.
Quite possibly medicated. I was drawn to
this article from Medical News Today about the psychopathic brain. Edit: I hesitate to share scientific perspectives on evil here, but hope knowledge/intervention will save lives.
Very interesting, thank you.
I might disagree with one thing. When one does studies on prison inmates, he assumes that people were exactly like this before incarceration. How can we be sure that certain changes of the brain are not the result of incarceration? After the last case in Fulton jail, I am wondering if dampening of empathy may be the mechanism the brain utilizes to protect itself from severe PTSD.
On the other hand, I always believed that "today's reward, even at a loss" is how ADHD brain works (if the reward is 2 dollars paid every day, for a month, or a 100 dollars paid at the end of the month, when does a child with ADHD show more consistent work?). And in this article they mention the prevalence of attentional deficits among psychopaths.
I 100% subscribe to the author's mentioning the role of reward, and not only financial, verbal, too. In fact, I believe that frequent financial reinforcement can help raise kids with better work ethics, while...maybe reminding of certain necessary things daily might eventually register. (All of us know that if an ADHD child forgets to brush the teeth, lengthy lectures about dental caries don't work. However, just saying "go brush your teeth" every evening might eventually turn it into a habit.) I wonder if simply saying "call Sam and say, I am sorry that you cat died" might work better with psychopaths. (In general, making people say or write something engages the control centers of the brain.) From the article it follows that our commonest way of "empathy training", saying "put yourself in Sam's shoes", does not work with psychopaths because their "mirror neurons" are not connected right? Rephrasing like "if your cat died, you'd feel better if your friend called you" might drive the message home. (In this regard, one wonders what is the right way to respond to "I'll kill her" and "I bought a gun" in terms of prevention? From the article, it sounds like the simple one, reminding of the disadvantage of being caught, might work better for the psychopaths? Rather than all our talks about morality? Maybe even better, make ask them what is the drawback of killing someone? If they say, "I might get caught", their control centers, hopefully, could activate?)
From this standpoint, I think Kaitlin's affect in court is understood. She can not imagine how Mo's parents feel. She can't even understand her own parents nor the sister. She just realized she might end up in jail, and she is scared and grieving for herself. I now understand why yoga did nothing for her. Karma is the concept where the punishment is exceptionally distanced from the action, in a convoluted way. Basically, it works when "you" is different. IMHO, psychopaths can not register it.