UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE, CALIFORNIA

NOVEMBER 2018

I spent my days researching the brain science behind criminal deviance, and my nights transcribing my interviews with Sam. I couldn’t tell up from down, right from wrong, night from morning. It was fascinating and felt legitimately dangerous. I get a tic in my left eye when I’m exhausted or inordinately stressed. The tic increased both in frequency and intensity. My nightmares escalated.

I was relieved to be interviewing a scientist and not a killer on the day Dr. James Fallon greeted my research assistant Amaia and I with teddy-bear hugs at his home on the UC Irvine campus over a doormat that read COME BACK WITH A WARRANT. He ushered us to his kitchen table, set with a decadent charcuterie plate, from which he ate with abandon before he even sat down as he told gossipy stories. He didn’t bother to wait for questions.

Fallon is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists examining the potential neurological and genetic correlates of psychopathy. He talked about science in a way that made you feel smart. There was something both paternal and wild about him. I could have listened to him build castles in the air for days.

Fallon is not just a neuroscientist who studies deviance. While doing his graduate research, he discovered his PET scan was nearly identical to those of the violent offenders he’d been studying. After further inquiry, Fallon concluded he is indeed a dyed-in-the-wool psychopath. He chronicles this discovery and its aftermath in his excellent book The Psychopath Inside and his corresponding TED Talk.

Fallon is not a violent psychopath. Not all are.

He’s a brilliant, mesmerizing, and manipulative psycho just the same. He talked freely about it over wild boar sausage and bloodred sliced tomatoes, fresh from the garden.

We discussed the difference between a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and the colloquial use of “narcissism.” The colloquial use is the Kardashian selfie.

“A personality disorder is different. Somebody with NPD doesn’t know they’re narcissistic. Somebody narcissistic, just full of themselves, they kinda know it. Then there are narcissists like Muhammad Ali, who really are the best. So it’s just a fact. With any of these personality disorders, you have to find out this difference between having the trait and having the personality disorder.”

Fallon explained his famous three-legged stool analogy for the development of the adult psyche in relationship to psychopathy. I’ve cribbed this from his momentous book The Psychopath Inside. He continues to challenge and advance the field of neuroscience.

1. GENETICS

Essentially set in stone at birth. Big subject, but from the perspective of psychopathology, the MAOA or “warrior” gene is almost always present, often combined with predilections for addiction. Not everyone who has this gene will go on to kill. Environmental factors impact individual genes, changing and affecting how those genes are expressed. By modifying the activity of these genes, DNA itself is modified, although the DNA sequence remains unchanged. These are epigenetic changes, and they can be passed to future generations.

Genes are the basic function of heredity carved in stone, but epigenetic influences can be caused by a variety of environmental factors, including pollution, physical environment, diet, traumatic experiences. Unpredictable factors determine whether a gene is activated or not, thereby affecting the proteins produced in each cell. Shadowy genetic issues can lie in wait for generations.

2. NEUROLOGICAL

In the brains of psychopaths, Fallon’s neurological imaging showed deactivation in the anterior cingulate cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the amygdala—regions of the brain associated with many things, including serotonin and dopamine production.

There are two main types of neuroimaging: structural, which looks at the architecture of the brain and larger scale issues such as injuries or tumors, and functional, which looks at the way the information is processed and can reveal deficits in cognitive processing, or diagnose metabolic diseases.

The most prominent test, with the most exciting forensic possibilities, is the positron emission tomography (PET) scan, which uses a radioactive tracer drug to reveal the activity in brain tissue. The tracer is injected and then observed as it moves through the brain. It gathers in areas where chemical activity is occurring and shows up as bright spots on the imaging, helping to identify regions where disease may be present.

3. TRAUMA

Trauma, most specifically childhood abuse, affects the expression of genes linked to psychopathic behavior, as can a positive childhood environment. Someone like Fallon, with the genetic and even neurological predispositions for psychopathy, can go on to lead a relatively harmless life if they have a nurturing and supportive upbringing. Conversely, a person who suffers abuse from an early age—and was born with damage to the first two legs of the stool—is set up for a life of violent, psychopathic behaviors. Extra points for traumatic brain injury.

Fallon was not abused as a child. He claims that is why he is a scientist and not a murderer.

“But you know, I am related to Lizzie Borden,” he said. He clapped his hands together. “So now, epigenetics. You have cells in your nose and your teeth, and all these cells have basically the same genes but they look different. How does that happen? Some of the genes are turned off, some of the genes are turned on. There’s a selective turning on and off of the genes, by turning off and on the regulators called promoters. There are also insulators, and when they’re the regulators—we don’t have to jump there immediately… You are what your epigenome is. It’s all of those genes and a bunch are turned off and a bunch are really turned on and what comes out: the genes that are being expressed.”

Fallon’s adult daughter breezed into the kitchen from the garden, kissed her father on the forehead, and cleared a couple of dishes.

“Can we talk about the amygdala?” I asked.

“Ooh, I love the amygdala,” she said.

“I know you do!” he replied.

“Hang on,” she said. “I have some fig jam I just canned. I want to grab you a jar.”

Fallon turned to me.

“You too. I can tell. You and I have similar reactions to things. We tend to be addictive. We tend to be a little over the top. You inherited really high executive memory and genes. But then along with that, you got the traits of being highly anxious. Then you got knocked around. Right?”

Had I said that?

“Look,” Fallon said. He held out his hand. It trembled slightly. “Now yours.”

I dared to reach mine out for a New York minute. I summoned all the will I had to keep it steady.

“See?” he said with a mischievous glint. “See how you shake? You’re smart as hell, and you’re a nervous wreck, and you’re going to stay that way.”

With a shaking hand, he poured one cute little dish that said vinegar into one that said oil and dipped in a chunk of mozzarella.

“Would you like some cheese?”

“I would.”

I ate it from his hand.

The amygdala is one of two almond-shaped clusters of nuclei located within the temporal lobes of the brain, close to the brain stem. Reach behind your head and feel the ridges at the bottom of your skull. Buried somewhere under there lives your fear. I like to think of the amygdala as the basement into which no one wants to climb. At its best, the amygdala kicks into gear if you’re facing a lion on the savannah.

Research suggests the amygdala is overactive in people with anxiety disorders and underactive in psychopaths. Violent offenders often have severely diminished activity in both the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain—the centers of basic human emotion, empathy, and impulse control. But along with psychopathy, Fallon has a side dish of bipolar disorder. While his frontal lobe takes a nap, his amygdala hops all day. This, we shared.

I asked him what he thought about my aunt’s description of what it would feel like to be with Sam: he’s stealing the shirt off your back, you know he’s stealing the shirt off your back, he’s telling you he’s stealing the shirt off your back, and yet you feel inexplicably compelled to give him the shirt off your back.

Fallon went further. “He sees what you’re thinking before you do, because he doesn’t project, he barters. He’s not looking for his answer. He’s looking for an opening. He doesn’t get crushes. He covets.”

The amygdala is the seat of memory, decision-making, and emotional responses. It is the home of the familiar fight-or-flight response. This part of your brain is subject to fear conditioning, which occurs when a neural stimulus gives you a big enough scare that the reptile in you decides it’s safer to stay under a rock for good. Or at least always be checking your six.

In other words, get hit enough times, and you flinch at a hummingbird. In that way, my anxious brain functioned in the opposite way from Sam’s or Fallon’s. The parts of the brain do not function independently but are connected by an elaborate network of freeways. I’ve learned that when I become paralyzed by anxiety, I can coax my thoughts forward, out of the roadside ditches carved by trauma. Start with always forward. Look back and you’re in the limbic brain. Look back and you’re a pile of salt.

I play a game to engage my frontal lobe (reasoning, planning, speech). I make myself think of five movies that start with the letter W, five words with five syllables in them, or, if I need something easy, I do serial killers:

Five serial killers whose names start with D…

Dahmer

Dr. Death

David Berkowitz

DeAngelo

Dennis Rader

The point of the exercise is to pivot from lizard to logic brain.

Fallon was right. I was a nervous wreck. Five foods that start with the letter R. The first five American presidents.

“My purpose isn’t to psychoanalyze you,” said Fallon. “You need to understand this if you’re talking to a psychopath. I may analyze you, but it’s not my point.”

He paused. I didn’t bother to fill the silence. I felt sure he was about to answer the obvious question.

“My point is always to own you.”

There it was.

“Even if it’s for an hour or two. Everyone wants to talk scans, scans, scans. First thing you do is not get scans. You ask, ‘Why are they this way?’ That’s when the scans and the genetics come together. I get tired of saying you got it upside down. What we try to do first is a psychiatric analysis. But they don’t want that.”

“They want the fast answer,” I said.

“Right. Fast. And free.”

We both reached for the last mozzarella ball.

Robert Kennedy is quoted as saying, “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”

I live in a deeply divided city. I do not know if Samuel Little was the criminal we deserved.

I know he was the criminal we allowed.