The Psychopath Inside (14 page)

A psychopath whose father lost all the family's money in the stock market or a business deal may exact revenge on the world by directing his antipathy at financial institutions. Terrorists or dictators with psychopathy might seek revenge for perceived slights against their clan, tribe, nation, ethnicity, or religion. But this leaves us with the disquieting notion that the coldest, most violent of our terrorists, lone killers, and dictators have a great sense of “empathy”—an empathy toward their own group, but little toward the life and well-being of others.

Beyond this mix of types of empathy according to individual
versus group (in a sense also related to the dichotomy of empathy versus sympathy discussed at the beginning of this chapter) is another important dichotomy, and that is between emotional empathy and cognitive empathy, also known as “theory of mind.” Theory of mind, as I've previously discussed, arises early in childhood, developing progressively until adulthood, and is a key developmental accomplishment in which the child learns she possesses mental states like desires and intentions and beliefs, and that others possess similar states, though those may be different from her own. Someone with autism will not show a normal theory of mind. This lack may also be present in people with some personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder, and also some forms of bipolar disorder. In contrast, people with psychopathy, narcissism, and certain affective types of schizophrenia will have cognitive empathy but lack emotional empathy. These two types of loss of empathy may be associated with underfunctioning of different parts of the lower, or ventral, half of the prefrontal cortex.

Rebecca Saxe of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently shown that theory of mind is centered, in part, in the nondominant hemisphere where the temporal lobe abuts the parietal lobe, the so-called temporo-parietal junction, that is, one node in the mirror neuron system. It is a key spot in a circuit that processes how one perceives the intentions, morals, and ethics of others, a partner to the orbital cortex of the frontal lobe that processes one's own intentions, ethics, and morality. And these two areas of the posterior and anterior cortices connect with each
other, perhaps forming the neuroanatomical circuitry for the Golden Rule.

A key question becomes: How does one know if one lacks empathy? If you lack it, there's a good chance you have no idea you lack it, because you don't know what “it” is. This isn't exactly like asking a person blinded since birth what blue looks like, since that person has no reference point at all. But it may be similar to asking a person with color blindness for blue what blue looks like. He can see things that are blue, and blue objects may appear similar to green objects, but blue per se is a mystery. Based on my viewing of interviews with serial killers, it appears that many of them don't seem aware of lack of connectedness. So minus a professional assessment, how can you become aware of your emotional color blindness?

For the first sixty-plus years of my life, I never thought I lacked empathy at all. I was happily married, had a wonderful nuclear and extended family, and a large circle of friends and friendly acquaintances and colleagues—thousands of them—so why would I ever question my sense of empathy? After all, who would want to closely associate and live with someone lacking emotional connectedness?

Before I discovered my brain scan, and even for a few years after, I didn't give a second thought to negative comments about my personality. In 1990, a colleague and I were supposed to give a presentation at a professional meeting, but I blew it off and went to a bar because I knew some cute girls would be there. Miffed, my colleague said, “You're an absolute sociopath to do that.”
Another time, in Miami, I skipped a presentation to meet up with some gals I'd met and hear a great Cuban band. “You're a psychopath,” my collaborator said. “How could you do that?” I told him my car broke down. I knew it wasn't right, but nobody got hurt so I didn't see the big deal.

People often refer to others as “crazy” or “a psychopath” without meaning it literally. Looking back, though, I probably should have paused to consider the sources in my case: trained psychiatrists who specialized in mood and brain disorders and would probably not be so quick to abuse a professional term simply because they were mad.

After reflecting on my brain scan for a year or two, I slowly began to reconsider these statements, and for the first time I thought about what central message my friends and family and colleagues were trying to convey to me.

I realized that I often, in fact, do not directly connect emotionally to people, or understand the way my behavior affects them. I see these things in a cold and distant way, and only upon seeing the effect can I then cognitively appreciate what I am doing. I then realized that my playful teasing of people could actually hurt them, and I was not stopping to read the signs on their faces that they were, indeed, hurt. I was also regularly putting people close to me in harm's way, just for my own edification and for the good times I might experience. It's not like I know exactly what empathy is, but I can now look at behavior—the way people go out of the way for one another, the amount of crying they do—and I can see that I'm really different from most people.

There have been many incidents that provided harbingers of an adult life characterized by a flattening of emotionality and borderline psychopathy. In 1968, I was a witness in a vehicular murder case in Canada during a midwinter jaunt to Quebec City for its storied Winter Carnival. While I was driving from Burlington during a blizzard, my car was passed by two speeding cars, one of which disappeared down the road into the night, while the other went off the road into a ditch, crashing head-on into a tree at about seventy miles per hour. I jumped out of my car and ran down the hill and was just able to crawl through a smashed window to position myself over the face of the driver, who was an elderly gentleman in the throes of death. His chest was crushed and while he was vomiting and regurgitating blood into my face, I kept him revived by mouth-to-mouth for about twenty minutes, until the police arrived. They pulled me out of the man's car by my legs, and I was furious, since I was so intent on reviving him. After testifying at the police station, I ended the interview melodramatically by throwing the old man's bloodied dentures onto the police sergeant's desk. Within a minute I no longer cared at all about the incident, and went on to party heartily in Quebec City, only casually mentioning to my former classmates what had happened. But something did bother me for a long time about that event. I hadn't really cared so much about the dead man after the event, but rather enjoyed the thrill of the whole escapade.

On other occasions I noticed that when people were crying over a tragic or sad event, I had dry eyes and a steady heart rate. I remember when JFK was shot because the people around me were
upset; I was more interested in how it went down. One day when I was working at the University of Nairobi, I walked into the morgue and a whole family was standing around a little girl laid out on an iron slab in a white dress. I looked at her and said, “What a nice dress.” My attention to the dress rather than the dead girl didn't strike me as odd at the time, but it does now. Even personal injury doesn't bother me. In college I put my arm through a plate-glass window and cut it open from wrist to elbow. I calmly looked at the tendons with an anatomist's eye. These incidents should have told me something wasn't exactly right about all of my emotional responses, or lack of them. But how could I have known that my brain wasn't normal?

As I've continued to examine my own behavior and personality, I realize that my relative lack of empathy complements my overall competitiveness—since I have little emotional regard for the feelings of others, I have few qualms about doing whatever it takes to win a competition or persuade someone to do what I want. Even when they were young, I never let my children win at anything, and now that they are grown, they have started mercilessly beating me at games, especially Scrabble. As you might surmise, I am a sore loser. Playing Scrabble, I might mislead people and lie about what I'm planning, to set them up. I don't think I cheat—it's no fun to cheat. It's much more fun to manipulate (a prime trait of psychopaths). I'll win fair and square but still stick it to them. I taught my kids that games are best played in a ruthless way—it's all about the aesthetics of winning. And I argued that ruthlessness respects your opponent, but that's bullshit. I
also just have to win. It's narcissism, ego, pure competitiveness. To some degree that competitiveness runs in our family, thanks to the warrior gene(s).

Fortunately for those around me, my intentions are rarely malicious. In other words, I don't get my jollies from doing harm to other people; I simply don't feel that bad if I happen to hurt someone while in pursuit of my own goals or even amusement. I love a good practical joke, and even though I don't do anything dangerous or illegal (usually), I know when I've unintentionally hurt someone's feelings or embarrassed them. But I haven't much cared. I've also been known to lie in order to gain the confidence or trust of the person I'm talking to. It's part of my persona of gamesmanship, a way of coping with life so that it is never dull for me. But the lie is most often the leaving out of information, rather than adding untrue information. For example, if someone asks me what I do, I might say I've been a bartender and truck driver but am now semiretired. Although technically true, the overall point is a lie, one I might use depending on my read of a person and what I want from them, which may only be to impress them with my high intelligence for a truck driver.

This is true of some psychopaths, but they're all different. Some come from bad families and lash out angrily because their fathers beat them. Most are numb, and it takes a lot to stimulate them. Like an addict, they have to do more and more to get a buzz, they need more and more extreme experiences to feel anything. That can be expressed positively, through romance, or, if they've been abused, revenge. There can also be a developmental
miswiring in the brain concerning sex and violence due to sexual abuse, which can lead to rape. The area is not well studied.

More often than not, my manipulation of people has to do with my own pursuit of adventure and pleasure. I'm always in search of a thrill or good time, and I've been known to put other people in compromising positions all for the sake of a little rush.

In 1990, I finally took a sabbatical from my laboratory at UC Irvine. Biomedical research scientists typically do not take them. Sabbaticals break up the flow of research and the training of students in the lab, so they end up being extremely counterproductive. But our children were getting to the ages when they would soon be leaving for college and getting married, and we would lose the opportunity to take a grand trip together. I wanted to go to a place exactly opposite of Irvine, California, so we spun a globe and East Africa came up. I applied for a Senior Research Fulbright Fellowship, received it, and we were off to Nairobi and the Serengeti. I scored some brain research equipment to set up labs in the School of Medicine at the University of Nairobi for nine months. The family went there together with me for six weeks, then returned to California. While there, I was privy to several disconcerting conversations concerning the suspected origins of the deadly hemorrhagic Ebola and Marburg viruses, and HIV/AIDS.

In that first year of my sabbatical, two physicians at the Nairobi Hospital told me about a man who, in 1989, had been brought in from a remote mountain site, bleeding out from most of his bodily orifices. Within a week he was dead. It was quickly
determined he had visited the Kitum Caves in Mount Elgon in the west of Kenya near the Ugandan border. I recognized the name of the caves: for thousands of years matriarch elephants led the herd deep inside them under the cover of darkness to scrape away at the walls to get at the salts and other minerals they need to thrive. This is a place I had always wanted to visit, but the story put a bit of caution into me. The man had contracted Marburg hemorrhagic fever, caused by the Marburg virus, a close cousin of the Ebola virus with similarly deadly results.

When my brother visited me that December, we went on a safari to the west and northern sectors of Kenya. I decided to finally visit the Kitum Caves. I wanted the sense of danger, but told Tom only about the elephants. When we arrived at the Mount Elgon National Park entrance gate, the place looked deserted. Tom ran into the ranger's hut, and the park ranger told him that with some troubles on the mountain and the increasing activity of armed Ugandan rebels in the park, no visitors had come to the park for nearly a year. To me this meant that we would see an unprecedented number and variety of game, as the entire mountain was devoid of humans. So on we went, unafraid of any danger, man-made or not.

We reached the only place where we could make camp. I did not want to tell my brother that this was the same small campsite clearing the ill-fated man had stayed at just a few weeks before he died. We collected an enormous pile of firewood and started a fire in the clearing at dusk.

Night arrives at the equator like an ax dropping. Within ten minutes of sunset, the hyenas started in with their banshee yelps.
Within an hour we heard, or rather felt, the thumping of elephants foraging two hundred or so yards away. By about eleven that night, we could hear two lions growling and several more spine-chilling taunts from a hyena. We decided we needed to take some action to shoo away the larger critters, so we both grabbed large flaming branches from the fire and started to wave them around while we yelled plaintive cries. This was a scene out of the film
Quest for Fire
, and remarkably it worked. The woods around us fell silent and we wrapped ourselves in blankets and curled up around the fire.

After an hour the forest came alive again, with what seemed like every lion, hyena, and leopard doubling and redoubling their efforts to get us, and our fire, out of their clearing. The closer the animals approached, the closer Tom and I wrapped ourselves around the fire, which was gradually losing its fuel. As the older and larger brother, I had managed to gain an inside position closest to the fire and kept inching around so my back, neck, and head were always inside his body. I tried to reason with Tom that since I had a wife and kids, perhaps it was more prudent to allow the first lion or leopard or, worse yet, hyena that showed up a shot at him before me. This close-quarters strategic and tactical positioning of our respective bodies went on all night. By the next morning, we were alive but absolutely spent.