The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (31 page)

I had to buy a fleet of Toyota Priuses for my staff to drive. Normally,
staff are reimbursed on a per mile rate when they drive personal vehicles for work. I had done a calculation and figured out that my grants would be charged over $50,000 per year if we followed that model. I calculated that with a Prius we could save about $150,000 over the course of the five-year grant.

“Buy two” had been the answer from my NIDA program officer, Dr. Steve Grant, when I asked him if I could buy a Prius to save money. We ended up owning four Toyotas by the end of our second year in New Mexico. My staff put over fifty thousand miles per year on each of the cars driving back and forth to prisons around the state. The Toyotas would soon eclipse a
moon unit
, over 252,000 miles, as my staff drove to the farthest corners of New Mexico to complete our research studies.

My laboratory was a buzz of activity. We collected data for faculty from the University of California, Santa Barbara; Harvard University; Vanderbilt University; University of Southern California; Dartmouth College; Duke University; Princeton University; Stanford University; Arizona State University; and Washington University in St. Louis.

We were writing grants as fast as we could to continue to fund our research studies. The article in
The New Yorker
by John Seabrook that I mentioned in
Chapter 2
generated a lot of media attention for the research we were conducting, and a few donations came in following the article to help fund our work.

Hearing about our psychopathy research, postdoctoral fellows and psychologists from around the world sent in applications to work in our lab. I was more than happy to oblige and share my passion for studying psychopaths.

I assigned one of my talented postdocs, Elsa Ermer, to analyze the first year of structural MRI data collected from adult male offenders. I wanted to know if the density of gray matter in the paralimbic system was abnormal in psychopathic inmates compared to nonpsychopathic inmates.

Gray matter is composed of the cells that perform computations in the brain. These thinking areas of the brain are contained within the gray matter. In contrast, white matter refers to the tracts that connect brain gray matter regions together.

Scientists have learned a lot about gray matter from the analyses of structural MRI data. For example, we know that, unfortunately, as one ages gray matter tends to decrease in many areas of the brain. But there are also regions, like those that store memories, that increase in density as age increases. As we store more and more memories, parts of the brain get thicker.

We also know that individuals with higher IQs have more dense gray matter than individuals with low IQ. Patients with mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, have abnormal gray matter in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.

I had hypothesized that psychopathy would be associated with gray matter abnormalities in the paralimbic system, the parts of the brain that regulate emotion and impulsivity.

Our first analysis was composed of over three hundred adult male offenders. I asked Elsa to work with our computer programmer to analyze the data. We met and planned out the analyses to make sure to examine any variables that might cloud interpretation of the results. For example, we had to ensure no inmates had any history of serious brain injury or other problems that might obscure the results.

I figured it would take weeks, if not months, to analyze an MRI data set of over three hundred inmates.

One Monday morning I got to the office before 8 a.m., and my programmer and Elsa were already there, hunched over a computer.

“Good morning,” I called to them on the way to my office.

“Stop! Come here!” Elsa exclaimed.

She was pointing at the screen in front of our lab programmer, Prashanth Nyalakanti.

“Look at these results.”

It had never occurred to me that the analyses could be completed in just one weekend.

“How can that possibly be ready?” It normally took about twenty-four hours per inmate to crunch the numbers on gray matter density in all the regions of the brain.

Prashanth said that he had written a script to use all the Mind computers—more than a hundred—over the weekend; the analyses were completed Sunday night.

Within each of the Mind’s one hundred computers, there were four to eight processing cores. Prashanth had assigned a brain scan to each processing core. What would normally have taken several months of computer cycles had been completed overnight by dispersing the data analyses over five hundred computer processing cores. It was a brilliant piece of code that also used the processing cores only when other staff were not using them.

I was impressed.

Elsa pointed to the screen. A blue color map indicated the brain gray matter regions that were negatively correlated with Psychopathy Checklist scores. It was a map that I will never forget. The paralimbic system was bright blue (see
Figure 8
).

Elsa said, “Isn’t that amazing?”

I was speechless. I was able to muster only a weak nod in agreement.

I grabbed a chair and nudged Prashanth over a bit. It was truly amazing. Psychopaths showed reduced gray matter in the orbital frontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, insula, temporal pole, and in the anterior and posterior cingulate. The entire paralimbic circuitry was impaired. I had not even fantasized about such a dramatic result. I was blown away.

It was one of those rare moments in academics when a hypothesis is proved to be true—a hypothesis that I, and my entire lab, had labored for years to craft and frame. I told Elsa she would remember this day for the rest of her life. Psychopaths’ brains
were
abnormal; we had solid proof.

I printed out copies of the maps and ran downstairs to show my collaborator Vince Calhoun. He asked a few general questions, double-checking my assumptions, and then he asked for a copy of the code that Prashanth had written to parallel process the brain imaging data. He too was impressed, both with Prashanth’s ingenious code and with our results.

Elsa led the write-up of the results. They were quickly accepted
in the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
—the top psychological journal in our field.
³

Figure 8
. Results from the first structural MRI analyses of criminal psychopaths collected on the mobile MRI system. The shaded regions depict areas of the brain that are atrophied in adult male criminal psychopaths. The areas represent the majority of the paralimbic system of the brain (see note 3).

I presented the brain density results at the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience meeting that month. The law professors and judges stared at the figure for a long time, processing the potential implications. I reminded them that the data were “correlational,” not “causal.”

I used the following analogy to help the judges better understand the results.

Again, our results were not “causal”; that is, we could not tell whether psychopathic behavior was a direct result of an atrophied brain. But the next analyses I planned to do might help answer this question.

As soon as the adult psychopath gray matter paper was accepted for publication, I set up another meeting with Elsa and Prashanth. I asked them to analyze the brain scans from the two hundred teenage boys from the maximum-security juvenile prison. Most of these youth had been convicted of multiple felonies. Indeed, there was an entire housing unit of youth at the prison who had been convicted of murder. These youth represented one of the most high-risk populations of teenagers in the country.

If the brain scans of the incarcerated youth showed the same results as the adult scans, it would suggest our findings were not likely to be due to atrophy from nonuse. The most parsimonious interpretation would be that the paralimbic atrophy was present from birth. It was a conclusion that followed Occam’s razor—it made the fewest assumptions.

It took only twenty-four hours for Prashanth to parallel process the youth MRI data. Elsa added a smiley face to the e-mail subject line when she sent me the PowerPoint file with the data.

Once again I was struck by the results (see
Figure 9
). The incarcerated youth with elevated callous and unemotional traits as assessed by the Youth Psychopathy Checklist had the same brain abnormalities as the adults with psychopathy. The brain plots of the youth and adults were uncannily similar.

A mixture of emotions ran through me. As a scientist, I felt excited and vindicated that my hypotheses about the psychopathic brain were borne out. As a human being, I felt sad for these youth with these abnormal brains. It was as if my lab had discovered a new disorder, but we didn’t have a cure.

Figure 9
. Results from the first structural MRI analyses of incarcerated youth collected on the mobile MRI system (left four images). The shaded regions depict areas of the brain that are atrophied in youth with elevated callous/unemotional traits. The results from adult males (right four images) are shown for comparison. The results from the two groups are strikingly similar. In both groups the majority of the paralimbic system is showing reduced gray matter density or atrophy. Youth data is from Ermer, E., et al. (2013). Aberrant paralimbic gray matter in incarcerated male adolescents with psychopathic traits.
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
, 52, 94–103. Adult data is from Ermer, E., et al. (2012). Aberrant paralimbic gray matter in criminal psychopathy,
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
, 121(3), 649–658

As the mixture of emotions in me subsided, one thing became clear—these results were going to spark a lot of discussion and debate. Debates would occur between academics, between lawyers and judges, and between public officials and the media.

But the results were sound. We could not be criticized for publishing small sample sizes.
⁴
Indeed, our youth study had ten times as many participants as the closest competitor.

I hoped that other scientists would replicate our findings someday. But for now I was pleased with my laboratory’s efforts.

At the age of eighteen, Brian began to use false identification
papers and other aliases to escape criminal charges or get reduced jail time. He was a prolific burglar, sometimes hitting more than a dozen homes a day. He lived in the rented home of his older sister and her family.

Brian did not get along well with his sister, and the two had numerous loud verbal altercations; at one point their altercations led neighbors to call the police.

During the burglary of a school, Brian set fire to the building. He was caught nearby by police, to whom he gave a fake name. The police determined his true identity and charged him with arson. He served less than a year in jail before being released on parole.

Brian returned to burglarizing businesses and homes within hours of being released. As he turned twenty-one, he was arrested for burglarizing a church and was sentenced to two to six years in the state prison.