Murderous Minds (32 page)

Any psychologist claiming to have developed effective treatments for callous-unemotional children or adult psychopaths will have to build in
safeguards to prevent being fooled. Both groups can learn to mimic emotions and be persuasive. It will be a time-consuming process to prove that a therapy works. It will be necessary to follow treated patients for years to prove that the therapy or treatment was effective, as the researchers in Wisconsin have begun to do.

Is it possible to increase empathy in a person who lacks it? Harma Meffert of the National Institute of Mental Health and Professor Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen and the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience Social Brain Lab in Amsterdam, think it might be possible, based on the results of experiments they carried out on eighteen people with psychopathy.
¹⁶

First, they had these prisoners, together with matching controls, watch some short film clips showing people interacting by touching each other’s hands. The hand contact was either loving as indicated by a gentle squeeze or caress, pain-inducing as indicated by bending or twisting a finger, socially rejecting as indicated by pushing away, or neutral as indicated by swiping a finger across the back of the hand.

fMRI brain scans of the psychopaths watching these films revealed predictably that brain regions “involved in their own actions, emotions and sensations were less active than that of controls while they saw what happens in others,” Keysers said in a press release.
¹⁷
“At first, this seems to suggest that psychopathic criminals might hurt others more easily than we do because they do not feel pain, when they see the pain of their victims.”

But then the Dutch researchers asked the prisoners to try to feel empathy toward the person in the film whose hand was being subjected to loving, painful, rejecting, or neutral treatment. Surprisingly, despite their high psychopathy scores, their brain regions lit up nearly as much as those in the controls who lacked psychopathic traits. The authors suggest that psychopathy may be more a problem of a reduced inclination to feel empathy than it is an inability to feel what another person is feeling. The default mode of their personality seems to lack empathy, the authors imply, but they might be able to turn it on if and when they feel like it.

The results raise the possibility that people with psychopathy go through life unencumbered by empathy except for a certain time when they intentionally activate it, or a version of it, in order to manipulate others. Perhaps
knowing just a little about how a potential victim feels makes it easier for a conning, manipulative bad guy to appear more sympathetic, more human, in the eyes of the intended victim.

The authors balance this depressing scenario with a more optimistic one. Perhaps, they suggest, it might be possible to condition or train people who normally lack empathy to turn it on automatically more often.

If neuroscientists can identify brain abnormalities in young people who begin to show signs of callous-unemotional traits and accumulate enough evidence to convincingly link them to these traits, then it would be possible that neurobiological screening could direct at-risk youth into treatment sooner rather than later for everyone’s benefit. That this is even a remote possibility in the views of some neuroscience skeptics and a likelihood in the opinion of others reflects how far we have come since Rav was hauled by his frustrated parents to see psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso 125 years ago.

This Theory Is Now Modified

When he examined his new patient, Lombroso probably was not surprised by Rav’s protruding ears, and he may have been suspicious of the shape of his skull too. Lombroso was convinced that physical abnormalities were markers of criminal behavior. He published five editions of his book
The Delinquent Man
(
L’uomo Delinquente
) starting in 1876 as he tried to convince the rest of the world that he was on to something. He was unsuccessful in part because his findings reflected the prejudices of his age and because he seemed to be trying to prove he was right rather than trying to challenge his own hypothesis that criminals were biologically different from non-criminals. In short, he saw what he expected and wanted to see in the faces and skulls of criminals. But Lombroso was right when he argued that biology can play a significant role in the origins of crime and antisocial behavior. Unfortunately, he was born before fMRI and other neuroscience tools were developed.

Yet even today, some critics compare the oversimplified interpretation of brain-imaging results to phrenology, the once-trendy practice of interpreting human traits and abilities based on the overall shape, bumps, and
indentations of a person’s skull. Phrenology was nearly, but not completely, ridiculous. It at least provided a hypothesis, something that could be measured, tested, and challenged. And don’t forget that today, physical anthropologists studying brain evolution in our human ancestors rely on a scientifically valid technique for studying brain indentations. But—and this is a very important “but”—they study the indentations left on the inside of fossil skulls. These indentations reflect the extent of the development of different brain regions such as those associated with speech, manual dexterity,
etc.

By making a latex mold of the empty space inside a fossil skull, paleoneurologists create an endocast. The inside surface of the skull is imprinted on the surface of the mold. If a prominent part of the brain or a brain blood vessel leaves an imprint on the inside of the skull, you can see it in the endocast. Of course, the mold can reveal nothing about the fine internal structure of the brain or its cells, but it can, under the right circumstances, provide direct evidence of the presence of particular brain regions in a long-deceased subject.

For example, if an endocast indicates that the brain of an early primate ancestor had a well-developed region closely associated with vision, scientists would conclude that this species had evolved a well-developed sense of sight. This conclusion would be based entirely on the impression left on the inside of the skull under which once nestled the brain tissue associated with this sense. The same would apply to other sensory systems.

The difference between phrenologists and physical anthropologists who create endocasts is that the phrenologists were on the outside, looking in, while all the interesting stuff was on the inside, pressing out. And of course phrenologists had very little understanding compared to what we know today about which parts of the brain are involved in processing different sensations and higher mental functions. The founder of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall, working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, deserved credit for promoting the notion that different brain functions can be associated with specific parts of the brain.

Unfortunately, he and his followers went beyond their nearly non-existent data. They did not hesitate to associate various bumps and indentations on the head to traits such as self-esteem, cautiousness, verbal memory, language, acquisitiveness, secretiveness, destructiveness, combativeness,
and 29 other moral and intellectual, or mental faculties (see Figure 3, top). Unfortunately, none of the fanciful associations between mental attributes and skull bumps could be substantiated by any scientific data. As physicist Richard Feynman said about an early theory that attributed planetary motion to the force applied by angels beating their wings: “You will see that this theory is now modified.”
¹⁸
Phrenology was an overenthusiastic, naïve, unscientific attempt to understand what many neuroscientists are still trying to understand: how brain structure relates to mental ability and behavior. Now, with techniques like fMRI, we have a more sophisticated tool for looking at the brain and one that may have the potential to help us prevent psychopathy from developing in the brains of susceptible youths.

Chapter Eleven

Why Do We Have to Deal with These People?

Explaining criminal psychopaths to juries and Darwinists

I
MAGINE THREE UNRELATED HUMANS
living around 150,000 years ago near the southern coast of Africa. Two adults, Al and Cy, and a child stand on the edge of a ravine which blocks their progress. Rough times, including extreme drought and cold temperatures never experienced by modern humans, have reduced the population in Africa, and therefore on the planet, from thousands to hundreds.
¹

This kind of drastic reduction in the number of individuals in a species due to environmental or other misfortune is called a population bottleneck. Trimming the population of a species trims the variety of genes in the species. Not all geneticists agree when, or even if, humans faced such genetic bottlenecks in the past, but many are convinced that our species survived one or more. A brush with extinction such as this one would explain the shallowness of our present gene pool compared to those of other primates.

It would be another 149,850 years before the descendants of our three hypothetical early ancestors Al, Cy, and the kid began to suspect the existence of genes. These three, therefore, could not have thought of themselves as caretakers of a valuable, dwindling genetic treasure. And anyway, two of them are facing a more immediate, personal threat in our scenario.

Without warning, dirt, pebbles, and rocks under the child’s feet slide into the narrow gorge, taking the child with them. After sliding down five feet, the child grabs onto an outcrop of rock, temporarily halting his fall. Seeing the child’s precarious grip, Al shouts, drops to his stomach, and reaches farther and farther over the edge trying to grab the child’s hand. Then dirt, pebbles, and rocks under Al give way. He plunges down the steep side of the gorge. The child’s grip fails, and together he and Al vanish. After the rush of stone and dirt into the ravine, and after the screams subside, the landscape is quiet again, as it was before the three reached the edge. As Cy turns back to retrace the path that led to the ravine, he chuckles and shakes his head in puzzlement. “Losers,” he mutters in a prehistoric language that died out long ago.

Where Do These People Come From, Anyway?

The tragedy has eliminated whatever rare genes Al and the child might have contributed to their tribe’s limited gene pool. Cy’s unique genes, however, including any that might predispose him and his offspring to traits of self-interest, lack of altruism, and lack of empathy, are safe for the time being, long enough for him to pass them along when he returns to the tribe. With the human species facing extinction as it did around this time, with the human gene pool shrunk by the loss of thousands of its members due to environmental change, behavior motivated by self-interest might have a survival advantage. If Al had let the child fall without risking his own life, he would have kept his own genes in the pool. If both Cy and Al had been ill-advisedly altruistic, the loss could have been even worse for our species.

If psychopathy gave some people an advantage in the struggle for survival under some conditions, psychopathy would persist in our species because psychopaths would be more likely to live long enough to reproduce and pass their genes to future generations. On another day, someone with Al’s altruistic tendencies might succeed in saving someone in danger by risking
his own life and so prevent the loss of a valuable member of the diminished group. Win some, lose some. By having a balance of people like Al and Cy in a group, perhaps the tribe hedges its bets.

In some cases, the lack of conscience and the inability to empathize with others make psychopaths seem almost like a subspecies of human distinct from the rest of us. Could psychopaths be Nature’s way of hedging its bets if cooperation and mutual support ever become liabilities in human society? Evolutionary selective pressures can change over time. Behavioral traits are strongly influenced by genes. Some that are useful today might be less useful next month or even tomorrow. Additionally, men might experience different selection pressures than women, a fact that might contribute to the perceived relative rarity of psychopathy in females compared to males.

So far, nearly all neuroscientific investigations of psychopaths have been limited to males. While psychopathy exists in women, it appears more often and with greater severity in men, according to Rolf Wynn from the Department of Forensic Psychiatry in the University Hospital of North Norway and his colleagues. According to Wynn and his co-authors, the expression of psychopathy might differ in men and women, with women exhibiting greater emotional instability, use of verbal abuse, and manipulation of people in their social circles. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to display instrumental (“cold-blooded”) violence and criminal behavior. In 2013, Kent Kiehl of the Mind Research Network received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health for $612,158 to scan the brains of female psychopaths and conduct cognitive neuroscience studies in this understudied population. Comparing the results of male and female brains affected by psychopathy could provide further interesting insights into this poorly understood condition.

It is possible that psychopathy is an aberration that, in the big picture of human existence, provides neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the struggle to survive. In this case it could easily persist as long as there is no evolutionary pressure to eliminate it. The net effect of psychopathy would be neither advantageous nor disadvantageous to the species as a whole. Like schizophrenia, it affects around one percent of the population. And as with schizophrenia, its effects—as costly and disturbing as they are to the many people who are directly affected by them—don’t amount to much in an
evolutionary sense. Nature may be able to handle a one percent incidence of psychopathy because it is, in the big picture of human evolution, not significant. Call me, unsentimental Mother Nature might say, when the figure gets a lot higher than a trifling one percent. Until then, it’s not a concern. One in 17 people have one or more disorders that result in “serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities,” according to the National Institute of Mental Health. If the United States can function reasonably well with a one percent incidence of schizophrenia and with a six percent incidence of serious mental illness,
²
why should a measly one percent incidence of psychopathy be of much evolutionary significance? As long as the other 83 percent of the population can get by with reasonably good mental health, mental disorders, while tragic for those directly affected by them and their loved ones, are not a threat to the species on an evolutionary scale. In this view, psychopathy is just one of many minor blemishes on the face of humanity.