In the book, The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey Into The
Dark Side of The Brain by James Fallon, Fallon discovers that he has the
brain of a psychopath. Coming to this
conclusion, Fallon looks at his family’s PET scans, including his. His PET scan
looked like that of a psychopathic killers’ scan. He confirmed from his PET
scans that he had inactivity in several cortices, such as the orbital, ventral,
and temporal cortices. Fallon also
discovered that he has a bloodline of family ancestors who had a psychopathic
brain and he concluded that his psychopathic brain originated from that bloodline.
This concept of discovering that James Fallon had a psychopathic brain through
PET scans and through bloodlines, it can be concluded that when there is a
potential health risk that may arise can be identified at a very early time and
may be treated if needed.
There are many different
technological advances that have allowed medical professionals to determine the
irregularities between a control group and an experimental group. A control group
can be used as a comparison to an experimental group to identify the
differences between the different groups to identify potential problems and
consequences that may develop from the variations in the experimental group. For
example, James Fallon compares a PET scan of a normal brain to a PET scan of a brain
of a Psychopath. He also compares a PET scan of his brain to a PET scan of a psychopath’s
brain. Through the comparisons of the scans, Fallon identifies the variations
present in the Psychopath PET scan and the normal brain scan. He also concluded
that his PET scan was similar to the Psychopath scan and different from the
normal brain PET scan. He later confirmed that his PET scan of his brain shows
signs that his brain is very similar to the brain of a psychopath. Through the
usage of advanced technology in PET scans, James Fallon was able to identify
and confirm that he has a brain of a psychopath.
Similarly, in a New York Times
article, called “To Treat Depression, Drugs or Therapy?” by Richard A.
Friedman, Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of Psychiatry at Emory University said
that, through the availability of technological advancements, she was able to
use PET scans to treat and diagnose depressed patients. Dr. Mayberg said that
through the usage of a PET scan, she was able to check the brain activity in the
depressed patients and had the ability to identify potential problems that the
patients were experiencing and future health risks that may arise due to the
brain activity in the patient. Identifying the variations in a scan between the
control group and a scan of the experimental group can allow a medical
professional to diagnose a patient at an early stage and treat the patient.
This demonstrates how technological advancements in the medical field allow
medical professionals to identify potential illnesses that may arise as a
result from a scan and also help the patient get cured.
From this, it can be concluded that
the technological advancements can help identify various health problems.
Through the usage of PET scans, James Fallon was able to discover that he had
the brain of a psychopath and later was able to also identify that he has a
bloodline of a series of psychopaths. In a news article, Dr. Mayberg was able
to use these technological advancements in PET scans to identify the health
problems that depressed patients are experiencing and was able to determine how
she may treat the patients at an early stage of depression. Technological
advancements in the PET scans allow medical professionals to identify different
health related problems from identifying patients experiencing depression to
determining people having a brain of a psychopath.
Works Cited
Fallon, James. The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's
Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. New York: Penguin Group,
2013. Print.
Friedman, Richard A. "To
Treat Depression, Drugs or Therapy?" The
New York Times. The New York Times Company, 8 Jan. 2015. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.
<http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/to-treat-depression-drugs-or-therapy/>.
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