The Moth: Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath - James Fallon

ladies and gentlemen James Fallon I'm a scientist who studies the brain and I've been a neuroscientist for about 40 years and most of that 40 years I've been what's called a small-time scientist at a small lab only a few people small grants and most scientists are like this we're kind of hobbits and the whole idea of being a hobbit is that you stay within the wheelhouse of your expertise you don't talk to the media you don't give talks like this and you just stay under the radar for everything and if you mind your own business everything will be okay and that's really how I live my almost my entire scientific life now generally up I was like a pretty average guy I was class clown in high school I still have my Teamsters card which I can go back to it any time hopefully and the first date I ever had we were both 12 years old I'm still dating her 50 years later so quite an act you know an average regular guy seriously and so anyway the part of the kind of science I was doing which is the basic chemistry connections of the brain and also adult stem cells that was going along just fine and then I got a call from some colleagues in psychiatry and radiology and they said you got to come over here we got a really cool new machine and the cool new machine was a PET scanner positron emission tomography and the great thing about this is you're able to see inside the human brain the living human brain and activates certain areas of the brain depending on what people are doing the tasks that you're doing and so I mean for neuroanatomist this is a candy dispenser and it was love at first sight and so I got involved that you know I made the first mistake of going outside my wheelhouse of expertise but anyways we started to do these studies on consciousness and memory addiction and also things like schizophrenia and that was going along and then a couple years after the starter which was kind of mid 90s I saw a SWAT team commit and they were all over the medical school and it was real Brittany where the PET scanner is and I saw this guy come walking in with manacles with police and then I got a call in the afternoon he said from another colleague II says you got to take a look at this and they had started Studies of serial killers and the idea was to go in these are serial sediment caught and during the penalty phase of the trial only the penalty phase they want to show that they're crazy right and the devil made me do it so if we they we could show that they were crazy would show up in their scan so I started analyzing these maybe one or two a year there was just kind of a side thing and everything was going along just fine then that's six years ago another colleague showed up with the whole pile of these and all these killers brains scans these killers brains but it was mixed in with normal people people with depression and schizophrenia and the good thing about this is I had no idea which scan belong to which person or what they were was a blind study and this was a perfect opportunity and missus really advantageous because it's so difficult with the legal system to get this kind of data so I went through and spent a few months looking at it and I was started to create piles of different areas of the brain that seemed to be malfunctioning in these different people about 3/4 of the way through I noticed something I've said first of all I don't know well but all the normals were and I knew the schizophrenic scuzz I had seen a lot of those and depresses there's a whole other group that had a mix of damage but they all had one thing in common they had damage to two parts of the brain one was the area right above the eyes orbital cortex in the front of the temporal lobe and this really Ford me because it was it made sense because one is kind of the animal instinct control your brain mcdhh Allah and the other is lyrics and morality or thought to be processed and the fact that these two were off meant their balance was off and it made some sense so I really thought about this did a lot of reading and developed the theory you know three things you need for to have a psychopathic killers brain I just started to give talks it was just very to me about the same time funny things started to happen and the first was we were doing an Alzheimer's disease study in our lab those for clinical trials we're also trying to discover new genes for schizophrenia for Alzheimer's in schizophrenia has turned out now it turns out my wife's family loaded with Alzheimer's disease and she just lost two parents with Alzheimer's so I said look at it I went to her and I said why don't we come in as the controls get involved we'll do PET scans look for genes for what we knew for Alzheimer's and we'll do I'll get my brother's to come in and we'll do the kids and then if we can see that you know anybody has these you know high level of these high risk genes maybe they can do something and they can change the way they live their diet and all these things and she said absolutely I mean she was quite heroic about this and she figured she was going to die something else she didn't before she you know died of Alzheimer's so she's that so we did this everybody was enthusiastic so the results came back and so I was going through the pile of my family's PET scans and as I was going through I was gone you know I was really very much relieved as everyone was normal sewn all the way through this I ate it these and the genetics were normal and I got to one on the bottom and I thought it was in the wrong pile because I also had all these killers brains and another pile on the desk and I said I've mixed them up and I looked at it and it looked like the worst case of these you know psychopathic killers brains and at no activity here and here the two areas and I looked down and it was me it was my name so I kind of thought I said I kind of get the joke here cuz I given these talks so and here you know I you know I really thought for a second I'm a scientist was like isn't that interesting em and I just reflected back because I was you know growing up in New York I was Catholic boy of the year in New York which got me to meet Nelson Rockefeller I don't know why those go together and and you know I was so hyper religious my whole life that in college I went to a Catholic college that a priest there was a professor said you're so bad you got to get out so he actually gave me an exorcism to get the goody two-shoes out of me I had no idea how to sin really and I learned it took a while because my heart wasn't in it didn't so you'd go through these steps okay now so I kind of laughed it off because I knew that I was in jail I didn't kill anybody then I was at a barbecue we had a family barbecue the whole family and the kids and everything my mother comes over you know she's she usually does and she pulls me aside she says you know I hear you've been given talks about serial killers and I saw a twinkle in her eye you know because she's really even if she's in her 90s it seems to be getting worse she's very devilish about this she says check your father's family out somebody said your cousin who's an editor of a paper in New York found this new book and it's about your father's family and he says and check your scans very carefully so I went I got the book and I read it and I'm going and it was really wild it's about the Cornell's who was Mike that's my father's family and in it was the case of the first case of matricide which is the killing of a mother by a son and that was in 1667 so it was a very interesting book on it you know how these these sorts of murder cases were handled back then but then at the end of the book there were there was six more murderers in the same land going from that family to me as we have this whole family and she loved this because she had to put up the whole life with this thing about being Sicilian you know and her father you know lived out of the streets here when he came over from Sicily he was about 12 just a couple blocks from here and he had you know he had became a bootlegger and she went up to lucky Luciano's place so she was given the Mafia thing even though she wasn't this was her chance to get even so anyway that was fine and then it was within a year I was invited to give a TED talk in a TED talk you got to talk about some interesting important funny and wellis which is not that easy so I got desperate and I did and this was a mistake and I told the first part of the story about my PET scans and everybody's normal my family but me and this thing about these Cornell's so I gave that talk and within and this was when Ted was just starting to put these talks on YouTube somebody called me up I said they just put your talk on YouTube and it's got like 30,000 hits overnight and and I mean you know and I went kind of blank on this because I made the first no-no about being a Hobbit scientist which is doing something like that so anyway I got all these calls a lot of media things head writer for The Wall Street Journal science came out and spent some time with us I got a phone call from the executive producer head writer of Criminal Minds Simon Mirren is I got what you're talking about man trans generally transgenerational violence and he was fantastic and they both were it kind of put the pressure on me because I had hanging out there this family history of my PET scans to look further into this so I look further into the genetics and I was trying to look for things generally we did a very broad scan but having to do with aggression and violence and all these genetics came back in my family and I can tell you this because every one of them have an average amount of high and low risk genes for aggression and violence and so they're all cool and I looked at the last number and there it was and I looked at mine and I in my own DNA I had all the high risk alleles for violence and aggression every one of them and so these so-called warrior genes and there's a number of them the first one is monoamine oxidase and they control serotonin and some transmitters and and so this it had a little bit more serious so I started to ask people because I also I saw in there things having to do with bonding to people we're just not right you know the cuddling sort of hormones act oxytocin vasopressin and testosterone it hinted it something may not be right that's what I really took notice so next mistake I made is I went around asking everybody what they thought of me now my wife Minh I've been hanging out yeah fifty years together what do you really think max oh no no tell me tell me I went that yes my grandkids might hit our kids and people are really close to my friends and everyone of them including professionals psychiatrists who know me well said we've always known you're kind of a sociopath and I went what what I said you know and I was in sort of a denial at that point every one of them said you don't connect to people you're kind of cold and you're kind of superficially glib and you're great at parties and you love strangers and you love world peace and hunger and doing all these things generally but in terms of being the person really close to you your mother wife and other people very close it ain't such a fun ride that was quite a disappointing person to be around and then yeah there's a you know it's 63 you're not supposed to be finding this stuff out so I get 21 you know if they can fix it is what you're going to do it 63 so there it was and you know the very fact they all agreed including the professionals I had known and work with they just said you're an interesting guy to be around so they kind of tolerate it because I'm fun and interesting generally but emotionally I don't have the kind of empathy apparently bonding with people I buy with strangers on strangers and world things it's upside so I looked and there actually genes that seem to be associated with these different kinds of empathy now I heard this in after I hurt all it I didn't care and I really didn't care I went and it was kind of the proof that what they were saying was true also that's interesting but I really and truly really don't care now it's got me to think about you know that nature is good and evil and about freewill and other sorts of things that we hold near and dear to our humanity and I started thinking about Psychopaths because I also happen to score a little too high on the psychopathy test like that that's exactly how I felt it not a matter full psychopath and a psychopath light what's called a pro-social or successful psychopath sounds so charmese did anybody want to go out later at happy to be with you and and so and I really started to think we know there's a very constant number of these in all sorts of societies that maybe society really needs Psychopaths because I mean do we really want our surgeons to be really empathetic when they're doing the surgery do want somebody cold and calculated right on the money right on the spot of doing good surgery do we want our Green Berets to really be empathetic where they go or do we want them to protect us and do we want our CEOs and we've got our investment people to really be you know heartfelt or they want a missus go out make me some money man and when I think of it I said well maybe we need them we need this and sometimes it gets out of hand but really it kind of got to me in the sense that everybody feels this way about me you're close to me people don't know me they said no that's not true but people know said yes you've got it man and so I figured just recently in the past two months maybe if I just acted the part even though if I don't feel it at an emotional level so if I treated the people close to me with kind of caring kind of civil go to all the funerals and weddings instead of the parties if I started doing those things maybe just acting them out would be a good place to start just to be a good companion and a good and and so that's where I am now thanks you

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 115,318

Rating: 4.911828 out of 5

Keywords: The Moth, Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath, James Fallon, Neuroscientist, brain scanner, breaking both rules, hobbit scientist, New York, world, science, festival, NYC, New York City, 2011

Id: fzqn6Z_Iss0

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 21 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Trumax]

That was really interesting.