The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (17 page)

Trudy was laughing a bit at Shock Richie’s antics. Everyone was amped up that morning, and the little joke Richie had played eased the tension in the air.

We sat down at the MRI console and started our brain imaging protocol. We talked to Richie using the intercom system; he was ready to go.

The MRI started its familiar beeping as the magnetic fields collided and the radio waves flipped protons about. After a few minutes, the first images of a criminal psychopath’s brain materialized on the computer screen.

I stared at that image, anticipating there was going to be some huge hole in Shock Richie’s brain. Dr. Forster appeared over my shoulder and studied the image with me. He reached past me and
flicked the dials, and the image spun through a whole series of slices of the brain from top to bottom, then left to right. I directed all my attention to making sure Shock Richie wasn’t climbing out of the MRI and trying to escape. Fortunately, we could see Shock Richie the entire time from our vantage point in the MRI control room, and there was only one way in and out of the room.

Dr. Forster said Shock Richie’s brain looked pretty normal. The guard sighed in disbelief.

I knew Dr. Forster’s assessment meant that Shock Richie’s psychopathic behavior wasn’t going to be explained by some tumor or other gross brain abnormality. The computer algorithms were going to have to analyze his brain very carefully.

To his credit, Shock Richie did everything that he was asked to do. He performed all the tasks well, didn’t move his head much, and the images looked great. As he was removed from the MRI, he sauntered over and had a seat in the chair of the MRI control room. The guard applied his leg and wrist shackles.

I let Shock Richie have a look at his brain on the computer screen.

“Surprised it’s in there?” I asked.

“Yes, but not shocked,” replied a smiling Richie. “Happy to see something in there. You’ll let me know if I have the best brain of the bunch, won’t you?”

He smirked and looked at me with those empty eyes.

I had to figure out what was different about Shock Richie’s brain, what was behind that cold, flat, unemotional look in his eyes.

The rest of the day went smoothly. Each of the remaining inmates got scanned, and none squeezed the emergency ball. I gave each inmate a printed picture of his brain. The inmates compared them to one another like little kids. Shock Richie told the rest of the inmates that his brain was the best. He pointed to his thick corpus callosum and highlighted it for the rest of the inmates. I had given the inmates a quick anatomy lesson as I handed out their pictures. Richie had discovered that the fiber bridge that connects the two hemispheres of the brain together, known as the
corpus callosum
, was unusually thick in his picture.

The Regional Escort Team and inmates alike made jokes about Richie’s dense brain structure for the rest of the day. We fed everyone
pizza for lunch, and the caravan departed just before 3 p.m. after a highly successful scan session.

As I watched the armored truck creep up the little brick road on its way back to prison, I felt the adrenaline rush that had lasted the entire day start to subside. My body was telling me I didn’t have much left in the tank, but I wanted to get the computers cranking on processing and backing up all the brain data.

Retreating to the laboratory, I initiated a script I had coded to analyze the data overnight, and then I walked to the parking lot to head home.

Over the course of the next couple of years, we arranged ten more MRI sessions, scanning over fifty maximum-security inmates. Each of the visits went well, with only minor complications. I gratefully acknowledge the efforts of the Regional Escort Team and the rest of the Canadian Department of Corrections, the University Hospital staff, and especially the MRI technologists and my fellow lab members.

In the two years prior to scanning Shock Richie, we developed the tasks that we would use to examine brain dysfunction in psychopaths. In particular, we wanted to develop tasks that engaged the limbic system in the brain, the system mostly associated with emotional processing. Given the profound deficits in emotional behavior that typify psychopaths, we were primarily interested in probing that system with our first brain imaging studies.

The parts of the limbic system we were most interested in included the little almond-shaped region known as the
amygdala
. I call it the brain’s little amplifier. The amygdala was hypothesized to be a critical node of impairment in psychopaths. Other critical areas we scanned included the anterior and posterior parts of the cingulate cortex, regions believed to be related to attending to emotional parts of language and other stimuli.

My favorite task that emerged from our pilot studies was an emotional memory paradigm. In this task, participants are asked to memorize a list of twelve words, presented one at a time on the screen. The
encoding phase
was followed by a twenty-second
rehearse phase
where participants ruminate on the words just presented. Then a
test phase
is given where twelve words are presented, again one at a time. Half the words in the
test phase
are from the prior
encoding phase
, and the other half are new words that participants have not seen before. Using a button box, participants have to indicate whether the word is from the previous list or not. About twelve different lists are presented over the course of about fifteen minutes.

What we did not tell the subjects was that the lists were composed of either emotional or neutral words. Examples of emotional words were things like “hate,” “kill,” or “death.” Neutral words included words like “table,” “chair,” or “leg.” We found that normal people recall emotional words better than neutral words, and that the amygdala and anterior and posterior cingulate are more engaged when processing emotional words than when processing neutral words. It’s amazing what fMRI can show you about how the brain works.

I stared at the huge computer monitor as the little red bar slowly climbed to the top of the graph, indicating that the data analysis was nearing 100 percent completion. I had just about finished processing the first study comparing psychopaths and nonpsychopaths on the emotional memory task. It had taken four prison transports to collect enough inmates for the study. I had spent hours making sure that the data were perfect, performing all the postprocessing steps for optimized analyses. I’d had to exclude a few inmates because they moved their heads too much, which made the images too blurry to analyze. I’d double- and triple-checked all the output to make sure the results about to pop on the screen were valid.

I sat there sipping my coffee and waiting. It seemed to take forever for the bar to climb to the top and hit that last mark.

Finally,
Finished
popped up on the top of the screen. I jumped on the keyboard and typed in the comparison I wanted to view.

Where do psychopaths’ brains show deficits in emotional processing?

The computer started to hum as the rendering of brain results strained the processor and memory capacities of the Sun workstation. As the image of the first ever results of a brain imaging study of criminal psychopaths started to appear, I thought about the road it took to get here: all the days and weekends spent in prison, all the commutes back and forth, all the interviews with inmates, all the meetings with administrators from the University Hospital and the Canadian Department of Corrections, all the planning, all the years.

The screen filled with a large image depicting four views of the brain, with blue colors indicating where psychopaths showed deficits in emotional processing. It took my breath away.

The amygdala and the anterior and posterior cingulate were lit up in bright blue—meaning that they were less active in psychopaths than in nonpsychopaths.

It was one of those rare times in academic life that a research plan came together perfectly. Psychopaths were showing deficits in exactly the regions we had predicted. Their brains are abnormal. I was staring at the first direct scientific evidence of how their brains were different from the brains of the rest of us.

Tears unexpectedly welled up in my eyes as I looked at the results.

I printed off the figures and ran down the hall to see if any members of the team were in their offices so I could show them.

Dr. Liddle was in his office on the phone. I paced back and forth in front of his door as he finished the call. When he hung up, I walked in and handed him the results.

He looked at them, smiled, and said without hesitation: “We have to send this to
Science
.”

“Do you think
Science
would publish something on psychopaths?” I asked.

“Yes. This is too exciting. The editors might not even know what to do with it,” he replied. “Make this your top priority; let’s get this submitted. And go show the rest of the team. It’s remarkable.”

Science
magazine is considered the top science journal in the
world. The editors publish only a small fraction of the papers submitted to them. For most academics, having a paper published in
Science
is a highly coveted prize.

I returned to the lab and started writing up the results of the first fMRI study of criminal psychopaths. I agonized over the text, wanting to make sure I found the right balance and tone for the readers of
Science
.

We submitted the manuscript a couple of weeks later and anxiously awaited the e-mail telling us our fate. A week passed with no word. I went back to prison to keep myself distracted from thinking about our paper.

The editors of
Science
wrote back ten days later that they had decided to send our manuscript out for peer review. Some 90 percent of papers don’t make it past the first round of editorial scrutiny at
Science
. We had passed the first hurdle.

Another two weeks crept by as we waited on the peer review. I had been incessantly checking my e-mail every few minutes. I nearly jumped out of my seat when the e-mail from
Science
arrived. The scientists who reviewed our paper loved it—my heart leaped. The reviewers had only minor comments that they wanted us to address. The editors of
Science
invited us to send the revision back to them. The team was ecstatic. I did my best to answer all the reviewers’ comments and I sent it back in.

Another two weeks passed; then came an e-mail that I would never forget. Our paper had ultimately been rejected. The editors wrote that while they loved our results, they worried that the sample size was too small and the conclusions society might draw from our research were too dramatic. Our work, they said, had enormous implications for the legal system, and before publishing in
Science
, the editors wanted to make sure the results could be replicated in a larger sample of psychopaths.

I was in shock. We had spent years working on this research. Most of the team had literally risked their lives to complete the study.

But I realized that the editors of
Science
were correct. Our sample size was small. We had only eight psychopaths and eight nonpsychopaths in our study. It had been too difficult to transport more of them. Our sample size was fairly typical for early MRI studies of
psychiatric populations, but it did raise some important scientific issues that a larger sample size would resolve.

Our team convened to discuss options. We decided to send the manuscript to a top psychiatric journal,
Biological Psychiatry
. The peer review came back quickly, and our manuscript was accepted to be published. The first ever fMRI paper on criminal psychopaths was complete. The team celebrated, but I did not share their enthusiasm. I was frustrated; I wanted more. I wanted to scan more brains of psychopaths, and I never wanted to be criticized again for not collecting enough data. I had to find a solution.

With our first fMRI study behind us, I returned to my brain wave studies and interviewing more inmates. In my spare time I wrote up a series of five studies for my dissertation and submission to peer-review journals.

As my dissertation was nearing completion, I planned to jump through the final hoop, the University Defense, to receive my doctorate. At UBC you defend your dissertation orally, and the department invites the entire university community to participate in the defense.

Other graduate students had recommended publishing all my dissertation studies in peer-reviewed journals prior to my University Defense. In this way you can always say to your examining committee that your work has met the metric for which all scientists are judged—publication in peer-review journals. If you publish your work prior to your dissertation, the thinking, at least of the graduate students, is that you will sail through your final defense and be crowned with your doctorate in psychology.

So I wrote up all five of my studies and published them before my final University Defense. In fact, I had collected so much data at the prison that I wrote up another fifteen or so papers and published them too. I actually should have written up a lot more of the data I collected; the data still sit in binders on the bookshelves of my office—a reminder that I have to publish or perish.

While I waited for my dissertation committee to set the final date for my University Defense, I went back to prison to keep my mind occupied.

I’d been asked by Dr. Brink to conduct risk assessments on inmates. In Canada, risk assessments were done on all inmates prior to release. These assessments included interviewing the inmates and reviewing their files. The information collected from these sources was then used to complete a formula. The formula weights the risk factors and the mitigating factors to determine a score. A low score meant the inmate was low risk to commit new crimes; a high score meant that the inmate was likely to reoffend within three years. The scores are typically used by parole boards to set restrictions on the inmates as they are released.