The Wisdom of Psychopaths (22 page)

He laughs. “Maybe I would now,” he drawls. “At my age. But they’d have to get the keys to my BMW off me first!”

We finish our drinks and go our separate ways. The song has got me thinking, and I prowl around the streets of Old Montreal with a crazy idea buzzing around my head. What about that study by Ahmed Karim: the one in which he’d made people better liars by zapping their moral decision-making regions—their anterior prefrontal
cortices—with transcranial magnetic stimulation? If you can turn one of the dials up higher, then why not several others?

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (or TMS) was first developed by Dr. Anthony Barker and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield, in 1985. But it’s got a longer history than that. In fact, the science behind the electrical stimulation of the nerves and muscles has been around since the 1780s, some two hundred years before Barker plugged himself in, when the Italian anatomist and physician Luigi Galvani and his compatriot Alessandro Volta first discovered, with the aid of a simple electrical generator and a pair of severed frog’s legs, that the nerves were not water pipes as René Descartes had conjectured, but electrical conductors that ferried information round the nervous system.

Since then, things have come a long way. The inaugural application of TMS by Barker and his team comprised an elementary demonstration of the conduction of nerve impulses from the motor cortex to the spinal cord by stimulating simple muscle contractions. Nowadays it’s a different story—and TMS has widespread practical uses, in both a diagnostic and a therapeutic capacity, across a variety of neurological and psychiatric conditions, ranging from depression and migraine to strokes and Parkinson’s disease.

The basic premise of TMS is that the brain operates using electrical signals, and that, as with any such system, it’s possible to modify the way it works by altering its electrical environment. Standard equipment consists of a powerful electromagnet placed on the scalp that generates steady magnetic field pulses at specific preselected frequencies and a plastic-enclosed coil to focus those magnetic pulses down through the surface of the skull onto specially targeted, discretely segregated brain regions, thus stimulating the underlying cortex.

Now, one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren’t wired up in quite the same
way as the rest of ours—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-sized structure located right at the very center of the circuit board. The amygdala, as we’ve learned previously in this book, is the brain’s emotion control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.

Using the light switch analogy, TMS may be thought of as a dimmer switch. As we process information, our brains generate small electrical signals. These signals not only pass through our nerves to work our muscles but also meander deep within our brains as ephemeral electrical data shoals, creating our thoughts, memories and feelings. TMS can alter the strength of these signals. By passing an electromagnetic current through precisely targeted areas of the cortex, we can turn these signals either up or down—either help these data shoals on their way or impede their progress.

Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and, as Ahmed Karim and his colleagues at the University of Tübingen did, to the brain’s morality neighborhood, and you’re well on the way to giving someone a “psychopath makeover.”
Indeed, Liane Young and her team at MIT have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a specific neural zip code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability, but also on moral reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others’ actions.

I pick up the phone to my old friend Andy McNab. He’s on a weeklong spree in the desert when I call, roaring around Nevada on a Harley V-Rod Muscle.

“No helmets!” he booms.

“Hey, Andy,” I say. “You up for a little challenge when you get back?”

“Course!” he yells. “What is it?”

“How about you and me go head-to-head in a test of cool in the lab? And I come out on top?”

Manic laughter.

“Love it,” he says. “You’re on! Slight problem though, Kev. How the fuck do you think you’re going to pull that one off?”

“Simple,” I say.

For those of you who’ve been living in a cave for the past twenty years (with the possible exception of the Taliban), Andy McNab was arguably the most famous British soldier to have served in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces until Prince Harry hung up his polo mallet at Eton back in 2005. During the First Gulf War, Andy commanded Bravo Two Zero, an eight-man Special Forces patrol that was assigned the task of gathering intelligence on underground communication links between Baghdad and northwest Iraq, and tracking and destroying Scud missile launchers along the Iraqi main supply route in the area.

But soon the boys had other fish to fry. A couple of days after insertion, the patrol was compromised by a goatherd tending his flock. And, in time-honored fashion, they beat it: 185 miles, across the desert, toward the Syrian border.

Only one of them made it. Three were killed, and the other four, including Andy, were picked up at various points along the way by the Iraqis. Suffice it to say that none of their captors were ever going to have their own talk shows … or make their mark in the annals of cosmetic surgery. It’s generally accepted that there are better ways of putting a person at ease than by stubbing your cigarette out on their neck. And better ways of breaking and remodeling their jawline than with the sun-baked butt of an AK-47. Thanks to more advanced techniques back home in the U.K., Andy’s mouth now packs more porcelain than all the bathrooms in Buckingham Palace put together. He should know. In 1991, he went there to collect the Distinguished Service Medal from the Queen.

The medal was just the beginning. In 1993, in a book that bore their name, Andy told the story of the patrol, in all its gruesome detail,
and defined, pretty much overnight, both the genre and the shape of the modern military memoir. In the words of the Special Air Service’s (SAS) commanding officer at the time, the story of Bravo Two Zero “will remain in Regimental history forever.” He wasn’t kidding. In fact, it’s now become part of a wider cultural history. And Andy has become a brand.

On a night flight to Sydney several years ago, we routed over Afghanistan. Down below, in the deep, dangerous darkness between the mountains of the Hindu Kush, I noticed, through the intermittent cloud cover, tiny pinpricks of light. What the hell were they? I wondered. The flickering campfires of age-old nomadic pastoralists? The secret hideouts of one-eyed Taliban warlords?

Right on cue, the pilot switched on the intercom. “For those of you on the right-hand side of the aircraft,” he intoned, “you should just about be able to make out the laptops of the SAS as they bash out their latest bestsellers.”

The intercom crackled off. And everyone laughed. Andy would’ve, too, if he’d been there. But I think we were flying over him at the time.

One of the first things you learn about Andy, and you learn it pretty quickly, is that he couldn’t give a shit about anything. Nothing is sacred. And nothing remotely fazes him.

“I was a couple of days old when they found me,” he explains as we meet for the first time at London Bridge station. “Just round the corner from here, in fact, on the steps of Guy’s Hospital. Apparently I was wrapped in a Harrods bag.”

“You’re joking,” I say. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Straight up.”

“Shit,” I say. “Incredible. I had you down as more of a T.J.Maxx man, myself.”

“You cheeky bastard!” he roars. “Nice one. I like it.”

We’ve teamed up as part of a radio show I’m putting together for the BBC.
The show is called
Extreme Persuasion
, and I’m interested in learning if certain psychopathic characteristics might come in handy in the SAS. Like, for instance, not giving a shit about anything.

I’m not disappointed. If you’re thinking of joining, I’ll tell you something for nothing. If you’ve got issues over your parentage, you’re better off staying at home.

“One of the first things you notice on camp is the banter,” Andy tells me. “It’s pretty much constant. Everyone is always slagging everyone else off. Taking the piss.
And like most things in the regiment, there’s a good reason for that. If you’re captured, you’re taught to be the ‘gray man.’ To act tired and out of it. To give your interrogators the impression that you don’t know shit. That you’re of little use to them.

“Now, if [your captors are] any good, they’ll start to look for weaknesses. They’ll look for the tiniest of reactions—fleeting microexpressions, infinitesimal eye movements—that might give away your true mental state. And if they find anything, then take it from me: that’s that, mate. It’s game over. Put it this way. If you’ve got a problem with the size of your dick, an Iraqi interrogation suite probably isn’t the best place to find out.

“So, in the regiment, everything’s fair game. The slagging is purely functional. It’s an efficient way of building up psychological immunity. It inoculates you against the kind of shit they can throw at you if you’re captured. It’s the right kind of wrong, if you see what I mean. Plus, you know, there’s nothing like a good windup, really, is there?”

No, I guess not. But mental toughness isn’t the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There’s also fearlessness. A couple of years ago on a beautiful spring morning twelve thousand feet above Sydney’s Bondi Beach, I performed my first free-fall skydive. The night before, somewhat the worse for wear in one of the city’s waterfront bars, I texted Andy for some last-minute advice.

“Keep your eyes open. And your arse shut,” came the reply.

I did. Just. But performing the same feat at night, in the theater of war, over a raging ocean from twice the altitude and carrying two hundred pounds of equipment, is a completely different ball game altogether. And if that’s not enough, there’s also the piss-taking to contend with. Even at thirty thousand feet, the party’s going strong.

“We used to have a laugh,” Andy recalls. “Mess about. You know, we’d throw the equipment out ahead of us and see if we could catch up with it. Or on the way down, we’d grab each other from behind in a bear hug and play chicken—see who’d be the first to peel off and pull the cord. It was all good fun.”

Er, right. If you say so, Andy. But what wasn’t much fun was the killing. I ask Andy whether he ever felt any regret over anything he’d done. Over the lives he’d taken on his numerous secret missions around the world.

“No,” he replies matter-of-factly, his arctic blue eyes (just for the record, there are eyes behind the bars you see in the photos) showing not the slightest trace of emotion. “You seriously don’t think twice about it. When you’re in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you’ve done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16.

“The regiment’s motto is ‘Who Dares Wins.’ But sometimes it can be shortened to ‘Fuck It.’ ”

Put like this, it’s not difficult to envisage how such pathological poise, such conscienceless composure, might actually come in handy in certain circumstances—how it might, at times, actually be construed as adaptive. One of Andy’s compatriots, Colin Rogers, a former member of the famed SAS assault team who, in Operation Nimrod back in 1980, tapped gently on the windows of the Iranian embassy in London, echoes his old mate’s sentiments. Taking out a terrorist in the dust and the fire and the rubble that comprise the usual architectural legacy of covert explosive entry is not something that Special Forces soldiers tend to deliberate over too much—especially when you’ve got a state-of-the-art Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, which fires 800 rounds a minute, slung over your shoulder and
when the margin of error is often on the order of millimeters. Get a clear shot and you go for it. You focus. Stay calm. And coolly squeeze the trigger. Hesitation is not an option.

The trick, it would appear, is being fireproof. It’s being able to perform not just in the heat of the moment, but simply in the moment. It’s about not feeling hot in the first place.

“You’re pumped up. Of course you are,” Colin tells me, in his East End local pub that’s clearly seen better days. “But this is something you’ve been training for for years. Six, seven hours a day. It’s like driving. No journey is exactly the same. But you can cope pretty well with most eventualities. Your reactions become automatic. You use your judgment, yes. But even that’s a product of the training. It’s difficult to describe if you haven’t actually been there. It’s as if you’ve got a heightened sense of awareness of everything that’s going on around you. Like the opposite of being sloshed. But at the same time you’re also sort of outside the situation. Like you’re watching it on film.”

He’s right. And not just when it comes to storming embassies. Recall the words of the neurosurgeon in the previous chapter? “An intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses” is how he described it: the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation. In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.

Consider the following, for example: an extract from an interview I did with a U.S. Special Forces instructor, about the caliber of soldier that eventually, after one of the most grueling physical and psychological selection procedures in the world, makes it into the Navy SEALs. The guys who took out Bin Laden.