The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (18 page)

There are other brain disorders that diminish the ability to empathize that provide insight on sociopathy like Leon's. Most notable is autism and its less severe form, Asperger's syndrome, both of which appear to be strongly genetically influenced. About one-third of autistic children never learn to speak and all of them tend to isolate themselves from others and focus more on objects than on people. They don't usually engage in imaginative play and have great difficulty forming and understanding relationships. The condition is often accompanied by sensory integration problems and sensory oversensitivities, such as being unable to tolerate “itchy” fabrics and being overwhelmed by loud noises or bright lights. Autistic children have repetitive behaviors like rocking and odd obsessions, typically with moving objects—for example, trains or the wheels on toy cars. Some autistic people are highly talented at math or drawing, and most develop focused interests in particular objects or ideas. People with Asperger's have greater abilities to connect with others and function in the world than those with more severe forms of autism, but their obsessions and inability to read social cues often keep them isolated. Their poor social skills can also make it hard for them to get or keep a job, although in some cases their mathematical and engineering abilities more than compensate for their awkwardness. Many children tagged as “geeks” or “nerds” because of their inability to relate to their peers may have Asperger's syndrome or come close to meeting the criteria for its diagnosis.

In order to function socially people need to develop what is known as a “theory of mind.” They need to know, in other words, that other
people are distinct from them, have different knowledge about the world and have different desires and interests. In autism this distinction is blurred. One reason autistic children may not talk is that they don't recognize the need to communicate; they aren't aware that other people don't know what they know. In one famous experiment, researchers put a pencil in a tube that ordinarily held candy and asked autistic children what someone outside the room would expect to find in it. Normal and even Down syndrome preschoolers said candy. But the autistic children insisted that others would expect the pencil, not realizing that people who hadn't seen the candy removed would think it was still there. The children knew the candy was gone, so their logical assumption was that everyone else must know, too. (The brain regions involved in coding “theory of mind” are believed to be in the left medial frontal cortex, just over the eyes.)

Unlike sociopaths like Leon, however, autistic people, although often odd, do not tend toward violence or crime despite their inability to empathize and recognize, for example, that ignoring someone might be hurtful to him. Their lack of empathy is conceptual. Autistic people may often be insensitive to the feelings and needs of others, but this is because they cannot fully perceive these feelings, not because they wish to cause harm or to be unkind. They have the capacity to love and feel emotional pain, but not the wiring that allows them to fully understand how to interact and have relationships. They lack empathy in that they have difficulty imagining what it's like to be in someone else's shoes—sometimes called “mind-blindness”—but they do not lack sympathy for those people's experiences when they become aware of them.

Sociopaths like Leon are different. Their inability to empathize is a difficulty with mirroring the feelings of others coupled with a lack of compassion for them. In other words, they not only don't completely recognize what other people feel, but they don't care if they hurt them or they even actively desire to do so. They can imagine walking in someone else's shoes, and they can predict how other people will behave based upon this ability to put themselves in someone else's place, but they
don't care what it's like there. Their only concern is how others will affect them.

In essence, they have a “theory of mind,” but it is twisted. Not being able to fully experience love, they see it as something you promise in order to get sex, for example, not as a genuine feeling. Because they use other people's feelings as a way to manipulate them, sociopaths assume that's what everyone else does, too. Not feeling pleasure from relationships, they don't believe others genuinely feel it, either. Since they are selfish, they believe others act only in their own self-interest as well. As a result, they dismiss appeals for attention or mercy as manipulative attempts to take power, not as genuine emotional pleas. They are emotionally frozen, in an ice that distorts not only their own feelings, but also how they see the feelings of others and then respond to them.

 

UNSURPRISINGLY, RESEARCH HAS now identified that some of the chemical correlates of sociopathy can be found in some the same neurotransmitter systems that compose our stress response systems: alterations in serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine systems have been implicated in aggressive, violent or antisocial behavior. Young people exhibiting antisocial traits and callous behavior tend to have abnormal levels of the stress hormone cortisol (which can be measured in a saliva test). Sociopaths are notorious for being able to fool lie detector tests, which actually measure physical responses related to anxiety and stress, not deception. It appears that their stress systems—either because they were placed on overdrive due to early trauma or because of genetic vulnerability or, most likely, some combination of both—are dysregulated, no longer responsive to anything except extreme stimulation. This makes them appear “cold” and unemotional and allows them to lie with impunity, as they do not show the signs of fear of detection that tend to give others away. It may also mean that far higher levels of painful or pleasurable stimulation are necessary in order for them to feel anything at all. Unlike people whose response to trauma is to get stuck in a highly sensitized state in which any stress at all triggers
a massive response, sociopaths' systems appear to have gotten stuck at the other end of the spectrum, in deadening—and sometimes deadly—numbness.

While preparing my testimony, I thought hard about what I would say about Leon and what I believed about his own responsibility for his actions. Why did he kill? Why does anyone kill? Are these even the right questions? Maybe, I thought, I should try to understand what keeps the rest of us from killing, what didn't put the brakes on Leon's behavior. How exactly had things gone so wrong for this boy? How had he forged his misfortune, neglect and trauma into hate—or did those things forge him entirely?

He was unquestionably guilty and did not meet the legal definition of insanity, which requires that a person be unable to tell right from wrong. Leon knew that murder was against that law and that it was reprehensible; he'd admitted it and he did not have any diagnosable mental illness that would impair his moral reasoning.

He met criteria for attention deficit disorder and conduct disorder during most of his childhood and youth. As an adult, Leon certainly fit the profile for both ADHD and ASPD, but those diagnoses, which simply describe symptoms like defiance, callous behavior and an inability to focus attention, do not imply mental clouding that would overwhelm one's ability to know that killing and raping people is not acceptable. These disorders involve decreased impulse control, but impaired impulse control does not mean complete lack of free will.

But what about Leon's inability to give and receive love? Can we blame him for having a childhood that wilted the part of his brain that allows him to feel the greatest joys most of us have in life: the pain and pleasure of human connection? Of course not. He is responsible, I believe, for his reactions to his vulnerabilities. Virginia and Laura struggled with similar problems, but they did not become violent people, let alone murderers.

One might argue that this difference in outcome is due to gender and, indeed, male gender is the biggest predictor of violent behavior. Male
murderers outnumber females by at least nine to one, though it appears that very recently, women have begun to close the gap. Nonetheless, throughout history, in every culture and even in most species, male violence predominates. Among our closest evolutionary cousins, the chimps, it is the males who make war on others, the males who are prone to use force. Yet I'd treated other adolescent boys with far worse histories of neglect, abuse and abandonment, and far fewer opportunities for love and affection than Leon had. Some had literally been raised in cages with no loving family at all, unlike Leon who had two parents and a brother, and who was neglected out of ignorance, not malice. Most of these boys who I'd treated grew up awkward and lonely, many were severely mentally ill, but the vast majority were not malign.

What about genetics? Could that explain Leon's behavior? Disadvantageous genetics combined with a less-than-ideal environment was likely a factor in how he was raised and who he became. If Leon had had an easier temperament, for example, Maria might not have been so overwhelmed by his needs; if Maria had been more intelligent, she might have discovered better ways to cope with her challenging baby.

But what I think happened in Leon's life was an escalation of small, in-themselves-inconsequential negative decisions made by him and for him that gradually led to a horrendous outcome for his victims, his family and himself. You may have heard of the “butterfly effect”: the idea that complex systems—most famously, that which determines the earth's weather—are extraordinarily sensitive to minor fluctuations at certain critical points. Such systems are so responsive to tiny perturbations that, as the example goes, if a butterfly flutters its wings at the wrong instant in Brazil, it can trigger a series of events that may ultimately result in a tornado that devastates a small Texas town. The human brain, the ultimate complex system—in fact, the most complicated object in the known universe—is equally vulnerable to a version of the butterfly effect.

This might also be called a “snowball effect”: when things go right early on, they will tend to continue to go right and even to self-correct if
there are minor problems. But when they go wrong at first, they will tend to continue to go wrong.

This effect is literally built into the architecture of our brains and bodies. For example, it is a tiny chemical gradient that determines which of our early cells will become skin, which will become brain and which will become bone, heart and bowel. Other extremely tiny differences tell one neuron to become part of the cerebellum, another to become cerebrum and similar slight differences in position and in concentration of certain chemicals determine which cells live and which will die.

We don't have nearly enough genes to begin to determine the location or even the type of every cell: there are just 30,000 for the whole body and yet the brain alone has 100 billion nerve cells (and ten supporting glial cells for each of those). Each one of those billions of neurons makes between 5,000 and 10,000 connections, producing extraordinarily complex networks. Our bodies and especially our brains are built to magnify practically imperceptible initial incongruities into massively differentiated results. And this, in turn, allows us to respond to the complicated social and physical environment that we face.

So, while for most babies, being born colicky does little more than frustrate their parents, for Leon it overwhelmed his mother's already limited emotional resources. Without the presence of her extended family there was no one to hand him off to when she was at her wit's end, as there had been with Frank. Abandoning her infant during the day, she left him without the critical input he needed to soothe and, ultimately, organize his already slightly dysregulated stress response systems, making them even more chaotic and disorganized.

This, in turn, left Leon alternately clingy and aggressive, hampering his social skills, which could potentially have allowed him to elicit the warmth and care he needed from elsewhere. It also further alienated him from his parents and created a cycle of misbehavior, punishment and increasing rage and distress. Then he was placed with a negative peer group, from preschool onwards, which further magnified the harm.

Surrounded by normal peers, he might have found people who could reach out to him, who might have offered him healthy friendships that could have led him away from antisocial behavior. But in the company of other angry, distressed and needy children, and additionally stigmatized by the labels applied to them, he instead became more distressed and out of control, leading him to react with escalating impulsivity and aggression.

At no one point did Leon make a conscious decision to become malevolent, but each small choice he or his family made pushed him further toward sociopathy, and each consequence of those choices made further negative choices increasingly likely. There were numerous forks in the road where different circumstances might have led Leon to become a better person, where better choices could have led to the start of a virtuous—not vicious—cycle. But unfortunately, he rejected every opportunity to turn away from his rage and impulsivity, and at none of those crossroads did he receive the appropriate help and support he needed from other people to pull him from the rut in which he'd become stuck.

The brain is built—our selves are built—from millions of tiny decisions—some conscious, most not. Seemingly irrelevant choices can result in tremendously different later outcomes. Timing is everything. We don't know when the smallest choice, or “stimuli,” will push a developing brain onto the path of genius, or onto the highway to hell. I want to stress that this doesn't mean that parents have to be perfect. But it's important to know that young children are extraordinarily susceptible to the spiraling consequences of the choices we—and later they—make, for good and for ill.

Fortunately, the virtuous cycle is every bit as cascading and self-amplifying as the vicious cycle. A word of praise at just the right time, for example, can lead a child with a moderate interest in art to become more passionate about it. That intensity can escalate, leading him to develop greater skill, receive more praise and, ultimately, build into his brain artistic genius, where once there may only have been modest potential.
Some recent research emphasizes the power of this effect in sports. Half of England's elite young soccer players on the teams that feed their professional leagues are born in the first three months of the year. The rest are equally distributed among the other months. Why should this be? Well, all youth teams have age cutoffs; if you are born earlier in the year, you are likely to be more physically mature, more skilled and receive more rewards for your competence than those who are born later in that group. The pleasure of reward leads to more practice; we gravitate toward our competence. And, in the positive feedback cycle within the virtuous cycle, practice creates skill, skill attracts reward and reward fuels practice. This small difference, enhanced over time by practice, leads to a huge difference, giving the earlier-born players a far better chance of making the cut by the time they reach the pros. These positive spirals are hard to predict, however. We just don't know when the butterfly will billow its tiny breeze into a hurricane.