James Fallon - Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath

 

Now, I'm a scientist who studies the brain. I've been a neuroscientist for about 40 years. Most of that 40 years, I've been what's called a small-time scientist. I have a small lab, only a few people, small grants. Most scientists are like this. We're kind of hobbits. 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. If you mind your own business, everything will be okay. And that's really how I lived almost my entire scientific life.

 

Now, generally, I was a pretty average guy. I was class clown in high school, I still have my Teamsters card, which I can go back to at any time, hopefully. [audience laughter] The first date I ever had, we were both 12 years old. I'm still dating her 50 years later. So, quite an average, regular guy, seriously. So, anyway, 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.” The cool new machine was a PET scanner, positron emission tomography. 

 

The great thing about this is you're able to see inside the human brain, the living human brain, and activate certain areas of the brain depending on what people are doing, the tasks that they're doing. For a neuroanatomist, this is a candy dispenser. It was love at first sight. And so, I got involved. I made the first mistake of going outside my wheelhouse of expertise. But anyway, we started to do these studies on consciousness and memory, addiction, and also things like schizophrenia. That was going along fine. And then, a couple years after this started, which was the mid-1990s, I saw a SWAT team come in and they were all over the medical school. It was real, right near where the PET scanner is. 

 

I saw this guy come walking with manacles with police. And then, I got a call in the afternoon, from another colleague, he says, “You got to take a look at this.” They had started studies of serial killers. The idea was to go in, these are serial killers that had been caught. And during the penalty phase of the trial, only the penalty phase, they want to show that they're crazy, and the devil made me do it, so we could show that they were crazy, it would show up in their scans. So, I started analyzing these, maybe one or two a year. It was just a side thing. Everything was going along just fine. 

 

Then about six years ago, another colleague showed up with a whole pile of these and all these killers' brains, scans of these killers' brains. But it was mixed in with normal people, people with depression, schizophrenia. The good thing about this is I had no idea which scan belonged to which person or what they were. It was a blind study. And this was a perfect opportunity. This is 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. I started to create piles of different areas of the brain that seemed to be malfunctioning in these different people. 

 

About three-quarters of the way through, I noticed something. I said, first of all, I knew what all the normals were, and I knew the schizophrenics because I had seen a lot of those, and depressives. 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, and the front of the temporal lobe. This really floored me because it was-- It made sense, because one is kind of the animal-instinct control of your brain, amygdala, and the other is where ethics and morality are thought to be processed. The fact that these two were off meant the balance was off, and it made some sense. So, I really thought about this and did a lot of reading and developed a theory, three things you need to have a psychopathic killer's brain. I just started to give talks. It was just very interesting 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. It was for clinical trials. We were also trying to discover new genes for Alzheimer's and schizophrenia as it turned out. Now, it turns out my wife's family is loaded with Alzheimer's disease, and she just lost two parents with Alzheimer's. So, I said, “Lookit.” I went to her and I said, “Why don't we come in as the controls, get involved, we'll do PET scans, looking for the genes for what we knew for Alzheimer's. I'll get my brothers to come in and we'll do the kids. And then, if we can see that anybody has these high levels of these high-risk genes, maybe they can do something. They can change the way they live, their diet and all these things.” And she said, “Absolutely.” She was quite heroic about this. She figured she was going to die of something else, which she did, before she died of Alzheimer's. 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. As I was going through, I was really very much relieved, as everyone was normal. So, all the way through, there's eight of these, and the genetics were normal. I got to one on the bottom, and I thought it was in the wrong pile, because I also had all these killers' brains in another pile on the desk. [audience laughter] And I said, “I've mixed them up.” I looked at it, and it looked like the worst case of these psychopathic killers' brains. It had no activity here and here, the two areas. I looked down and it was me. It was my name. [audience laughter] I said, I get the joke here, because I've been giving these talks.

 

I really thought for a second, and I'm a scientist, it was like, “Isn't that interesting?” [audience laughter] I just reflected back, because I was 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. [audience laughter] I was so hyper-religious my whole life that in college, I went to a Catholic college, that a priest there, who 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. I learned. It took a while, because my heart wasn't in it, but you'd go through these steps. Okay. So, I laughed it off, because I knew that I wasn't in jail, I didn't kill anybody. 

 

Then it was at a barbecue. We had a family barbecue, the whole family there and the kids and everything. My mother comes over as she usually does, and she pulls me aside, she says, “I hear you've been giving talks about serial killers.” I saw a twinkle in her eye, 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.” [audience laughter] She 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 she says, “And check your scans very carefully.”

 

So, I went and I got the book, and I read it, and I'm going. And it was really wild. It's about the Cornells. 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 how these sorts of murder cases were handled back then. But then, at the end of the book, there were six more murderers in the same line, going from that family to me. And so, we had this whole family. And she loved this, because she had to put up her whole life with this thing about being Sicilian. [audience laughter] 

 

And her father lived out on the streets here-- When he came over from Sicily, he was about 12. Just a couple blocks from here, and he became a bootlegger. She went up to Lucky Luciano's place. So, she always got the Mafia thing, even though she wasn't. This was her chance to get even. [audience chuckles] So, anyway, that was fine. And then, within a year, I was invited to give a TED Talk. In a TED Talk, you got to talk about something interesting, important, funny, and all this, which is not that easy. So, I got desperate. This was a mistake. I told the first part of the story about my PET scans, and everybody's normal in my family but me, and this thing about these Cornells. So, I gave that talk. 

 

This was when TED was just starting to put these talks on YouTube. Somebody called me up, they said, "They just put your talk on YouTube, and it's got like 30,000 hits overnight." I went 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 of science came out, spent some time with us. I got a phone call from the executive producer, head writer of Criminal Minds, Simon Mirren. He says, "I got what you're talking about, man, transgenerational violence." He was fantastic, and they both were. It put the pressure on me, because I had, hanging out there, this family history and my PET scans, to look further into this.

 

So, I looked further into the genetics. I was trying to look for things generally, we did a very broad scan, but having to do with aggression and violence. All these genetics came back in my family. 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 were all cool. I looked at the last number, and there it was. And I looked at mine, and 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. There's a number of them. The first one is monoamine oxidase, and they control serotonin and some other transmitters. It got a little bit more serious.

 

So, I started to ask people, because-- also I saw in there, things having to do with bonding to people were just not right. The cuddling hormones, oxytocin, vasopressin, and testosterone. It hinted at something that may not be right. That's when I really took notice. So, next mistake I made is I went around asking everybody what they thought of me. [audience laughter] Now, my wife and I have been hanging out 50 years together. "What do you really think of me?" I said, "No, no, tell me, tell me." [audience laughter] I went down, asked my grandkids, our kids, and people really close to me, friends. And every one of them, including professionals, psychiatrists who knew me well, said, "We've always known you're kind of a sociopath." [audience chuckles] And I went, "What?" 

 

I was in 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. You're quite a disappointing person to be around." [audience laughter] At 60, you're not supposed to be finding this stuff out, it's like at 21, so you can fix it, because what are you going to do at 63. So, there it was. 

 

The very fact they all agreed, including the professionals I had known and worked with, they just said, "You're an interesting guy to be around." So, they tolerated it, because I'm fun and interesting generally. But emotionally, I don't have the empathy, apparently, bonding with people. I bond with strangers and world things. It's upside-down. There are actually genes that seem to be associated with these different kinds of empathy. Now, I heard this and after I heard all of it, I didn't care. [audience laughter] [audience applause] 

 

I really didn't care. It was kind of the proof that what they were saying was true. [audience laughter] I said, "That's interesting," but I really, and I truly, really don't care. [audience laughter] Now, it's gotten me to think about the nature of good and evil, and about free will, and other sorts of things that we hold near and dear to our humanity. I started thinking about psychopaths, because I also happen to score a little too high on the psychopath test. [audience laughter] Like that. It's exactly how I felt. [audience laughter] I'm not a full psychopath, I'm not a psychopath lite, what's called a pro-social or successful psychopath. [audience laughter] Sounds so charming. Anybody want to go out later, I'd be happy to be with you. [audience laughter] 

 

And so, I really started to think, there's a very constant number of these in all sorts of societies, that maybe society really needs psychopaths, because-- Do we really want our surgeons to be really empathetic when they're doing the surgery? Do we want somebody cold and calculated right on the money, right on the spot of doing a 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 [chuckles] and we want our investment people to really be heartfelt, or do we want them to just go out and make me some money, man? [audience laughter] 

 

When I think of it, I said, “Maybe we need that. We need this.” Sometimes it gets out of hand. But really, it got to me in the sense that everybody feels this way about me who are close to me. People who don't know me, they say, "No, that's not true," but people who know me said, "Yes, you've got it, man." [audience chuckles] And so, I figured, just recently, in the past two months, maybe if I just acted the part, even though 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, [audience chuckles] 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 friend. And so, that's where I am now. Thanks.