotionally detached, cold, premeditated manner.  Furthermore, it discusses a study that revealed that psychopaths have reduced brain regions “associated with empathy, moral reasoning and the processing of emotions such as embarrassment and guilt.”  It concludes that psychopaths do not respond to punishment because they judge based on the benefits of the situation without weighing the costs.

            In The Psychopath Inside, Fallon goes into great detail, coinciding with McIntosh’s notion that psychopaths have lower levels of brain matter in regions dedicated to morality and emotion.  Fallon discusses that lower activity in the orbital cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex are characteristic traits of the fMRI of a psychopath.  These regions are involved in inhibition, social behavior, ethics, and morality.  Furthermore, psychopaths have lower activity of the emotion regulating amygdala, in the temporal lobe, which explains the cold behavior.  Overall, psychopaths lack significant amounts of activity to their limbic cortex, also known as the emotional cortex, for obvious reasons.

            Fallon’s explanation of the lack of activity to the brain helps understand the point McIntosh was aiming to make.  McIntosh mentions that psychopaths have difficulty learning from punishments and engaging in socially moral behavior.  The Psychopath Inside helps the reader understand this point of view.  Fallon does not write based on his scientific knowledge alone, he tells you how he, a self-proclaimed “pro-social psychopath” thinks.  For instance, he says he understands why one should go to his best friend’s mother funeral, but not because he feels the empathy, but rather because he was taught that it is the right thing to do.  He blatantly says it: “I don’t care,” using all CAPS and repeating it over and over as he writes about the many ways he can change to make happy those around him.  Punishment may serve as a way to tell a psychopath that what he is doing is wrong, but here’s the rub: he still does not care.  The whole idea behind punishment is “negative reinforcement,” used to make the person feel regret, but with no activity to this area of the brain, it is difficult to argue why punishments could work on a psychopath in the first place.

            McIntosh writes his article reporting on a study that attempts to find better ways to change psychopathic criminal behavior.  Fallon’s The Psychopath Inside provides an excellent tool for readers to understand what it is like to think like a psychopath.  In addition, it cannot be further stressed that psychopaths possess not only different neural networks but also larger – in this case smaller – neural bodies.  For this reason, one must take into consideration that we cannot expect the same success from methods that work to adjust a "normal" brain's behavior to result when applying them to the mind of a psychopath.  

Works Cited

Fallon, J. H. (2013). The psychopath inside: A neuroscientist's personal journey into the dark side of the brain. New York: Current.

McIntosh, J. (2015). "Psychopaths' brains unable to fully process punishment." Medical News Today. Retrieved from
: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/288669.php