Murderous Minds (36 page)

Authors: Dean Haycock

BOOK: Murderous Minds

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Epilogue

A Little “Big Science”

A
LTHOUGH LEARNING MORE ABOUT
what is going on in the brains of criminal psychopaths would satisfy our curiosity and increase our ability to effectively deal in the courtroom, forensic hospital, and clinic with the problems they present, this type of research faces several challenges.

The field is small and underfunded. Not every lab can afford a $2 million mobile fMRI scanner. The National Institutes of Health allocated less than $2.9 million for seven grants identified with the key word “psychopath” during the fiscal year 2013. Although there are approximately as many psychopaths as there are people living with schizophrenia, the NIH allocated $270 million for schizophrenia research in 2013.
¹Schizophrenia is a devastating disease that deserves that funding and more. It is difficult, however, to justify spending more than 93 times more money on that mental illness compared to psychopathy since an estimated 15 to 25 percent of male offenders are psychopaths. The benefits for society of finding effective treatments for these individuals, as Kent Kiehl points out, could reduce the financial cost of crime by perhaps billions of dollars in direct and indirect costs. The potential psychological benefits for potential victims cannot be measured in dollars.

Since brain scans are expensive and subjects can be hard to find, researchers are sometimes forced to use subjects with psychopathy scores
that are scattered across a range. Results from these subjects can be identified and analyzed separately, but it isn’t an ideal way to draw conclusions about psychopaths in general if there really is a distinct separation between high-scoring and midrange psychopaths, as the results of Hiatt, Schmitt, and Newman suggest. Calling everyone in such a study “a psychopath” may be misleading. The field could also benefit from better characterization of psychopath subtypes among the subjects who agree to be studied. A significant proportion of the research in the field has been limited due to small sample sizes.

In the past, some researchers in many fields of study often behaved a little like cats; they got together when it was to their immediate, mutual benefit, but often they preferred to work alone and they sometimes clashed over territory. Scientists interested in learning more about psychopathy would benefit from a coordinated effort to agree on technical standards for assessing brain function using fMRI and other imaging technology. Establishing shared databases and brain banks of well-characterized subjects could have significant benefits. Psychology Professor Craig Neuman, Ph.D., of the University of North Texas, points out in his article “Will the Real Psychopath Please Stand Up” that the Dutch government is systematically funding research on psychopathy.
²Such a program in the U.S. would have the potential to provide benefits that granting agencies are not yet aware of.

Kiehl is tackling the problem by compiling a database that will contain information about thousands of psychopaths including brain scans, genetic data, and case histories.
³Coordinating and expanding this resource to accommodate and include researchers around the world may bring us much closer to answering more questions about the nature of morality than we now know to ask.

Researchers frequently collaborate on individual projects with the intention of publishing a research paper or two. Biological investigations of the psychopathic brain, like other areas of neuroscience, could benefit from adoption of a little “big science” attitude, in the sense of greater coordination and collaboration between labs around the world working to learn about the biological correlates of psychopathy.

Unfortunately, this sub-discipline of neuroscience is too small to match the emerging “big science” movements that promise to give the overall field
of neuroscience a boost. Many neuroscientists have already embraced the goals of these new inter-disciplinary, multi-lab research initiatives begun in 2013, and trickle-down benefits for psychopathy researchers should follow. These initiatives include BRAIN, the U.S.-based Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies program, and the Human Brain Project sponsored by the European Commission.
⁴Our lack of basic information about the structure and function of the brain makes such programs crucial for future progress in neuroscience. And if the billions of dollars intended for these programs are actually allocated in the next decade, the insights gained by mapping and developing theories to explain the organization and function of the brain will pay off for all sub-disciplines of neuroscience including psychopathy research. Other game-changing programs include the Human Connectome Project (the source of Figure 6), which is making brain scans of over a thousand healthy volunteers available to research scientists, and the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, which is doing the same with more than 100,000 of samples of genetic material obtained from patients with mental illnesses.

BRAIN started with a $100 million investment, and the Human Brain Project started with a $69 million investment. This good news comes after less-good news: the recent decline in scientific research and development funding in North America. Canadian R&D declined by more than 3 percent between 2012 and 2013, while U.S. R&D dropped by 5 percent. Over the same period, Germany, Japan, and South Korea increased funding by 5 percent, while China increased it by 15 percent.
⁵It would be unfortunate for psychopathy research to remain underfunded, since it addresses one of the most important aspects of human behavior: the presence and absence of empathy, conscience, and compassion.

“The definition of psychopathy itself—what it is, what it is not—is one of the most fundamental questions for psychological science,” Jennifer Skeem and her colleagues declared in 2011.
⁶Continuing to uncover what happens in the brains of people with varying degrees of psychopathic traits is one way to refine this most fundamental question about human nature.

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