CrimePsychopathic brains’ wiring leads to dangerous and violent actions

Published 7 July 2017

Researchers have found that psychopaths’ brains are wired in a way that leads them to over-value immediate rewards and neglect the future consequences of potentially dangerous or immoral actions. Psychopaths “are not aliens, they’re people who make bad decisions,” one researchers said. “The same kind of short-sighted, impulsive decision-making that we see in psychopathic individuals has also been noted in compulsive over-eaters and substance abusers.” Psychopaths are “exactly what you would expect from humans who have this particular kind of brain wiring dysfunction.”

Josh Buckholtz wants to change the way you think about psychopaths — and he’s willing to go to prison to do it.

An Associate Professor of Psychology, Buckholtz is the senior author of a study that relies on brain scans of nearly fifty prison inmates to help explain why psychopaths make poor decisions that often lead to violence or other anti-social behavior.

What they found, he said, is psychopath’s brains are wired in a way that leads them to over-value immediate rewards and neglect the future consequences of potentially dangerous or immoral actions. The study is described in a paper in Neuron.

For years, we have been focused on the idea that psychopaths are people who cannot generate emotion and that’s why they do all these terrible things,” Buckholtz said. “But what what we care about with psychopaths is not the feelings they have or don’t have, it’s the choices they make. Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims and astronomically costly to society as a whole.

And even though psychopaths are often portrayed as cold-blooded, almost alien predators, we have been showing that their emotional deficits may not actually be the primary driver of these bad choices. Because it’s the choices of psychopaths that cause so much trouble, we’ve been trying to understand what goes on in their brains when the make decisions that involve trade-offs between the costs and benefits of action.,” he continued. “In this most recent paper…we are able to look at brain-based measures of reward and value and the communication between different brain regions that are involved in decision making.”

Harvard notes that obtaining the scans used in the study, however, was no easy feat — where most studies face an uphill battle in bringing subjects into the lab, Buckholtz’s challenge was in bringing the scanner to his subjects.

The solution came in form of a “mobile” scanner — typically used for cancer screenings in rural areas — that came packed in the trailer of a tractor trailer. After trucking the equipment to a two medium-security prisons in Wisconsin, the team — which included collaborators at the University of Wisconin-Madison and University of New Mexico — would spend days calibrating the scanner, and then work to scan as many volunteers as possible as quickly as possible.