Inside the Brain of a Psychopath

psychopaths literally have a different brain than you or i do unless of course you are a psychopath in which case this video will hopefully give you some insight as to what's going on with your brain but for me it's always been a morbid curiosity with psychopathy i mean they're like the edge cases of humanity why are they incapable of empathy why are they so prone to risk taking even if that risk almost comes with a guaranteed death sentence or lifetime imprisonment why are so many ceos psychopaths what's the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath and is there even a potential treatment for psychopathy or are we just doomed to live in fear for the rest of eternity from these individuals it's gonna be a slightly terrifying one let's do this there is no official diagnosis of psychopath or sociopath instead these are terms that the public or professionals even will use to just communicate the behavioral symptoms that someone is experiencing in reality both psychopathy and sociopathy belong to what's known as anti-social personality disorder or apd now apd is one of four personality disorders that belong to what's called cluster b personality disorders the other three are going to be borderline personality disorder narcissistic personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder now well none of those are desirable disorders to have by any stretch of the imagination apd is commonly seen or believed to be the worst among them and that's because apd can have some of the traits that are in those other disorders but still suffer from personality disorder so for example a sociopath can be impulsive which is also what someone with borderline personality disorder would display but you wouldn't say that a sociopath suffers from borderline personality disorder instead they would just share borderline traits but they still suffer from antisocial personality disorder now apd can actually manifest in different individuals differently this is what we're really getting at when we say psychopathy or sociopathy now definitions change over time and that's just a product of science right the more you learn about something the more you have to change it as you go along but it's probably easiest for you to think of psychopathy as being the end result or product of physical issues combined with environmental problems while sociopathy is going to be almost purely a product of environmental conditions so in other words a psychopath is actually born with physical issues with their nervous system and then on top of that you pile on environmental conditions such as child trauma sociopath on the other hand is going to be born with an essentially a normal functioning nervous system but due to childhood trauma or maltreatment that is going to then alter their nervous system so that's pro i mean that's an oversimplification which is why it's really best to think of them as just suffering from antisocial personality disorder but for our purposes that should work just fine now to understand what's physically going on with the brain of a psychopath we first need to discuss a very famous neurotransmitter called serotonin now serotonin is a monoamine neurotransmitter or neuromodulator essentially all that means is that when it's released it will cause or stop a signal to occur or it can actually change how another signal is working now serotonin is widely distributed throughout the body in fact you find the most of it surprisingly in the digestive tract but with the brain so let me grab the brain here and turn this around serotonin is going to be produced here in the brain stem and there are going to be groups of nuclei called the rafi nuclei and they're going to produce serotonin and then they're going to have neuronal projections that are going to take the serotonin pretty much throughout the entirety of the brain when serotonin is released at the synapse and the synapse is actually just the location where two or more neurons are communicating with one another it's actually going to leave what's called the presynaptic neuron first and the presynaptic neuron is just the first neuron from there the serotonin will go into a space between the neurons called the synaptic cleft because interestingly neurons are not actually at least at the synaptic location they're not in contact with one another instead there's a space so that chemistry can occur in those gaps so serotonin will leave that presynaptic neuron go into the synaptic cleft and then it's going to bind to receptors on that secondary neuron called the postsynaptic neuron and depending on the location the type of neuron and several other factors serotonin's going to either initiate something it's going to inhibit something or it's going to alter some kind of activity within that synapse so now that the synapses have communicated with serotonin something needs to happen to the serotonin so much of that serotonin will actually be reabsorbed back into that presynaptic neuron we call this serotonin reuptake but not all of it some of it will actually remain inside of the synaptic cleft but it needs to leave two so what the body will do is break it down and it does that with an enzyme called monoamine oxidase a or m-a-o-a for short and so what ends up happening is this combination of re-uptake and breakdown and what that does is it just takes serotonin out of the synapse temporarily again temporarily because what will then happen is well once the synapse needs to fire again and serotonin needs to be released then you can get the proper response because you know how much serotonin is going to be present now the activity of this enzyme is coded by a sequence of dna called the maoa gene which is located on an x chromosome now there can be different versions or alleles or variants of this gene you could have what's called maoh or m-a-o-a-l and all that means is that you have high-end uh some high activity in the gene or low activity in the gene at least when you compare it to a normal functioning mao gene the reason i'm bringing this up is because researchers have discovered that most if not all psychopaths have the low functioning variant of the maoa gene and in some especially rare cases there have been entire family lines that have the gene completely knocked out meaning they don't break down serotonin at the synapse at all now some of you may be wondering why this is an issue at all i mean serotonin is commonly described as the happy neurotransmitter so in that case it would suggest that having more of it would make you better off or happier not worse i mean just look at ssris for example an ssri stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and these are the go-to antidepressants for many clinicians out there and they essentially function by limiting how much serotonin is reabsorbed into that presynaptic neuron although maybe i shouldn't actually say it that way because we don't have a crystal clear understanding of exactly how ssris work what we do know is that they have an effect on serotonin and they tend to improve symptoms of depression but this is where many go wrong in their assumptions surrounding brain chemistry neurotransmitters aren't solely responsible for anything dopamine is not responsible for joy or pleasure and serotonin isn't responsible for happiness instead they play roles in these behaviors and emotions right they work with other hormones and other neurotransmitters and it's this complex dance i often tell my students to think of brain chemistry and neurotransmission similar to an orchestra or a symphony right you may enjoy the violin but you don't want to hear only the violin when you're listening to an orchestra or a symphony instead you want the violin to come in at the right time with the right cadence with the right loudness right there all these instruments are there to come in at the right time and then the right way and all of it together creates an experience that is the best way to think about neurotransmission and brain chemistry as a whole so instead of saying serotonin is responsible for happiness you really should be saying that serotonin is is playing a role in happiness as well as it's playing a role in just overall emotion and behaviors now you may be thinking eureka we found it this is this is the gene that's responsible for aggression all we gotta do is some genetic engineering cut it out throw it away and boom we have no more psychopathic serial killers that would be awesome but unfortunately it's just not that way it's not that simple and that's because aggression as is all behavior and emotions is complex so simply having the presence of this low activity variant doesn't equate to have been aggressive or being psychopathic instead it's what we call a predictor of psychopathy a predictor of aggression serotonin plays a role in the development of psychopathy now that's the thing is serotonin plays the role in the development of the brain in general if you're to look at the growing brain in utero so we're talking embryogenesis and then we're talking fetal development serotonin is flooding the brain and it's part of this complex dance to help mature the brain and turn it into what's going to be a fully functioning brain but it makes you wonder if someone has this maoal variant what could that mean for serotonin breakdown during brain development what kind of repercussions could that have now we're going to address that but real quick i want to mention something else first and you may recall me earlier saying that the maoa gene is located on an x chromosome so if you remember back to high school biology females have two x chromosomes and males have an x and a y chromosome we get those chromosomes from our parents right you get one from your mother one from your father since females have two x chromosomes your mother can only give you an x chromosome but since males have x and y your father can give you either or meaning the father is the one that determines the sex of the child well the vast majority of psychopaths are male and if you think about it through this chromosomal perspective this makes perfect sense because let's say that a female has the low ac the low activity variant on one of her x chromosomes if it's not on the other x they cancel each other out meaning that she's not likely to display that aggressive behavior that comes from it with males however they only have one x chromosome so if they got it they simply got it there's no canceling out this also means that the genetic uh uh indicator the genetic deficiency the predictor of aggression is actually passed down from mother to child now it is possible for females to become psychopathic and this has happened it's just so much less likely because you need to have both of those x chromosomes having this this variant this is one of the many reasons why researchers got so excited when they first discovered the correlation between maoa and psychopathy in fact it was initially nicknamed the warrior gene because it lined up with so many expectations surrounding psychopathy and aggression but the problem is they all they very quickly discovered that simply having this low activity variant doesn't make you psychopathic and aggressive you see plenty of people who don't have it so therefore it's not a one in one correlation and they realized that means there has to be something else that tips the scales if this plays a role even a significant role it's not enough to get you over the hill instead there has to be something else and what they've since realized it's likely a combination of environmental conditions so how you grow up as well as brain alterations likely as a product of the serotonin alterations during brain development now those that suffer from antisocial personality disorder are notoriously difficult to study and the reason being is that they don't willingly seek treatment so unless they're court-ordered or they're in prison or they're dead and you're just studying them posthumously they're not going to actively try to fix themselves because they don't see anything as being wrong with themselves but the best data that we do have surrounding psychopathy sociopathy and just apd in general comes from pet scans which stands for positron emission tomography and this allows you to actually see the metabolic uh or the metabolism of the brain i guess i should say just which areas are metabolically active during specific thoughts and emotions pet scans have been vital to mapping out brain regions based on function and at this point we have a pretty decent understanding at least generally speaking about what's going on and what's being processed in specific areas of the brain so when apd patients undergo pet scans and you ask them to contemplate moral and ethical questions or dilemmas something very fascinating is found and that's low activity in what's called the prefrontal cortex which is this region of the brain right here so you're looking like this is the anterior portion and we're going towards the posterior side this is a right hemisphere of the cerebrum so you see low activity in the prefrontal cortex and then in the limbic system and we can't see the limbic system because it's embedded inside of this hemisphere but it contains structures like the amygdala or the hippocampus but when you ask these patients to say let's let's say give them a specific scenario maybe a child a young child tragically loses both parents in a horrifying car accident and the child survives and they are crying and obviously devastated by this right 99 of people you would expect to see the areas responsible for morality and empathy light up and those areas are going to be here so if i turn this around so this so if you look you're going to see like this line here this is dividing what i'm going to surround here this is called the anterior cingulate cortex and then this region here is called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex now both of these areas are strongly linked to morality and empathy and so when you put them through these types of moral and ethical dilemmas what you see is that they're just completely under active to the point where you can make the argument that they don't feel empathy or if they do it's at such an extraordinarily small level that we don't we don't know how to properly understand it and that also means that their moral compass is completely skewed which is just terrifying and fascinating now this region of the brain right here is called the dorso lateral prefrontal cortex and this is the last region of the brain to develop in the human being so some of you may have heard that the brain doesn't fully mature until you're 25 years old well specifically we're talking about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the dlpfc now the dlpfc is responsible for rational decision making you can think of it as your risk assessment center it's the lens with which you view the world right you you make rational decisions based on the connections made in this area and the reason why it's so it's delayed in its maturation is because it takes the human being around 25 years and again there's wiggle room with this to to make mistakes to learn from role models teachers parents um television shows you name it about the differences between right or wrong or what's a smart or an intelligent versus an unintelligent decision and it's able to do this from feedback from other areas so the anterior cingulate posterior cingulate the dorso that's like the the the you know the dlpfc is going to come from the ventral medial pfc or uh you know the orbital frontal cortex all these different regions of the brain if i can hold it properly for you to see are going to be giving feedback to that dlpfc saying hey this is how we respond to these moral and ethical issues well if you recall when when the brain is developing in utero and serotonin is responsible for that well with psychopaths that's reduced and so what we find is that if these areas that go to the dlpfc that relay information aren't active that is going to change how synapses are formed in this region meaning to a psychopath their behavior is not irrational it's completely rational because their rational center has formed around the irrational this is why they don't feel bad this is why they don't they're not bothered by that scenario with the child losing their parents they're not bothered when they do something that the rest of us are like you can't do that they steal something or hurt someone or just behave in this way that the rest of us would feel morally and ethically compromised they don't feel that because their brain is literally processing the the information differently than it would for you or i but again though none of this is a foregone conclusion and as i mentioned earlier you need something on top of all of this to really create psychopathy right we've built the house of cards it's highly unstable in a lot of cases but that doesn't necessarily mean that everything's going to crumble to the ground in order for it to crumble you then need environmental conditions to amplify it to really cause that devastation and this occurs through childhood traumatic experience again so this could be like you know uh abusive parents this could be sexual abuse right not just emotional but sexual abuse but it also could be to just witness horrifying things right if you have a young child who witnesses some horrifying wartime crimes that can also be enough to start to tip the scales into psychopathy but this is also where we then can bring sociopathy back into the equation because we all know that trauma at any age can be devastating but childhood trauma is especially devastating because again going back all those different areas of the prefrontal cortex are you know sending information to the dlpfc well even if you don't have that maol gene right even if you don't have the altered brain structures but you're young enough and you still grow up or experience that childhood trauma that can be enough to shift that dlpfc to cause aberrations in those other areas to where they become low functioning so you get essentially the sim the same type of result as you did with psychopathy but this time it's almost purely based on environment considering that both psychopaths and sociopaths belong to antisocial personality disorder it makes perfect sense that they're to share several behaviors and one of those is going to be a complete lack of empathy it's physically impossible in most cases for them to put themselves in another shoes right to see it through their eyes and feel the way that they are feeling but then they also have little to no anxiety right in the same way that we have anxiety so i mean i don't know you but i get anxious all the time just over little things little things that might be coming up or i'm gonna have to do later or i have to do right now but for them that's not going to be the exact same right and again there's a little bit of a spectrum to this but in a lot of cases they just don't feel anxious their heart rate is not jumping up when yours and mine would be so this actually goes hand in hand with their risk assessment because if they're not feeling anxious they're more likely to take risks and when you couple that with a lack of empathy that is just a perfect storm right that just breeds just a disturbing type of individual because then they could steal something or hurt someone and not feel bad about it even though there's a high risk to it but the thing is when they take those risks they're still going to get adrenaline they're still going to get dopamine hits so it's going to help to make them feel alive which then just starts to kind of like get this you know the ball rolling to create this out of control behavior especially when we're talking about sociopaths but they're also going to have and share an enjoyment of having power over others and again that makes perfect sense especially when you couple it with a lack of anxiety as well as the lack of empathy right because then it's going to be easier for them to become successful in a lot of ways especially when it comes to psychopaths we'll talk about that shortly but the other in my eyes probably the most disturbing thing about it that they share is a lack of remorse right they don't feel guilt or shame so it's not just that they couldn't empathize when they weren't anxious and they enjoyed the power once they know the end result of what they've done they don't feel bad about it right they're not like sitting there losing sleep they don't really think about it someone could be crying in front of them complete an emotional wreck about what they have done to them and it's just like well that's just part of play in the game now despite their similarities there are obviously going to be differences especially considering we took the time to say there's psychopaths and sociopaths so psychopaths they tend to be far more calculating right they are able to plan deceits and manipulation in advance right they're not going to be nearly as reactionary they're capable of blending in with those around them they can observe the behavior of others and say oh that's how that's how people act i should probably act like that right because when i act my other way people get scared or they don't like that so okay i'm going to blend in like this right so they're not anxious about it or anything they're just able to kind of fly under the radar typically they're going to be intelligent they're going to be charming and they can be ruthlessly cunning now despite what you may have heard in pop culture being a psychopath doesn't mean you're on a one-way trip to becoming a serial killer or an angel of death and an angel of death is going to be a medical professional who purposely kills their patients instead psychopaths tend to gravitate towards positions of power right so sometimes they can become psychopathic serial killers but a lot of other times they may become a lawyer they may become just a doctor and they may not be an angel of death but they enjoy that position of power and manipulation and everything they can do with it but you're also going to see them become military members you're going to see them become police officers and they can make outstanding businessmen or business women right ceos i forget the exact statistics but there is a high amount of ceos that are actually psychopathic and it makes perfect sense when you think about it right when you have a lack of empathy you're not anxious you're able to take risks if you're able to steer those in the right direction that is a potent individual it's also someone you don't want to cross obviously because they don't mind getting revenge they don't mind ruining you and they won't feel bad about it right that's what makes psychopaths so different from sociopaths is the fact that i really to me it comes down to their ability to plan and not be reactionary and that's the thing with sociopaths they are far more abrasive than psychopaths are going to be right they're far more reactionary they don't like to or really think even to fly under the radar instead they're just going to do things to do them right these are the type of people that don't mind showing that they're cruel that don't mind showing that they're manipulating right they're the type of person who would key a car just to key a car you don't have to do anything to them they're just gonna do it and it doesn't bother them they don't feel bad about it it's really just this experimentation they're just like well you could ask a sociopath why did you do this and it's just like i wanted to see what would happen and when you tell them what happened you know the damages or you know the carnage that ensued they just don't care right so you can think of almost like um this is this is this may be a terrible analogy and it's like i don't mean to but i'm just gonna say it i tend to think of sociopaths almost like a rabid dog and then i tend to think of psychopaths as being more of a trained dog that's a trained attack dog right both are capable of just obscene destruction but the way the method they go about it is going to be completely different and that to me is what makes them so scary but in just their own unique ways so is there anything that can be done to treat these individuals um the sad and unfortunate answer is likely no at least given current technology and the current state of medicine i mean the fact is you're dealing with a hardware problem right you're dealing with literal changes in the genetic sequencing and the physical brain itself even with sociopathy right because emotional trauma will literally change the areas of the brain the way the synapses communicate with each other the pattern with which they communicate with each other so what we're talking about here is brain plasticity issues combined with genetic deficiencies and again maoa isn't the only gene that we found that correlates with psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder there are other genes so then it's like we have to figure out which of those genes is being read in which order how do they relate i mean it's not as simple i wish it was as simple especially with like and i mentioned this earlier genetic engineering like crispr type technologies that we could just go in there and change the genes and boom you fixed it but again you then have the emotional trauma aspect even if we do get to that point where we can do genetic engineering and actually fix that underlying issue we still have the emotional trauma aspect bad things happen you know but to me it's like if there's anything that we could do as a society and even like cross-culturally across the world and this is a tall order i know what i'm about to say trust me i know what i'm about to say it's be better parents it's be better role models and look i i'm a parent and by the time you watch this i'll likely have my second child right now my wife is pregnant she is full term at this moment her due date is next week with our second child um to me it's like parenting is one of the greatest joys if not the greatest joy in my entire life and it's also easily the most difficult thing i've ever had to do um you know i have a four-year-old and then we're gonna have this newborn and it's like every day is a lesson on my own insecurities and issues that i need to get over with because it's so easy to yell it's easy to want to get angry it's easy to just want to say do this because i want you to do it and it's like i like to think of myself as a decent parent i like to think of myself as not doing any damage but it's like it's an imperfect process and i can see how it can get out of control i think any parent can understand that because if you've never dealt with a tantruming three-year-old all right they are some of the rudest people alive they are just obscenely insane in fact i actually should mention this when you're diagnosing antisocial personality disorder they can't even diagnose it under the age of 18. and some psychologists and psychiatrists want to push that out even farther and that's because children and teenagers actually display many antisocial traits right kids are ridiculous they do all sorts of stuff they test boundaries push boundaries they they drive you nuts in a lot of ways right the most beautiful people that's ever walked the earth but they are crazy people too and so being able to control yourself is one of the most difficult things and what i've been learning and i'm going to continue to learn and i know it's only going to get harder and it's going to be different as the years go on is that you know i just got to continue to be the best i can possibly be and i understand that that is a difficult thing actually i would argue almost impossible to get every parent in the entire world on the same page where hey we're all gonna just we're gonna do better but unfortunately i think that's what needs to happen and or at least make significant strides because again even if you treat the underlying genetic susceptibilities you still have the emotional aspect so to me it's like one of the things i personally think about and i think about this all the time is like okay well how can you be a better parent and for me again this is all this is all opinion based right you could completely disagree with all of what i'm saying right now but to me the way i tend to approach it is i want to try and develop more rationality within my child and within the children and that's just logic type behavior right it's if this than that right if you do this then this will happen and you know it's like i'm not trying to say emotion should be completely removed because i think emotion is essential to being a human being but i also think that if we react less and instead respond more right we listen to them and we try to be like okay well based on this we're gonna do this you develop those types of logical um just rational decision making in them i think that's going to be the best thing to help try and steer us out of this again this is all opinion based this is all subjective but that's why i'm just a huge fan of logic type things and it's also why i'm a huge fan of the sponsor of today's video brilliant now i want to be perfectly clear brilliant is in no way claiming that their content is going to help solve parenting and anti-social personality disorder that is not at all what's happening here but i i just want to let you know about brilliant that we've been fortunate enough to work with brilliant essentially since the inception of this channel and they're easily one of our favorite sponsors and i actively this is true i use the the app for brilliant on a day-to-day basis right i'm a big chess player i love sudoku i love those types of 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any guilt if i'm on my phone doing so if you're interested visit brilliant.org iha and the first 200 people there will get 20 off their annual subscription again i cannot speak highly enough about brilliant so be sure to check them out but thanks for hanging out with me with this video i really appreciate it hopefully it wasn't too fear-inducing and you learn something fun and exciting that you can go scare other people in your life but thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Institute of Human Anatomy

Views: 3,545,111

Keywords: psychopath, sociopath, psychopath vs sociopath, what is a psychopath, what is a sociopath, psychopathy, sociopathy, psychopathy vs sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, what is antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, empathy and the brain, morality and the brain, prefrontal cortex, limbic system, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, differences between psychopaths and sociopaths, brain

Id: AHk7S6prF6M

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/death_of_gnats]

That was very enjoyable. Good science too. Warning: last 5 minutes is sponsor spruiking.

[u/BEAMeUPScuT]

I wonder how much substance abuse over time alters the brain- specifically alcohol, amphetamines, and/or any combination of substances known to significantly impact brain function.

Can someone cause themselves so much brain damage from overuse of those substances, that they become 'psychopathic' in nature?

[u/mmmfritz]

Ok now do brain structure for people who like cats.

[u/RobotsAndMore]

This channel is one of my favorites. A lot of what they cover goes over my head but I really appreciate that they share their knowledge with the world via youtube.

[u/whezzan]

This explains so much. I’m glad I watched it.

[u/StansDad_aka_Lourde]

This shit is like modern phrenology.

[u/0dteSPYFDs]

I have ASPD, or at least, my psychiatrist and therapist think so. Not that it’s a good thing, but I don’t have any affective empathy, only cognitive empathy. In fact, I don’t really have very many feelings physically, or mentally.

I also got my genesight test back today and spoke to my psychiatrist. It turns out I have a mutation, but a different mutation than what he mentioned.

All that being said, can other mutations that impact serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine production have similar effects on an individual?

Heterozygous Polymorphism COMT Val158Met was the one pointed out specifically, but I have some other metabolic issues with medications.

proof

Edit: NVM, end of video has my answer.

[u/Ben_MOR]

Could someone give a quick resume of the big differences ?

[u/JaredAnders]

Can you see the lead paint?