Imagine being a neuroscientist, and studying brain scans of murderers to look for psychopathic traits. Imagine doing that and looking at scans of family members for comparison purposes, and then finding one that is way at the extreme edge of what you’re finding in the murderers’ scans. Whoops, the scans got mixed up. The techs check and re-check; nope, no mix. So you peel off the code – and the scan is yours.
That’s what the neuroscientist James Fallon found.
He told his wife and she said, “I’m not surprised.”
He laughed at that. Which is kind of psychopathic itself.
The BBC discussion is slightly odd, because they simply talk about murderer or not murderer. He’s not a murderer, despite having all the alleles for being a psychopath, so what gives? (The answer is environment.)
But murder isn’t all there is, for cryin out loud. There’s cruelty, there’s bullying, there’s manipulation, there’s chronic lying. Professor Fallon isn’t a murderer, good, splendid, but it would have been interesting if the BBC person had asked him why his wife said that, or if he himself in fact thought he was deficient in the empathy department.
I once knew someone who ticked a lot of the psychopathy boxes. I never thought “murderer?” But I thought a lot of things short of that.