The bad kind of neurodiversity: Psychopathy

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Fascinating story about the nature of psychopaths and psychopathic behavior, describing the work of psychologist Robert Hare:

http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html

Three decades of these studies, by Hare and others, has confirmed that psychopaths' brains work differently from ours, especially when processing emotion and language. Hare once illustrated this for Nicole Kidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her prepare for a role as a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could she show the audience there was something fundamentally wrong with her character?

"I said, 'Here's a scene that you can use,' " Hare says. " 'You're walking down a street and there's an accident. A car has hit a child in the crosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child's lying on the ground and there's blood running all over the place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, "Oh s**t." You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you're not repelled or horrified. You're just interested. Then you look at the mother, and you're really fascinated by the mother, who's emoting, crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes you turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimicking the facial expressions of the mother.' " He then pauses and says, "That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened."

Hare's research upset a lot of people. Until the psychopath came into focus, it was possible to believe that bad people were just good people with bad parents or childhood trauma and that, with care, you could talk them back into being good. Hare's research suggested that some people behaved badly even when there had been no early trauma. Moreover, since psychopaths' brains were in fundamental ways different from ours, talking them into being like us might not be easy. Indeed, to this day, no one has found a way to do so.

The whole hare.org website is interesting, and deserves a bookmark.

Interesting. I was reading about this neuroscientist who discovered he was a psychopath on accident when studying brain scans of known psychopaths. He had him and his families mixed in because he was also studying some genetic problem. He was shocked when he discovered his brain matched that of a psychopath since he didn't act like a typical psychopath. I think psychopathy is on a spectrum.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 180947814/