James Fallon, PhD: The Psychopath Inside

and see from the title just called the psychopath inside and uh and I had to think of you know scientists never satisfied with just titles always has to be : and then something else there's you know it's a good and bad depending how you look at things which is one and I guess the other could be something strange happened on my way to the lab one day which is really what a part of this is about and in the heart of it it's about so it's kind of a kind of a weird talk you know it's not like a science talk is a a sort of a personal oops store you know type of story and it's it's there's enough in it a a lot of my friends who are very religious thinks that that my resistance to many things this was God's Way of telling me this that I should shape up and I don't look at it that way I just look at it just serendipity I just wish I had good serendipity at the casinos and at the racetrack and and so I'll talk about two things one is a personal story and then start out with what identity is about because when you talk about a personal story so Who am I am it's it's something you start thinking of when you've you know very young you know it's like Who am I what's this all about and and then I'll talk about from that the way it has changed my mind on why certain things occur in the world and why there might even be good or really would we really call it good or is it just a an effect on the world of the way things are you know the different types of people and so I'll talk about that and I tried to pick something a topical at the end about politics you know about psychopathy and politics so uh you know I and I'll never be able to get through the part on business or in religion or on the unfortunate about the military it's it's great to see Jack Pryor here it's a real war hero from the Vietnam War and but also war hero now because he works so much with veterans issues PTSD and all sorts of things that you just you can't believe so it's really great to see you jack and and so I've worked with him and at the Pentagon and the Department of Defense by my association with Jack so it's kind of the hero and the crazy guy get together and then we work there it seemed to work out we've been very good friends since then so we talk about identity and the the nature-nurture problem the nature-nurture problem goes back to Aristotle and Plato and it turns out from what we know about modern neuroscience and genetics now in the past 10 years plato was correct and Aristotle was wrong and so I'll leave it at that those of you who have a background in philosophy know what I'm talking about in terms of the the idea of tableau rasa that we are born blank slates or were born with all capabilities capabilities that we're you know we're born knowing what morality is we don't have to be taught morality we don't have to be taught language we just tuning up stuff we already know for many many millions of years of evolution and it's just tuning up so it looks it's looking more and more now like we're not tabla rasa were born with a very full slate that is just then refined depending on the ecological niche you're in you know what language you're going to learn you're around mountains or in a city you know all these different things and and we're able to deal with all of them so that that's part of it but beyond that I tried to look at this you know once I went through this on my own personal story I started to think about identity and who we are but I immediately went to the biological side of this of course and so I said okay how many the question was for biologists how many different individual human beings have there ever been and will there ever be in a reasonable amount of time two million years let's say and went through the permutations and the combination so I said okay we got 20 you can see there 21,000 coding genes but many more regulators of each gene and regulators of regulators of the genes so if you look at those numbers you start to get many combinations not just from jeans that you measure by sending your you know your blood or your saliva to 23andme but way beyond that and so if you take those combinations which makes up about fifteen to twenty percent of the genome the coding genes and the rest of it is really what is where the action is now in terms of Biological Psychiatry it sits in this non-coding part which makes up over eighty percent so we study schizophrenia now when we're looking at it it seems to be this non-coding part many of which are transposons are really key players in making us who we are because we are in part at least based on our genetics or really our genomics what's expressed beyond the coding gene so if you take those combinations and and I said well how many combinations of humans can there be just based on all the genetic epi genetic genomic and all of the combinations and it turns out to be 1 times 10 to the 80 first power which is which is one sex vegan Tilian which is you know it's a big number right and they're in and so I looked at that number for a few days and after every few days I said I've seen this number before and and that number turns out is one order magnitude off the number of atoms in the universe and and so for all of all of us who were born in the 30s and 40s and 50s we know about the the 60s and 70s so in that sense we really are Stardust and in it also means that we'll never be to humans alike ever and we could go on for five million years this is a number beyond belief it's basically infinity so so the chances of there being another you are really off and that really that having some obsessive-compulsive disorder through most of my youth I I had to get to that extra order of magnitude 10 to the 82nd so I wanted this is like creating an answer and I found new combinations for transposons and these transposons which were studying different psychopathologies get us up to this 10 to the 82nd power but and that just the numerology of that is the you know if you look at when we're most susceptible in our life there are three major periods with three P's and one is you know postnatally certainly from the time we're born until about three years old this is the most this is the time when we're at our weakest in terms of the environment or strong SP that is when abuse trauma abandonment really changed the genetics it marks the genetics and such an interesting and an oftentimes tragic way that we deal with in terms of psychopathy personality disorders terrorism etc so it's it's it's one of these things we know how it's to absolutely to keep from happening and so we know how to cure these don't how to cure them but we know how to stop them and that's by getting rid of abandonment and abuse early on but beyond that there is also this preconception a part of this and that's a weird time to be susceptible this is before you're even conceived right and this this occurs through these transposons in the female reproductive tract so in the after sex and the female reproductive tract there's well you know the sperm are there for about a day or so but they a lot of them die you know there's some only one hero who makes it to the end and there's all these other soldiers helping along but those soldiers are breaking down and they're releasing their contents well the major contents they're releasing our transposons now a lot of the transposons we have these little pieces of DNA we got from retro viruses like HIV but other all sorts of viruses and some bacteria and they became part of us we use them because it helps us rearrange our DNA for example so that we have very good immune systems so every time you get sick or you're exposed to a new cold virus these are busy at work recombining your immune system that so can recognize on the other hand these transposons make us very vulnerable to cancer a lot of the cancers are because of these so with everything with the genetics and this is a fundamental part of this my view this the story is there's no good or bad genetic effects they're just they always it's always how you look at them right so we're happy about the immune system being helped by transposon but we're not so crazy about the cancer side of it but in the case of during conception what happens so you start getting mixing of all the different sperms transposon elements now here's here's the the trick as it were if the woman has had sex with two or three guys in that same 24-hour period they're all going to be infecting infecting each other the transposon so when the child is born even though through paternity testing of the DNA regular DNA you'll say well that's the father well actually the child will have three fathers okay and it'll become a mosaic so what's born is that it would be partially controlled by one father let's say this spleen the liver part of the brain and so there's a mix and these are not passed on to the next generation but the but the the child really is three father's this is very disturbing stuff right and I wanted to start with this actually to make sure everybody's hell way you know come in in yes it's one of these true stories like watching the thing the first time you know the film the thing and you're going to thank God there's nothing like I this is the thing I'm talking about the thing is the thing now so if we we look at this you say well at least we know one thing at least we know that identical twins are identical and a lot of psychology is based on this so you say what percent of a certain behavior is due to heredity genetics and how much is due to environment is based on the idea that identical twins are identical and it turns out of course that they're not identical at all and you can't find two identical twins who are identical and a lot of it's due to what the thing called C and V s or copy number variants and that's these transposons clipping and moving multiple copies of different genes to different places so one identical twin can inherit 10 you know I may have 10 copies from the mother of one thing happened with behavior or hair color skin color and you can see here these are identical twins and someone are not the same color at all you know we always think of it as terms of the external but what's internally all their organs and their mind can be very different so that's really change psychology and how we look at nature nurture and the relative contribution now because of these things because that's no longer something we can count on because they're all different now my personal story is see 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 it my family has been quite good about it they're pretty tough my life was really tough but so just the background I was raised in a regular household you upstate New York and you know I was in high school as a class clown but growing up I was also the Catholic boy of the year in New York as I was really obsessed with being perfect you know that was I had OCD and it was and I it was expressed through hyper religiosity so I never had sins to really tell my sins I would have from the time I was in your early adolescence I'd go in and then the priests ago they had to keep saying this is not a sin and I said to me it's a mortal sin therefore it's I said I'm sorry I'm going to help like immediately I probably better help you here and and and it wasn't until after I wrote the book many years later and this a couple years ago my mother who's still alive she's 99 now she goes she says watching you go to and from school is really quite weird because when I'd leave she said 50 feet on each side of you would be cleaned up I was like a vacuum cleaner because everything and if I did and when I came thinking back the same way symmetrically clean on both sides had to be perfect every day and you know I was very good in terms of picking up things you know and and but it was really I consider 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 always thought in terms of the universe of backside I was favoring the left can you imagine this right and even though I knew it was crazy you know you had it you had somebody talk about OCD there's OCD this obsessive compulsive disorder and when you have it you know the thoughts are crazy but you can't help it if you have obsessive compulsive personality disorder you think it's okay and that's why personality disorders are so much more devastating because I knew they were crazy but it didn't help one bit okay and but the personality disorders like psychopathy and borderline people are think they are in a world of an agnostic world they don't understand certain things that you take for granted okay so it's it's part of that so anyway I was like a regular guy and really up until a couple years ago I'm self diagnosed on my self diagnosed Psychopaths himself diagnosed normal regular guy you know I still have my Teamsters card I was a teamster worked a lot as a labourer and you know as a bartender which I love to do they're a lot of fun and I went to school too but I so I really considered myself quite quite regular and so here I am with the family and I you know the woman there that I'm behind and you can see I'm bothering or under the water already there even at our age that she and I are had our first date we were 12 years old we're both first dates because we both love to play game Scrabble and bridge and all the stuff like that and also swim we hosted race against each other and then after about four years we were over to her house and then we were doing the regular goofing things because we were just friends it was there was nothing romantic at all then we started to make out it was like we went what's this and then we went steady and then we've had you know if kids five grandkids the whole deal after that we had no idea was going on it was kind of late developers that way but anyway if you look at that you know I have a very stable home life and we got five grandchildren we have and I've had the same job I'm like a potted plant at the University of California I've been there looks like stability but it's almost too stable you know I should have been moving out a little bit and but but I didn't so from that appearance and from everything I knew is absolutely normal guy and I had a you know a good job and was productive it was everything quite wonderful up until about 2005 okay so I had this I was a always had a small lab and I was involved in a lot of different research but my own lab was small we only only had about 15-20 people in it and but then I also had some colleagues that I had taught and starting in the early 90s around a writer in 1990 we had a PET scanner and so some of the students I had as medical students back from the late 70s early 80s we're now psychiatrist they said you got to come and take a look at these scans and what they were doing was every year that had a couple of murderers a lot of really bad guys serial killers and people you know about some we don't know about and they'd say could you tell me can you tell us what the parts of the brain that are affected you know and this was always occurred during the penalty phase of the trial and it was still when there was a you know though there was a death penalty and so so we did a fair amount of that and then it that expanded from the all through the 90s but it was only a couple of years and a couple of per year and I didn't really pay much attention because it was a quaternary and I didn't a tertiary part of my research because I was looking at many other things schizophrenic Smita stem cells it was all over the place and so some of these we're looking at with different techniques we're impulsive murderers some are very disorder and are just when they get manikins impulsively and they will be violent and kill others like this guy here turned out to be a psychopath now in 2005 from several different collaborators I've said all of these scans pet SPECT ephemera of all these different murders but I said don't tell me what it is because I'm going to make up a story right even as a scientist you're always fighting like this bias that I know what a murder should look like brain scan I said don't tell me and try to confuse me a semi-normal schizophrenic all sorts of stuff so I spent a few months going through the first pass and coming out of that was a pattern that that popped out that I had never seen before and here it is and in these scans these parts of the brain and blue were turned off they're really turned off and least when I looked at it I that was an old friend this is the limbic system and so this limbic system included the medial prefrontal cortex and orbital cortex then the cingulate cortex looping around now this along the midline of the brain right so it's the orbital cortex is above the orbits the eyes so it's orbital cortex above the eyes and 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 so it's a big circle this is the limbic system or the emotional brain and this is what was off and and nobody had really described this yet so I said okay this is an interesting pattern so I started to vet this by giving talks in psychiatry departments and law schools and things like that at that time just to see if it made sense to people to see what you know what I was missing well at the same time just by chance we were studying Alzheimer's disease we're looking for the genes sets of genes that contributed or interacted in Alzheimer's and we had finished all of our Alzheimer's patients and we needed normals and we needed them fast so I ended up asking you know if I went through the mistakes I guess I asked my family because I know they would come in so my brothers or my gear kids my wife and he even my mother and aunt and I said look it we're all normal so why don't you come in and that was you know I saw earlier look at us were normal and happy we take pictures down at Cobo and a pool and but there was one one proviso is that my wife's family was loaded with Alzheimer's so her mother and father had died of Alzheimer's her brother just died his old very good friend of mine and some aunts and uncles it was just loaded with it and and so with her I said look it you may not want to find out the answer because if we do the scans we could see some what are called prodrome ik changes in the brain and the the genes may turn out to be the wrong combination do you want to know this and this how she is she goes like I've just got over non-hodgkins lymphoma I'm going to die cancer before Alzheimer's let's do it this is her far as I like this and and and so we we did it she said look it could help our kids or grandkids and you know it the way their lifestyle is and everything so there's kind of a heroic thing and so we did it and they came back so we de pet scans and quantitative EEG and genetics and different psychometric tests that were specific for a number of things including Alzheimer's and so there you see three six of the people tested and you can see the top two rows of the PET scans where it's a standard sort of thing where you ever you see red or yellow it's that's more activity than a normal person or the comparison group as it were and and then things in blue and green are lower than normal and or normal then a comparison group but those particular scans the first five are quite normal considering the tasks and the age and the gender and all that of the people the EEG s were a little funny the first second last one were unusual patterns that are typical people with depression but who are a very good attention they're very and very fast you know with the with the stimulus response and and then we did a whole bunch of genetics at the bottom and when I was going through the pile of this that so big technician brought these all these scans and of my family and I leaf through my boom-boom boom-boom-boom and I and I was so happy because they looked normal and I got to the bottom the last scan on the PIO set of scans on the bottom I looked at it I went okay what's the joke here and I said you've switched the scans here obviously with the pilot murders with the Psychopaths because it was a pattern that looked exactly like little worst psychopathic murderer I studied but kind of a pure form there was a lot of different kinds of damage it was just that basic pattern and they said no and these guys would kid me but it turns out they they they didn't and they went back and checked and they said that's know that somebody in your family so well they should not be walking the streets I think here we are dangerous character and so I was like my civic duty to turn one of my family members and and of course I it off and that's when Gandalf came knocking at my door because it was my name on there and and and it was you know the first thing I did was it just laughed you know I kind of got the joke the overall immediate joke is I'm studying this scientist and then he's it I got that and I didn't think it I didn't take a person they was like ah yeah that's really funny and uh and then you know I went home after about a week I mentioned to my wife I said the damnedest thing I said and I didn't pay attention to this it was just a passing thing I had to be reminded of it later and I said our PET scans came back and everybody was normal yours is normal which is wonderful and the and I said but my pets get looked just like a psychopath then she said something I should have taken notice of she goes it doesn't surprise me and young hey now husbands and wives and best friends can say these things to each other but in retrospect she was serious and and she had also years before a night what something I didn't remember that was as reminded of when we fought saw the first Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter we're sitting there there's back in the 80s and she goes that's you we're sitting the movie theater ha ha ha yeah I was like and she goes no not Hannibal Lecter your will you're like what the psychopath who's inhibiting it you know but who you know and I thought it was because he was good-looking or something but it wasn't that it so a part of this is people saying things to you throughout your life that you don't put them together in certain ways you know you really don't check the whole banquet of things out together and so 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 that are associated with high aggression and high violence and also low aggression low violence and you can get combinations of you get one from your mother one from your father so you can get to high risk you know high violence or too low or a mix of the two and but there's about 15 genes that code for any complex adaptive behavior any trait it's not just one so when you hear you know word gene that's one of 15 associated with it the with aggression and violence and then there's also other genes that are associated with psychopathy having to do with anxiety and in Psychopaths have very low anxiety you know they really do and they have very high threshold for pain and low reactivity they have 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 fight about this he thinks my understanding is too complicated and so that's a fight we always have and he's a great guy your talking is great speaker 2 but we have a little bit of a different view of this and I and I'll show it to you the different types of empathy because it affects the way we vote for people I believe it Ben and it's it's a and so I'll use this I'll get back to it but so Psychopaths can have very high cognitive empathy they know what you're thinking and feeling the problem is they don't use that to help you they use it against you so it's not that they don't have empathy they don't have that kind of empathy that they're moving with you emotionally when you're feeling happy they're feeling happy and vice versa and you're feeling bad they move with me and and you know in my own personal case all my a lot of friends used to come to it tell me their problems and my wife's girlfriend so all through teen years and after that I'm just the kind of guy you can go talk to because I never cry with them they'll tell me awful stories and start crying I'm not I don't you know I don't respond emotionally at all to me it's like there's a problem that has to be fixed so I like coldly go along and help them you know it's not like I don't try to help but I'm not moved by things emotionally normally I didn't know this before you see you know you don't know you don't know how you really are I think a lot of times some people don't but it could be a lot worse or not so bad as you think yes it turns out so anyway when the genetics came back my family had some of them had a high level of aggression genes but overall with the type of empathy anxiety stress pain and and the violence and aggression we're kind of average which was good and it fit the other biological markers which is the imaging pattern which was more balanced same thing happened in the case of me I like Anne had inherited in the casino of genetics I had thrown like the 36 12 s in a row you know it's just very low probability but it happens just like there are people who a low number but inevitably who inherit almost none of these genes and these are the mentions of course these are people they don't get mad at you their hold grudges they don't get even and they're sweet nothing knocks them off the track and you know these people right and there's people and they and it looks like they have the genetics that's kind of an opposite of a psychopath and so when of a there's a lot of complex definitions of psychopathy and so and I was asked what the opposite of a psychopath is in one word it's a match really that's what it is now if that wasn't enough at the same time this is the same year within three months we had a party at my house I would I'd gone out albacore fishing I love to fish and and so I brought back all these fish called my wife we had usually a big parties 35 40 people and everybody comes to these you know when you have a you try to get people to come for a party like three months ahead of time it's not enough I can make it and then it creates a if you have fresh albacore and you give people half an hour to show up everybody shows up everybody's oh shut up at thee and so he loved having these parties my mother was at the party and she goes like this you know she says your cousin who's a newspaper guy could New York found this this book that just came out on on your family I said my family now also my family well it turns out it was my father's side of the family she was talking about his side now she's like a full Sicilian background and always had got kidded about being mafia like all the thugs were in the Sicilian side it turns out not to be true and even though you know her father and her sisters they're all bootleggers or in numbers and she used to go up to lucky Luciano's place but very sweet people their word Val you know it's just like but my my mother oh yeah we got a dynamite truck going up lucky sure you know a teenage girl so she had that sort of you know you get a lot of this stuff from your mother you know this this love of adventure you know part of this just a love of adventure and thrill and she's got a lot of it and but any rate in this book it was about my father's side of the family she cuz check this out and I said bow let's wait until the end of the party but she was so excited because and I could tell she had that you know devilish look in her eye that she was going to get even and she did because in the book is it was about my grandfather a direct grandfather from the 1600s and it's the first case of a son murdering a mother matricide in the american you know colonies within white colonies and this was the first case and she and i sell that's cute it's like one of these stories a you know you know your great-great-grandfather was a horse thief but this was the first murder and she does know read on hey so you get to the end and she and so one of my cousins is Lizzie Borden we all know Lizzie Borden but to all of us on this side of the family T Fallon is an adopted name we were adopted by Irish farmers our real names Cornell and so we're Cornell's and all the Cornell's are in contact with each other and we all think that Lizzie Borden is wasn't guilty so she wasn't one of the murders but there are other people between there than I mentioned in the book there's too many murderers in the past then in the pin and there's a while in that same sad we has Ezra Cornell he started a Cornell University so we figured the to kind of cancel each other out right Ian Lizzie at least for that century but since then in in the past few years my cousin's two cousins who are genealogists and the great researchers in the stuff they found four lines on my father's side and all of them are loaded with murders and but the interesting thing is they're either murderers or like ministers they're either very holy there's no like regular people let's go have a beer kind of guys there either you know they're either in church or they're out with a gun somewhere so it was a it's a weird family so it all wrapped around the same issues of the cortex right and what is some go this way so we go the other way and and so so we have not only that but we also have you know a direct line to some of these because some of them kind of the worst kings of England which many of you have it's just about you know we have them but I have had too many in our family so that happened at the same time all this stuff was happening within a few months of each other and I started on you know I was laughing but I was saying what the hell is going on and and and so uh at that time we were I was finishing up you know about two years later we're finishing up I had to get like five million dollars together for a stem-cell company was adult stem cells for a chronic stroke and for Parkinson's we found I say we my students found and I took the credit for it's I don't know a principal investigator have discovered anything but they had a really good student feel and and so so a guy picked up the technology and we raised in you know five six million dollars get it going and so I didn't care about this other stuff I was you know when we had this work on schizophrenia in Alzheimer's so I wasn't thinking about this psychopath stuff at all or seriously cuz it was just like a you know like a stupid thing like the theories are wrong it turns out the theory is not wrong though now so then I the Ted people asked me to come and give a talk and I and I told him about this you know this is the important story about certain biases in science in medicine we don't we can only have embryonic stem cell research we can't you know have you get large grants for adult stem cell which are within your own body and it was I was going to talk about that about that bias that if you're not with the mean the mainstream of biomedical sciences then you don't get funded it's at that easily and they said yeah that's okay but you have anything personal this is my second mistake I said well yeah I got this screwy story to happen to me I swear I didn't think it would be that interesting and they go Chris Anderson that's it that's a story so I gave this TED talk right and so I stood up there like a horse's ass and spilled the beans now at the time in 2009 they were publishing these on YouTube you know they had they hadn't started doing that so what they were putting up were like Bill Clinton gave a talk or Al Gore but none of the other people were being put up so I thought it was just like any talk that you'd give as a professor which is you give it once everybody forgets about it you never hear about it unless you really bomb or something and you never see it shown anywhere well at this particular one this is when they first started it so about four months after I gave the talk in January at the Ted I got calls from my colleagues in the morning we're always excited they said it puts your TED talk up on YouTube and I'll and they said you got like 30,000 hits overnight and what are you talking about I didn't even think was going to be on seriously I got on there and I and I you know I don't know anything by business but I learned about marketing that that morning which is if you ever put up a you know if you put up a video on YouTube and the key word says psychopathic killer you're going to get 30,000 hits real fast that's all I know about marketing and that and and this this started a whole series of you know interviews and all this stuff and then I I was a called by you know Simon Miran the showrunner like I mentioned for Criminal Minds he says you got a saw your TED talk and I want you to you know come and act in it like a joke and and and we went on from there because he really got it and I was what I was really talking about wasn't so much my story you know you have to have a like a thoroughbred to ride a story but the real story this the subtext which is about transgenerational violence about epigenetics and how continuing violence in different areas of the country or different areas of the world whether it's an you know LA or Somalia or Chicago or any place we have these neighborhoods are parts of countries where the kids are seeing violence for more than three or four generations you can build then a model of epigenetic and then transgenerational changes that's what the TED talk was about but saying it at that time nobody really had were talking about it so they didn't it so I was like the personal talk he got it he's not even a scientist he got it was fantastic so anyway uh after that I I was asked to I'm sorry this long story but this is how it went you know this is it's it's part of it and so I was asked by the president of the University of Oslo and the the embassy to give a talk with the ex Prime Minister of Norway and he had bipolar disorder and in his first term like in 2000 2001 he kind of really started showing all the signs of bipolar disorder a very depressed and then hypomanic and and here's somebody now Europeans do not admit they have psychiatric disorders you know you go into American Bar especially in Southern California you know how much into man is you know how much they make the divorces would have an affair with all this you know everything in psychiatric disorder but in Europe and especially northern Europe and really especially in Scandinavia they never talk about this stuff like now you can imagine a prime minister saying I have a psychiatric disorder and he did it and this was I thought another great act of heroism and so I said yeah I'll come over so we did the talk together and we had a clinician who also talked and at the end I had to use some data I couldn't use other people's data right because the IRB regulations but I could use my own I get out myself and so I showed him my pet scans my genetics and I showed him all the disorders I had from the time I was born until the present and and I and then I went on and it wasn't just to show this it's so small you can't really see it it was just to say that we create statistical models where we weave in the psycho metrics all the symptoms then in with the the scans and different parts of the brain with the alleles of the genetics and we have general linear model equations that then say ah this gene is causing that that you know etcetera it's a very powerful way to to do these studies so I wanted to explain it so I used my data well I finished the talk and the at the end of the talk it was a public talk but there's a lot of psychiatrists in the in the audience too it's a very like in this audience or like a there are some neuroscientists here so I got it you know you always worrying not to make things too simple and everything you know it's all that stuff and you have regular people who are smart but don't take this but that was a mixed audience too and so at the end of the talk that chair the department of psychiatry at the University of Ashley goes first of all he says thanks that was pretty interesting and he says uh first of all you're bipolar and you don't know it and he went on to tell everybody that in in the United States the way back in 2010 that we were defining bipolar it's not considerate now it is so he said you're bipolar you don't even know this he says the thing is that your hypomanic you're up all the time and of course that's what it's defined by not the depression by but by the mania or hypomania and and he saw that he says also we want to talk to you afterwards so in over to my friend's house is a president of the University of Oslo and with these psychiatrists and psychologists and they said you know we were looking at your data and you're probably a borderline psychopath really close to that I went what and I then I'm starting to think some of my friends or pulling my leg the other psychiatrist back in California and no they did they didn't know me they said you at that point the first time after those five years I took it's started take it seriously so what I did in that flight home I I said what is something it was very disconcerting it was just weird because this was very different than what I thought it was I didn't to go sweet guy Catholic boy of the year for god sakes my way and and so I went back and started asking I started ask my wife and then my brothers my mother people close to me my best friends and then the psychiatrists who know my behaviors and I just say tell me what you're really think of me I said just had a experience don't worry I'm not gonna get mad at you and they all let me have it they also the same thing except my mother who at the end just say oh you're nice a boy though you're nice boy is looking she was the only one she's said you know and then after that on the side she told me all the terrible things I did but anyway and so they they all told me these very specific events and how I don't I'm not there and they started my sister said remember that letter I sent to you fifteen years ago look at that letter again it's like Jim I'm I got all the love and you never says your good brother he says you're never there you're not there emotionally at all and my daughter had told it as I found that my wife back in his by 2000 said you know I was really bugging her because was I was acting in ways that were really annoying to her really you know bothered her very cold sorts of things and she had my daughter taking a lot of clinical psychology with patients she goes Jenna just understands I'm dead as a narcissist and in and she didn't say psycho pet but she said he's really a narcissist so he doesn't even know he's doing this and it's all about him you know about me and so I gotta tell you right now I get to give a talk and talk about myself though this is you know I gave an excuse but it's really wonderful again except you don't want to do it in this way and so they all said the same thing to me and it was uh it was sort of odd and then I had when I was tested by psychiatrists and you know we did structured and unstructured sort of testing and here's one of the summaries which basically says this is about once said that he says jf that's me satisfies most if not all the psychiatric symptoms and psychoanalytical characteristics of a psychopath along with associated affective symptoms but he notably lacks most of the behavioral consequences of such psychiatric pattern in other words he's able to inhibit these these traits that would have made him a full-blown psychopath and he basically said that all my thoughts and urges are like a full-blown psychopath I just never act them out and and so this was like well why you know it's honor why I'm not in jail you know why and why growing up did all those adults tell me that they'd say it's a good thing you're from a good family I was told this grown-up because you would have turned out to be in a gang would have been a gang leader a little bit of bad guy and I heard this from different priests and rabbis and doctors all through my teen years and afterwards it was always an adult who would say something really wrong with you there's dark it's something dark about you even though I wasn't doing anything you see it was something about about me and so as okay well in trying to put this together to try to make sense out of this I was in my jacuzzi in the backyard my mother was over and she was weeding and doing things with you know plants she was pruning the plants what she likes to do and she was sitting on this three-legged stool this wooden stool and I'm saying I got this all this biological stuff I've got the genetics and I've got the brain pattern connect tones of a psychopath and yet I'm not what's the deal you know I have tendencies but I don't and I looked at the stool and I looked at and I said it's her she was the third leg now this may be obvious to you it's not obvious to me that the environment early environment would have played a role because I was like the poster boy for genetics determines everything so when I had to finally admit that I was wrong all my colleagues loved it I had to eat crawl on this which I hated to do but I really got that part wrong but it opened up another door and more interesting part about what epigenetics is really about it's not that the genes don't matter it's that they matter only in certain circumstances that's how it turns out so there are the the three sort of legs and a kind of a model that I put together about psychopathy and related personality disorders that biological markers and the you know the early environment upbringing from birth till about three or four it really goes down after that the effect and and in what abandonment is and stressors do and in fact we know that you know all the genes all the cells of you I have the same genes but they're turned on and off you know if you're making a hair cell it's different than if you're making a liver cell so these things are turned on and off and and and some of this turning on and off is by methylation the small methyl group a carbon with three hydrogen's added on and it can turn things temporarily on like when you get the flu and for immunity or I can turn them permanently on and that's what it looks like early abuse does in abandom in the first few years of life so those things that are normal and so if you look at Psychopaths and other personality disorders where it's associated with violence well it's not it's not inhuman to kill we you know if somebody is attacking your family you can kill them that's not but if you kill at the wrong time then it's considered you know a psychopathic trait a same thing with sex you know nothing wrong with sex but there's time and a place for it and and so it's this inappropriate behavior having to do with mostly aggression and manipulation and violence but it looks like those genes that control that in a kid who's been affected early on by by trauma that they get methylated and they stay permanently on so it's like the kids always being attacked there's always an attack and this makes a lot of sense because you you have a case where the child is born and the social brain opens up which is the frontal lobe especially the orbital cortex anterior temporal lobe and the amygdala that social brain opens up to the world and if it sees violence the best way to survive is to be violent yourself so you said you know it sets the trigger points probably I'm saying this like we really know there's data but you know whole story's not known and so you set that brain to be hair-trigger for violence and aggression but if you are born and you see into a wonderful world it's a wonderful world the best way to act is with love and that's you know and so those those genes are turned off and and you have somebody who's really quite mellow and quite nonviolent unless they have to be because they can still at the right time become aggressive they're protecting their family for example now I couldn't figure out what why it was that I didn't really show more of the traits of it and while I was writing the book I put this book on the Psychopaths inside I was over in Italy in this little town and the Alps and nobody spoke in English and everything and I I happen to get two papers when I was over there and it was about this gene that was one of the warrior genes it's a serotonin transporter it's called cert se RT and and there were a couple of these genes and it was if on paper was done in rhesus monkeys and then another one humans showing that if you had this gene and you were abused this was bad news it was like the mao-a the first warrior gene because it really affected serotonin metabolism and in quite a permanent way but it said that if you treated well it kind of negated the negative effects of it now this now this allele that was a warrior gene allele very dangerous if you're treated well it kind of not only turned off that that effect it inhibited other genes so I said this must been what happened so you know this this third leg of the stool it was like okay what's the percentage of kids who inherit these high-risk genes the cop like I did and you may come up with a few percent right of the population and on the other side people who inherit the other type the other alleles which are very peaceful mentioned than the mention alleles and so they're maybe 5% hardcore in either side and and but if you expand if we widen the gutters on this it could be 10% on either side and so then the question is how much does environment affect the kids at the protected end the answer is nothing not at all these are the kids that when they're growing up you can see them anything can happen to them they just bounce right up and there's happy as larks nothing gets to them and nothing sticks with them whereas the other type that's vulnerable they're the dangerous ones so there may be you know maybe 10% of the population where the nature-nurture answer is well if you have the right combination of genes and brain connection patterns then environments everything and these are the kids and families and that most at-risk and the public policy thing is you know how do you how do you identify those kids you know especially if you're a libertarian I'm a libertarian so the idea is people coming in and asking your family to see all the medical records bothers me it's not just you know and so this is where some of the conflict is because we know that identifying these kids early on just like the first guy I work with was a pediatric neurologist and back in the 70s and he told me back then he said I'm never going to tell anybody outside this room but he said I can tell a psychopath at the kid at 2 or 3 years old I know and and he would follow him their whole lives and he was right but he'd never admit it because he you know it's it's like a lot in science you don't want to really tell the truth it's just like let it go let it go and it could be anything could be climate change it could be anything and you just go along with the crowd because you don't want to end your career you don't want to answer questions from media or from angry parents your whole life you know brandishing sticks and stones and so he never said anything but so we do know how to identify these kids you know and again but it's up to the society to say do we really want to do that because you know in this sort of epigenetic landscape you know and you look on the left everything's nice and sweet on the right the same genes can be changed that sends you down a different Valley right and there are a couple of breakpoints along the way during development were depending on your especially early environment that the same genetic package can send you to a very successful career as a leader and I'll get to very quickly why people who are sent down the path to the left can be wired as Psychopaths and end up being great leaders and there's something different about it and and so if we if we we go back to the the the question about nature nurture and the answer is it depends you know it depends on their genetics and then you know the environment will have a differential effect either great effect or very little effect and then I you know just to finish this part of it I then ask the question what do you do with this in your personal life I had this information and so what I thought I'd do and I tried to use my own narcissism against me you know I became my own experiment I said look I know that you can't turn around a psychopath or borderline psychopath you can't did it it'll cure them no he's a record one and I said but I can do it I said I can do it because I'm different you see I really I mean this is how I talk to myself I really do it honestly so I can do it because I'm you know I'm just more powerful than the rest of them it's a sounds crack pop it and that's the way and so what I did was I I tried to treat my wife like a regular guy would so every day I would in every interaction whether it was you know washing dishes are pouring the wine to going to a funeral and I pop away from a lot of things that regular guys would go to and I'll find a way to get out of it to go party somewhere and so I I was monitoring every behavior turns out about 300 times a day when I was with these very simple things like pouring the wine first are cleaning up being a good roommate but also larger things that what I was doing was the most selfish thing at each choice point and it was and I never thought of it that way and I said that's not how regular guy would do it and it turned out after about a month I was so exhausted and it's really tough to be a good guy you know it's really a good nice gal it was so exhausting I went from sleeping like four hours a night to six seven hours a night I was so and it wasn't I was exercising which you know I hate I like fishing but I didn't that's about it and but the whole thing was so exhausting so after a couple of months my wife goes what's coming what's with you ice what do you mean she goes you're nice all of a sudden like a lot of thing and I told her I said don't take it seriously I'm just doing an experiment and I had to because she can read me I mean I can't lie to her anymore about anything it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah so I love you yeah yeah yeah how you know what we always thought and she in and she says and she said something so curious to me she goes I don't care if it's if it's sincere or not she says you're just treating me better and I said you just want me to treat you better I don't have to have it in my heart to you know because now I'm a Pooh you know it was like the big revelation people just like to be treated better okay that was the first big lesson yeah like 66 years old and I'm learning this I'm like a 14 year old right I'm learning these things like the environment hasn't affected anyway and so I I did that and then I did it with my other friends and they all did the same thing you know it's all like what's going on here and they kind of gave me the similar response so I was like learning about real human behavior and uh and so at the and I'm still trying to do it but I'm telling you I'm sleep on my life away because I'm just I fall in the bed I go god that's exhausting but I I really started to watch my friends especially my male friends my age with their kids and grandkids and and watch them when they didn't know anybody was watching the real behavior not trying to put on for somebody like with what a great father did or some they and I would just sneak peeks all the time and I realized that they were doing things that were so unselfish and I'm watching them I said I'd never do that and I'd be out at the corner bar at this move right here or that move I'd be doing this and that and and and I realized that a lot of my people I knew I didn't really know because they were really sacrificing so I had to learn these very fundamental things that are not natural to me and you know and when I sat down with the psychiatrist friends of mine I said what do you mean what do I do that's psychopathic and they went through you remember this thing which should remember this and it was this litany of stuff they said all those are psychopathic I said you're not a full-blown psychopath you're right at the edge but in a way I don't need it you know what I mean it's not like I grew up or or I didn't grow up needing anything and I was athletic and sort of good-looking at the time and and all this stuff and so I had a lot of friends I didn't need any of that stuff so whenever I'd see like a psychopath do something you know like lie or get you know kill or rape I said these guys are chumps you know that's not the real way to manipulate people so I do I just got really absolutely and that's how I used to think I'm I said there were such an easier way to manipulate that person and this and it's all about manipulation and not really caring about you know about that everybody is it's a game on everybody and that I do I do have and so the other thing is what do you know what do we do in my in my professional life because I was closing down my wet lab and really you know giving up my my tenure part of my job for you know somebody younger and everything that was nice they thought that was like I was just doing it so I can go fishing you know up and so I got together with two close friends Tom Stevenson and Fabien machardie we sat in the back with some steak from Texas and some Cabernet from California and started talking about this what how do we take this information and as we're sitting back there it's like what do you do when you get three buddies together and you want to get a plan to you know how are we going to you know change the world with this was the information can we commit to it and so we're going to call ourselves the three musketeers and my wife had another name for us but we decided on the global consortium so if you get three of your friends together we call yourself a global consortium and we went out for you know looking for projects and funds and the main thing the main thing we're looking at was this trans transgenerational epigenetic violence and how it's this this gift in quotes that keeps giving both in terms of terrorism but just the local street stuff and at homes to bullying and everything and and you know how to test them and how to understand the brain and how to predict it and all this stuff and so we looked at that so we had started with this idea of you know intragenic genetics which is personally what happens in your own life but then on the right it's how this is then passed down in generations not only because you have the same behaviors like you're mimicking the behaviors but their actual genetic marks that go on and this is known from for example a Swedish study and also from a Dutch study of famines and and so you know what happened to your grandfather your great-grandfather when they were a certain age like when they're five to nine years old it's called the growing period if they underwent a famine then you would grow up perhaps with high blood pressure and obesity you know in diabetes and so people were popping up that word said I shouldn't be fat I shouldn't be this it shouldn't be that well it looks like these things are passed not only jumping generations but two generations and one of the most striking things was the you know the the children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims they started to get the same nightmares that the people who have been through those experiences we're getting which means that the the predilection for the terrible nightmares from the Holocaust we're being transmitted that is we're affecting you know brain connections in brain chemistry and these are people that would never saw any awful things but it was being sent down the line so this is you know now we're starting to look at you know something like slavery if you look at its slavery hundreds of years of abuse right in deprivation and all sorts of stuff how that can really get into uh you know into the fiber of a large number of people and it could happen anywhere in the world the and so this became you know an issue one of the first things it got involved it I I went to the Sahara into the deep desert and was looking at nomads Berbers and betta was non Arabic and Arabic veterans and they they simulate in a certain way the the critical changeover point from hunter-gatherers the nomadic lifestyle to settling down we had different kind of war so they were kind of an early condition so I went there and interviewed them you'd see at the lower right kids are the same everywhere they're all over me driving me crazy I was trying to get saliva from them and tell stories and but anyway earlier they're very sweet and so we went through looking for all these different genes having to do with warlike characteristics and as it turned out the all-weather their Arabic or non Arabic and they had very little violence and and it turns out that their pattern of these warrior genes and things associated with violence and aggression they look just like Sicilians which could be good news or bad news you know it's a Pentagon and I and I was less REI when I found out that the the way they dealt with it I said well how do you deal with people who are ill behaved well they sent them down with an elder and then they let them fight first for a while for a few minutes and then whether the kids are adults and then they pass judgment and they never kill anybody there's no capital punishment they send you out into the desert which is kind of capital punishment but it's no direct killing and and in in there was still a part of the equation there that was off and after this experience of looking at the genetics I started to think and realize the importance of a harsh the harsh environment in a harsh environment in our evolution how this may have played into the amount of violence and I don't know if you've had Steve Pinker here's a friend of mine who talked about you know violence is going down people just don't believe that there's less and less violence then it depends on how you look at it but part of this was was really becoming interested in the overall issue of not only defense but war and I got contacted by Jack Pryor and areas with Bob scales and Jack's right here and he said you know very interested in studying the effect of you know the different genotypes and different brain patterns of young soldiers and to how to prevent a PTSD right and also how to not up regulate psychopathy when the troops come home and how to you know differentiate between different kinds of empathy within troops you know there's the Delta Force guy the lone the kind of the lone wolf which is a very different person than the you know the elbow to elbow infantry person who has a real kind of emotional empathy you know they're fighting for each other is you'll you know it's not about mom and apple pie so much is if they're fighting for each other very tight bond you don't find in that you would find in a Delta Force guy a lone hunter sniper type of person so very different and the idea is you know how do you get the right people in the right job well the first thing is that and I'll end it here there's so many interesting things about this that the first thing is that the brain the emotional part of the brain the limbic system and the dorsal stream these two are not in balance until you're about 25 years old for most people 24 25 26 and the first obvious thing is that you don't ever want to send anybody to Wars under 25 it's just asking for so much right I mean it's it's out sort of about a desperation but the I mean if you can have to have war you better wait to you have mature people that have been tested so they don't ruin their lives and come back and other their families lives so that's an important part of this but it's you know so we still haven't done all those things but you know another interesting part of it is that you talk with them you know Paul Zak talked about empathy but it turns out you can create warm fuzzies between these individuals but it also oxytocin sniffed by you know gangsters just make them better Liars for each other see it doesn't always end up like it's like lovey stuff but in society in terms of society it's not it may not be such a good thing they just make some better criminals together you know and they then they live for each other and I'll I'm halfway through my talk and there's a certain person who runs everything who's behind me I better stop and for questions but I you know I said there's a lot of bad news about all of this in terms of what it means for public policy and and behavior but that same guy Fabio majority will work with the geneticists and psychiatrists just found something pretty recently that showed that these epigenetic marks large scale in the cortex can be reversed which is so remarkable this means there's actual hope for reversing things like psychopathy this is the first data to show this so we're taking some of that information and I'm now working at the VAT with the Vatican the Vatican Arts Council and so let's try to look at the opposite of you know of psychopathy and violence which is for the Pope it's tenderness so we're trying to find two experiments of how to show exactly what you know in art and his message and all this stuff really is that is the key to reverse this you

Channel: Mind Science

Views: 91,877

Rating: 4.835309 out of 5

Keywords: consciousness, neuroscience, Mind Science Foundation, psychopathy, James Fallon, personal story, 3-legged stool, UC Irvine, Pearl Stable

Id: WSatsGU5UKQ

Length: 63min 11sec (3791 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ChapterImaginary1367]

It's nice to be reminded that not every psychopath is an edgy teen.

[u/vrcraftauthor]

I find it interesting that he was able to diagnose himself from a brain scan when I've read there's no conclusive diagnostic test.

[u/ThePhudSon]

Man, this guy hit a spot with me. What an informative speech.

[u/druggie19]

James Fallon life is like a movie tbh

[u/Dasvanina]

He score 20 on the pcl r

[u/HelloHalley123]

I think that not criminal psychopaths can be wonderful people sometimes