The Psychopath Inside (12 page)

A second dualistic circuit, in our Rubik's Cube brain and the figure just given, involves one part that monitors the outer sensory-motor world that connects us to our external environment. This circuit is located in the lateral strip of neocortex on both the left and right sides of the brain. This circuit is mutually inhibitory with the circuit in the medial, central strip of cortex between the two hemispheres, which is devoted to monitoring emotions in ourselves and others. It overlaps with the “default mode network” that is most active when we are daydreaming and not consciously paying attention to our environment. Like the amygdala and insula, its function is more implicit than explicit. That is, we are often not consciously aware it is functioning. As shown in figure 6F, its two circuits for monitoring the physical world and the emotional world are also mutually inhibitory, and they also connect with the dorsal prefrontal cortex, which helps in deciding which world is most important to pay attention to at the moment. This circuit creates a second duality in our conscious world.

Of particular relevance to our story here is that both the ventral orbital/amygdala circuits in the dualistic circuit on the bottom, and the midline circuit above, are underactive in psychopaths. This is clear in psychopath brains in general, and in my own brain.

How does this manifest itself in the behaviors and attitudes of psychopaths? In late 2012, Anthony Jack of Case Western Reserve University convincingly demonstrated mutual inhibition
between the midline (emotional) and lateral (mechanical) circuits. He then hypothesized in 2013 that our brain, by the very nature of the midline versus lateral dualism, limits the way we view reality. These antagonistic circuits view the outer mechanical world and the world of thinking and feeling differently, and this differential “feel” for these two perceptions leads to our dualistic views of mind and body, physical world and mental world. It explains why we see consciousness as something other than just the brain—why we believe in the soul.

Jack's explanation was not only insightful, but it also helped me relook at a mystery in my own life. He provided a new way to look at dualism, and he went on to say that there are people who don't understand the problem of dualism itself.

It has been a bit of a curious thing in my academic life for the past forty years that I've read about and talked with others about dualism. But for the life of me, I could never understand what the problem was to begin with. To me, the brain is like a mechanical machine, like a car, and the mind and feelings are a bit like the speed of the car.

What group of people did Tony Jack find that are stumped by the very idea of dualism? Psychopaths. My lack of emotional empathy and my abandonment of God, the soul, and belief in free will may all be connected.

•   •   •

In 2011, I did another Discovery Channel show, an episode of
Curiosity
titled “How Evil Are You?” For this show, Eli Roth wanted me to scan his brain and test his genes, but didn't tell me why. I
knew him only as the actor who played the Bear Jew, the baseball-bat-wielding Nazi-slayer in Quentin Tarantino's
Inglourious Basterds
. I told Eli and the crew I didn't want to know any more before doing the analysis.

We took blood and sent it to the lab, and we ran an fMRI scan. During the scan, Roth looked at two types of alternating images, and we collected data on which parts of the brain were most active or inactive. Neutral images were things like dogs or roses, and emotional images included terrorists or people getting shot or beat up. After analyzing the data, I called up my colleague Fabio and said, “This guy is wild. Every time he looks at an emotionally charged scene, all his emotional areas light up. His heart's probably going crazy, and I bet he feels like he wants to throw up.” But the midline area, responsible for functions including self-knowledge (discussed earlier), were turned off. So he was very upset but had no idea what was going on. The neutral pictures, on the other hand, lit up pleasure areas, which they don't normally do for people. The genetics showed that he had alleles for high levels of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, which encourage bonding and warm fuzzy feelings, and suggested that he'd be strongly empathetic with his family—a great guy to be married to—but his genes also suggested he'd be hostile to people outside his group. I told Fabio, “This guy's a mensch, but you don't want to get him mad at you.”

Before giving Eli his results, I asked him, his agent, and his producer, “Are you sure you want this to be filmed?” They said yes, and I let him have it. He went a little white but noted the
results made sense. In a conversation that didn't make it to broadcast, he said the first movie he saw was
Alien
, and he threw up in the theater. And when he watches scary movies he has no self-awareness. “Do you know what I do?” he asked. “You're an actor,” I answered. He said, “My main thing is I'm a producer, director, and writer of horror films.” He's responsible for the gory
Hostel
movies, which are commonly described as torture porn. I said, “You're self-medicating.” Making those movies could be a form of exposure therapy, similar to people getting closer and closer to things like spiders, hoping to get over their fears.

Eli added, “I'm awful to work with. I'm tyrannical. People I work with have been telling me, ‘You gotta get tested, man, because you're a freaking psychopath.'” But he was a sweetheart otherwise. After the show, we went back to my house. “I don't drink, but I need a beer,” he said. “And I gotta call my father and tell him what you just said.” He told his father, a retired psychoanalyst, “Dad, I just did the show and Jim told me everything you've always told me.” It was hysterical. Based on genes and the fMRI, I could predict what was going on inside his head. It's an antidote to the idea that genetics and imaging are not useful for understanding people. If you just have one of those analytical tools, you can't predict a lot, but together they're very powerful. Knowing about someone's childhood helps, too. Eli's father sent me pictures from Eli's bar mitzvah—the cake was covered in fake blood.

I got a buzz out of that show, predicting Eli's behavior. In some cases you can really nail down what someone's thinking and
what's driving him in different circumstances. But this could be dangerous in a courtroom. Going from a useful clinical tool and a nice parlor game to determining someone's life or death, that's a big jump. I've consulted on cases during the penalty phases, but using this stuff when deciding guilt would be jumping the gun. I have nothing against it ethically, but scientifically we're not ready. For instance, Eli's got a wild brain, but he's not a criminal. He's just a talented and different sort of guy. Sounds like someone I know.

D
iane and I met in late June 1960, the day after school ended for the summer. Although I lived in what was considered the medium-priced end of the upper-class town of Loudonville, Diane lived in an upscale neighborhood of the working-class village of Menands and went to a private all-girls school in Albany. Her father's father, who had grown up poor but had earned himself a good living through real estate, had owned a large swath of Central Avenue in Albany until the crash of 1929, when he lost everything. Thus Diane's father also started with nothing, and slowly created a modest real estate portfolio of his own. He had built the suburban neighborhood in which Diane's family lived, and was a quietly prominent member of the community, having just been elected president of Wolferts Roost Country Club at the border of Albany, Menands, and Loudonville, to which my family also belonged. It was here, at the club's swimming pool, where Diane and I met.

I would go to the pool every day with my younger brothers Pete and Tom, and we would swim and frolic from opening at ten a.m. to closing at six p.m. It was there that the three of us learned
to swim, with Pete and Tom excelling through junior high and high school and Tom swimming for the New York State 100-meter championships in his senior year. Like in all sports, I did not excel in swimming but could swim freestyle sprints and breaststroke, just long enough at full-bore to compete for wins, until my asthma would kick in. We also loved to play cards together and with new friends we met at the club, as well as other games we learned from our parents and aunts and uncles, who were uniformly excellent parlor gamesmen.

By July I'd met many kids at the pool, and between games of water polo and “jump-dive” one afternoon, I overheard a girl's voice. She was in the water a few yards from me, but I could hear her say, unnecessarily loudly, “He couldn't be a Fallon. He's too fat to be a Fallon.” I glanced over, and there she was, giggling with her friends. When I locked in on her, she turned her head and looked at me with a smile. I was annoyed but intrigued by her self-confident playfulness.

Over the following weeks we started chatting while with our friends, and soon we were sitting at the same poolside tables, often playing cards. We then started swimming a bit together, doing little mini-sprints while playing other water games. In conversation she was clearly ahead of me socially, and while not really being into the shank of puberty yet, and being pretty clueless about sex or romance, I knew I was attracted to her. It was partly her confidence but also her wit and intelligence. We were both just twelve years old, but she seemed to know things, to understand not only her own being, but even a bit of the great beyond, and it
really put a hook in me, as I had never met anyone like her. To this day I have never met anyone like her.

At the end of summer, the club threw a dance party by the pool for the teenagers one Friday night. This party was also attended and supervised by the adults. I do not remember the specifics of exactly what happened, but by Thursday my mother and Aunt Flo had encouraged me to ask Diane to the dance, as they must have known that we had taken to each other over the summer. I got to choose my party outfit, an all-white beachcomber knicker ensemble that, fifty years later, my mother and Aunt Flo still have a hearty guffaw over.

The dance party was a blast, Diane and I danced about thirty numbers, and it was all over by eleven. I barely saw, or talked to, Diane until the following June, since she had to go back to school. Her brother Mike and I were good friends, so I would see her when I visited their house, but because I went through puberty late, my fascination with her didn't grow into romantic attraction for some time. Most of our interactions involved me teasing her about the snooty prep school boys she was dating. Summers were magical. Each summer throughout high school we would play at the pool together. We played card and board games and raced each other in the pool, and were captains of our respective girls' and boys' interclub swim teams.

By the end of my junior year, I had finally convinced a girl whom I'd had a crush on for years to go out with me. That lasted about three months during the spring and summer of 1964. Then on August 2 of that year I went over to see Mike, hoping also to
see Diane, and she and I ended up going down to their basement family room. We watched TV, talked, teased each other, and then started wrestling like we sometimes did. During one takedown, I got her in a half nelson and then an ankle takedown onto a sofa chair. And for the first time we kissed, and then things started heating up. I'd liked her from the beginning, but at this point I was crazy about her.

We started dating constantly, always hanging out with friends and each other. By the fall of the following year, 1965, I was off to college while she finished her senior year. During that year we really started to talk about things, about what we wanted in our futures. Although we were very different, we shared common interests. But in those discussions it became clear that her entire worldview, and her comfort with that world and herself, was utterly different from mine. In particular, she had no fear of the unknown, no fear of dying or, to my complete astonishment, not existing at all. I could not comprehend her comfort with such a metaphysical perspective, and although she, too, was raised Catholic, she was not particularly observant and had no problem blowing off seeming contradictions in religions and what she felt was silliness in the need people have for eternal life. Her comfort with her whole mortal existence is still, to this day, beyond my reach.

We also learned that we shared a love of children and a desire to have a family early. Our politics were not so very different, although she is more apolitical than I am. Through college we fell more and more in love and tried to spend as much time together
as two college students could during New England winters, separated by four hundred miles. She had matriculated at Chestnut Hill College outside of Philadelphia, and I would hitchhike down from Burlington during the winter so we might spend two days and two nights with each other once a month. Although we had been dating steadily for three years, we did not have sex, and that was utter torture for both of us, but a necessary condition of my obsession with being good. Nonetheless, we were in love and had wonderfully romantic and fun times throughout late high school and college, lack of intercourse notwithstanding.

You might be wondering how this story gels with someone who ostensibly lacks empathy or the ability to connect emotionally with others. The truth is, I say “in love,” but I've never truly felt fully emotionally connected to Diane. My connection with her emerged partially because I
didn't
connect empathetically. I never understood her. She was fascinating to me, and still is. We have common goals and values—family, Libertarianism, agnosticism—so there's a like-mindedness, but she always felt like someone from outer space. Fortunately, that has always been more than enough for me.

About this time, in the period of 1967 to 1968, my thinking and behavior had started to change. My assertiveness in sports had noticeably increased, and I wasn't pulling punches anymore so as not to hurt people on the football field, and my speed and brinksmanship in alpine ski racing was peaking. I was a bit less kind, and academically I was excelling. It was like an aggression machine had turned on within that year. I had left the Church and my
hyper-morality was gone. My classmates were encouraging me to run for class president, and my level of expanding swagger was obvious to others close to me.

In the winter of 1968, my junior year, her sophomore year, I once again hitchhiked to Philadelphia to see Diane for the weekend. I could usually cover the four hundred miles in about seven hours. In the 1960s, there was no problem getting rides, as the Great Fears had yet to grip America. But that weekend the trip through the blizzard took me the better part of a day, including two hours on a farmer's tractor, four hours on big rigs, and many short rides with salesmen and others who had to be out on roads that were otherwise devoid of traffic. More than two feet of snow fell along the way and the wind gusted to more than fifty miles per hour, which made the visibility, let alone the hitchhiking, a bit challenging. I finally arrived after sixteen hours, in the middle of the night. Diane decided to get a motel room near the college. When we met at her dorm, I was completely encrusted in rime. As we kissed, she asked, “Why did you come down here in this blizzard?” Lost for words, I just told her, “I don't know . . . I think it means I love you.” A month after my college graduation in June 1969, we were married. We have been together ever since.

Halfway through college, I started to party heavily and my grades suffered. I went from being a six-foot, 220-pound athletic machine to letting it all go, preferring to just have fun. By graduation I had ballooned forty-five pounds. That would be the first large weight gain of my life. My father actually needed to stuff me into a corset to get me into my wedding tuxedo. On the
honeymoon I began to lose weight. After the honeymoon, with iffy grades, I had no graduate school plans and no job. I started doing odd construction and trucking jobs, holding a Teamsters' card, then some carpentry, mowing lawns, and bartending at the Saratoga racetrack. I was able to find a teaching job in an all-girls Catholic high school and, as the only male on campus, thoroughly enjoyed teaching those young women. Our first child, Shannon, was born that May 1970, an event that, along with the subsequent births of our second daughter, Tara, in 1971, and then son, James, in 1974, stand out, with marrying Diane, as the most significant events in my life.

I was ecstatic about the birth of our kids. But as soon as they actually came out, I celebrated by going off and partying for several nights. That would be completely psychopathic today, now that dads are more involved. Even then, people looked at me funny, but society allowed it. I didn't feel connected to my kids until they were old enough to start responding as human beings, when they were toddlers. Before that, they were like dolls to me. (Although that might not be unusual for fathers.) Once I got to know them I really enjoyed them, and I do to this day. They were a great source of joy and fascination. Shannon was walking and talking by nine months, and was very entertaining. Tara was quieter and demonstrated early a knack for focus and perceptual awareness of her environment. And it seemed like James was three before he said anything. Then at six or seven he started saying incredible things about the nature of time and God and the universe. Each of my kids is very different from the others.
When they were small, I liked hugging them, playing with them, talking with them. So I was not a distant, cold, aloof father by any means, but my attraction was dominated less by warmth than by entertainment and an intellectual interest. I'm fascinated with other kids, too, but I think a lot are boring. Mine just turned out to be interesting kids, which I'm not saying only because I'm their father—our friends agree.

Following my abrupt change in attitude and aggressiveness in 1968, my connectedness with people, including Diane, decreased. I started to value people for the fun I could have with them, and my feelings for Diane peaked at the end of college. Before that I adored her, but then I started doing and saying things that pissed her off, and I started loving her in different ways. Having children accelerated the shift, as my feelings morphed from passion into admiration and respect for what she was doing as a mother. As I got older I had to learn to re-love people by admiring them. Today I love my kids as friends. I have a lot of respect for them, but I almost forget they're my kids.

Looking back, James says he knew I loved him (I told him so every day). I came to a lot of games and cheered (he won the Orange County sprints, and Shannon and Tara were both Division I swimmers), and he never felt let down by me. I laughed a lot, but I didn't show much emotion otherwise, and he felt a disconnect. I never cried in front of my kids (and Diane didn't, either), and so they tried not to cry or show emotion in front of me. When they saw my brain scan back in 2005, they said it didn't surprise them, and therefore it didn't bother them. One emotion besides joy I did
show was anger. It's difficult to get under my skin, and normally if something bothers me I'll shut the door and withdraw, but when I pop it's fierce, and frightening. Nevertheless, James says I've always been his hero.

Another reason I may have been an emotionally distant father was that I was always focused 100 percent on my work. After I graduated from college, I spent a year teaching at the all-girls high school before I was accepted into the master's program in the Psychology Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where my academic performance and social life flourished. Those were magical times for all of us, and for my waistline as well. Back in shape in all ways, I was accepted in the doctoral program at the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I again thrived in every way, and earned my PhD after three years. A PhD normally takes at least five, but I worked day and night, so my family didn't see me much. I also continued to party. I might work until eleven and then go to a dive bar and enter a dance contest and make some money. I'd come home at five and Diane would say, “I thought you were done at eleven.” I'd say, “Well, yeah, then I went out, and look, I won a hundred bucks dancing.” It was extreme behavior, but Diane, who stayed at home with the kids, rarely complained about being left alone. I needed only four hours of sleep a night, and I'd use my extra awake hours out having fun. There was no point in coming home to a sleeping family.

Academically, I was armed and dangerous and flying high for my next stint in the postdoctoral program in neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego. These, too, were wonderful
years academically and socially, but my drinking and smoking and eating habits continually wore on my athleticism and waistline. Over the period from 1969 to 1978, when I started my professorial run at the University of California, Irvine, my weight, sleep habits, panic attacks, and considerable risk-taking continued to take off some of the glitter of the otherwise good time, often too good a time, I was having.