My personal story
Now, my personal story is – now I have to have water for this because it still freaks me out a little bit. Not really, it doesn’t freak me out, but my family has been quite good about it. They are pretty tough. My wife is really tough.
So just the background. I was raised in a regular household in upstate New York. In high school I was the class clown but I was also the Catholic boy of the year, as I was really obsessed with being perfect. I had OCD and it was expressed through hyperreligiosity. I never had sins to really tell. The sins I would have from the time I was in the early adolescence, I would go in, and then the priests would go, and they had to keep saying: “this is not a sin”. And I said: “to me it is a mortal sin, therefore it is a sin. I am sorry, I am going to hell like immediately, you better help me here”. It wasn’t until after I wrote the book, many years later, and this is a couple of years ago, that my mother, who is still alive – she is 99 now – goes and says: “watching you go to and from school was really quite weird because when you leave”, she said, “50 feet on each side of you would be cleaned up”. I was like a vacuum cleaner and when I came back the same way, symmetrically clean on both sides. It had to be perfect every day. I was very good in terms of picking up things. I considered it a moral issue because I would say: “well, this week I did not spend enough time paying attention to the right side of the universe, I was favoring the left”. I always thought in terms of the universe. Can you imagine this? Even though I knew it was crazy, I had to do it. You had somebody talk here (note: at TED) about OCD. There is the obsessive compulsive disorder and, when you have it, you know the thoughts are crazy, but you can’t help it. But if you have obsessive compulsive personality disorder, you think it is okay and that is why personality disorders are so much more devastating. Because I knew it was crazy, but it didn’t help one bit. With personality disorders like psychopathy and borderline, people are in an agnostic world. They do not understand certain things that you take for granted. It is part of their condition.
Anyway, I was a regular guy really up until a couple years ago. I am not self-diagnosed as a psychopath, I am self-diagnosed as a normal regular guy. I was a Teamster (I still have my card). I worked a lot as a laborer and as a bartender, which I love to do. It was a lot of fun. I went to school too. I really considered myself quite regular.
Here (note: in the video) I am with my family; I and the woman there that I am behind – and you can see I am already bothering her under the water, even at our age – had our first date when we were 12 years old. We were both first dates because we both loved to play games – scrabble, bridge, and all the stuff like that – and also swim. We hosted races against each other. After about four years, we started going over to her house and we were doing the regular goofing things because we were just friends, there was nothing romantic at all. Then we started to make out, it was like: “what is this?” We had no idea what was going on, we were kind of late developers that way. After that we went steady and we have three kids, five grandkids, the whole deal. Anyway, if you look at that, I have a very stable home life. I have had the same job; I am like a potted plant at the University of California for how long I have been there. It looks like stability, but it is almost too stable. I should have been moving out a little bit, but I didn’t. I had a good job and I was productive. From that appearance and from everything I knew, I am an absolutely normal guy. Everything was quite wonderful up until about 2005.
I always had this lab and I was involved in a lot of different research. My own lab was small, we only had about 15-20 people in it. But I also had some colleagues that I had taught. In the early 90s we got a PET scanner. Some of the students I had as medical students back in the late 70s, early 80s, which are now psychiatrists, said: “you got to come and take a look at these scans”. What they were doing was every year they had a couple of murderers, a lot of really bad guys, serial killers and people you know about, some you don’t know about, and they would say: “can you tell us what parts of the brain are affected?” This has always occurred during the penalty phase of the trial and it was there when there still was a death penalty. We did a fair amount of that. Then, from the 80s through the 90s, that expanded, but it was only a couple of years and a couple of per year. I didn’t really pay much attention to it because this was a quarternary, not even a tertiary, part of my research, because I was looking at many other things: schizophrenics, adult stem cells, I was all over the place.
Some of the things we were looking at, with different techniques, were the impulsive murderers. Some are very disordered and, when they get mad impulsively, they are violent and kill. Others, like this guy here (note: in the video), turned out to be a psychopath. Now, in 2005, from several different collaborators, I was sent all these scans (PET, SPECT, ephemera) of all these different murderers. I said: “don’t tell me what it is because I am going to make up a story”. Even as a scientist, you are always fighting this bias that you know what a murderer’s brain scan should look like. I said: “don’t tell me and try to confuse me; send me normals, schizophrenics, all sorts of stuff like that”. I spent a few months going through the first pass and coming out of that was a pattern that popped out that I had never seen before. Here it is (note: in the video). In these scans, these parts of the brain in blue were turned off; they were really turned off, at least when I looked at it. This is an old friend, the limbic system, which includes: the medial prefrontal cortex, the orbital cortex, the cingulate cortex looping around – this part along the mid-line of the brain. The orbital cortex is above the orbits of the eyes. Then the cortex strip that goes right along the middle of the cortex and then loops through the hippocampus down to the amygdala and then it makes a loop back through the insula. It is a big circle. This is the limbic system or the emotional brain and this is what was off. Nobody had really described this yet. I said: “okay, this is an interesting pattern”. At that time, I started to vet this by giving talks in psychiatry departments and law schools and things like that, just to see if it made sense to people, to see what I was missing.
At the same time, just by chance, we were studying Alzheimer disease and we were looking for genes, sets of genes that contributed or interacted in Alzheimer. We had finished all of our Alzheimer patients and we needed normals and we needed them fast. I ended up asking my family – if I went through the mistakes, I guess this would be the first – because I know they would come in: my brothers, my kids, my wife, and even my mother and aunt. I said: “look, we are all normal, why don’t you come in?” You took an earlier look at us and saw that we were normal and happy, we used to take pictures down at Cabo and at the pool. There was one provision, which is that my wife’s family was loaded with Alzheimer; her mother and father had died of Alzheimer; her brother, an old very good friend of mine, just died; and some aunts and uncles. It was just loaded with it. So I said to her: “Look, you may not want to find out the answer because, if we do the scans, we could see something that is called prodrome changes in the brain and the genes may turn out to be the wrong combination; do you want to know this?” And she goes like this: “I have just got over non-Hodgkin lymphoma, I am going to die of cancer before Alzheimer, so let’s do it”. This is her as far as I know her. She said: “look, it could help our kids, grandkids, and the way their lifestyle is, and everything”, so this is kind of a heroic thing.
And we did it and they came back. We did PET scans, quantitative EEG, genetics, and different psychometric tests that were specific for a number of things including Alzheimer. There (note: in the video) you see three tests of six people that were tested. You can see the top two rows with the PET scans, where the standard is that, where you see red or yellow, it means more activity than a normal person or the comparison group. Where you see blue and green, it means the activity is lower than normal or the comparison group. The first five of those particular scans are quite normal considering: the tasks, the age, the gender, and all that of the people. The qEEGs were a little funny. The first, the second, and the last one were unusual patterns that are typical in people with depression, but who have a very good attention, they are very fast with the stimulus response. Then we did a whole bunch of genetics you see at the bottom. When I was going through the pile of all these scans of my family, which a technician brought to me, I leaf through them and I was so happy because they looked normal. I got to the bottom, the last scan of the PET set of scans. I looked at it and I went: “okay, what is the joke here?” I said: “you’ve switched the scans here, obviously, with the pile of murderers, the pile of psychopaths” because it was a pattern that looked exactly like the worst psychopathic murderer I studied, but kind of a pure form. There wasn’t a lot of different kinds of damage, it was just that basic pattern. They said: “no”. These guys would kid me. But it turns out they didn’t. They went back and checked and they said: “that’s somebody in your family”. I said: “well, they should not be walking the streets, I think we have here a dangerous character”. It was my civic duty to turn in one of my family members. Of course, I peeled it off and that is when Gandalf came knocking at my door. Because there was my name. The first thing I did was I just laughed, I kind of got the joke. The overall immediate joke is I am studying this scientist and then he is it. I got that. I didn’t take it personally, it was like: “that is really funny”.
Then, after about a week, I mentioned to my wife. I said: “the damnest thing happened and I didn’t pay attention to it”. This was just a passing thing, I had to be reminded of it later. I said: “our PET scans came back and everybody’s was normal; yours is normal, which is wonderful; but my PET scan looked just like a psychopath”. Then she said something I should have taken notice of. She goes: “it doesn’t surprise me”. Husbands and wives and best friends can say these things to each other, but in retrospect, she was serious. Years before, she had also said something I hadn’t remember but I was reminded of – what we fought when we saw, back in the 80s, the first Hannibal Lecter movie, Manhunter. We were sitting there, in the movie theater, and she goes: “that is you”. I was like: “ha ha ha”. And she goes: “no, not Hannibal Lecter, you are Will, the psychopath who is inhibiting it”. I thought it was because I was good-looking or something but it wasn’t that. A part of this is people are saying things to you throughout your life that you don’t put together in certain ways. You really don’t check the whole banquet of things out together.
After that, it took a while to get all the genetics done and when they came back, there are a number of genes whose alleles – the forms of the genes – are associated with high aggression and high violence, and also low aggression and low violence. You can get combinations of these. You get one from your mother and one from your father, so you can get two high risk, high violence genes or two low risk, low violence genes, or a mix of the two. It is not just one gene, there are about 15 genes that code any trait for any complex adaptive behavior. When you hear the word gene, that means one of the 15 associated with aggression and violence. There are also other genes that are associated with psychopathy having to do with anxiety. Psychopaths have very low anxiety, they really do, and they have very high threshold for pain and low reactivity. They have not only low stress-related hormones, but also a low level of emotional empathy.
Now, Paul Zak, who talked here, is a great friend of mine and we were fighting about this. He thinks my understanding is too complicated and this is a fight we always have. He is a great guy, a great speaker, but we have a little bit of a different view of this. I will show to you the different types of empathy because I believe it affects the way we vote for people. I will get back to this. Psychopaths can have very high cognitive empathy. They know what you are thinking and feeling. The problem is they do not use that to help you, they use it against you. It is not that they do not have empathy, they do not have the kind of empathy that makes them to move with you emotionally: when you are feeling happy, they should be feeling happy; and vice versa when you are feeling bad. In my own personal case, a lot of my friends and my wife’s girlfriends used to come to tell me their problems through the years. I am just the kind of guy you can go talk to because I never cry with them. They will tell me awful stories and start crying. I do not respond emotionally at all. To me it is like there is a problem that has to be fixed, so I coldly go along and help them. It is not like I do not try to help, but I am not moved by things emotionally, normally. I didn’t know this before. I think that a lot of times you don’t know how you really are. Some people do. But it turns out it could be a lot worse or not so bad as you think.
Anyway, when the genetics came back, some of my family had high level of aggression genes, but overall, considering the type of empathy, anxiety, stress, pain, and the violence and aggression, we are kind of average, which was good. And it fit the other biological markers, which is the imaging pattern that was more balanced. The same thing happened in my case. I had inherited a casino of genetics like I had thrown the 36 12s in a row. It is very low probability, but it happens. Just like there are people who have a low number, who inevitably inherit almost none of these genes. These are the mensches, people who do not get mad at you, do not hold grudges, do not get even, and are sweet. Nothing knocks these people off the track. There are people like this and it looks like they have the genetics that are kind of the opposite of a psychopath. There are a lot of complex definitions of psychopathy. When I was asked what the opposite of a psychopath is in one word, I said it is a mensch, really that’s what it is.