The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (30 page)

In summary, the majority of spree killers who go on rampages suffer from some sort of psychotic illness that includes command hallucinations and delusions. As we have reviewed, personality traits, especially psychopathic personality traits, are based on one’s
entire life history and in all domains of a person’s life. An isolated violent crime, even one that leads to multiple deaths, does not by itself warrant a diagnosis of psychopath. Also, hallucinations and delusions are not symptoms of psychopathy; thus most individuals who commit spree killings do not meet criteria for psychopathy.

One of the board members of the nonprofit Mind Institute
in New Mexico
²
was Dr. John Nash, a Nobel Prize–winning economist from Princeton University. Dr. Nash’s life has been chronicled in the movie
A Beautiful Mind
, in which he was played by actor Russell Crowe. Dr. Nash was able to fight through his own mental illness to create game theory in economics.

Dr. Nash felt the science I was conducting would be a game changer in forensics, and he was one of those who convinced me to accept the job offer from the Mind Institute and the University of New Mexico.

Relocating my laboratory from Connecticut to Albuquerque, New Mexico, was not simple. My laboratory was composed of fifteen full-time research staff, two Yale psychology graduate students, and a dozen undergraduate students working on various projects. Moreover, I had to continue to make progress on my current grants in Connecticut, as well as set up a parallel laboratory in New Mexico so that my staff could transition smoothly.

During long meetings, we finalized plans for the undergraduate and graduate projects to run to completion in Connecticut. I then flew all fifteen staff members out to New Mexico to tour our new lab space at the Mind Institute. My staff visited during the world-famous
hot air balloon festival in Albuquerque. The city was alive with energy; every morning we saw hundreds of balloons floating around the city, an amazing sight.

Upon returning from the visit, my staff organized a meeting and called me in. They had all agreed to the move. Dedicated young professionals, they shared my interest in using the latest neuroscience to better understand psychopaths. I was honored that they were all willing to relocate.

The New Mexico Corrections Department organized a weeklong training session for my staff on the ins and outs of working in the New Mexico prisons. My senior staff attended the training and developed a manual to train the rest of our staff.

Once the plans for transitioning were finished, I turned my attention to finding help completing my nonforensic projects. I was still actively pursing brain imaging studies on the neural basis of psychosis and how neuroscience could assist in differentiating patients with schizophrenia from those with acute psychotic bipolar illness.

Finally, I traveled up to Oneonta, New York, to Medical Coaches Inc., where our prototype mobile MRI was being built. My laboratory’s ability to collect data for my grants depended on the success of this new system. It was a risky move. I was definitely all-in; I was going to make this mobile MRI work or go bust.

The engineers at Medical Coaches Inc. added dozens of my special features to the trailer to enable us to incorporate all the MRI-compatible equipment needed for functional MRI studies. These included wall mounting five computers in the control room to power our data collection efforts. One computer was used to drive the visual projection system to deliver pictures or video to the prisoners while they were in the MRI. We connected the video output of the computer to a high-definition projection system housed in a shielded cabinet in the rear of the trailer. The projector would throw the video image to a special screen mounted in the MRI bore so the
prisoners could watch all the stimuli and videos we planned to present to them. It was a state-of-the-art, high-definition video system.

Another computer recorded and monitored in real time the timing of the stimuli and responses from the prisoners. When you work with psychopaths, you have to ensure that they are completing the tasks you ask of them in the MRI. Indeed, I also set up a computer to track the eye positions of the inmates while they were in the MRI. We could monitor the precise location of where on the video screen the inmates were looking when we presented them with stimuli. This further ensured they were paying attention and not falling asleep!

Another computer tracked and monitored all the research data and interfaced with the Mind Institute’s neuroinformatics system. We were going to be collecting terabytes of brain imaging data and we needed to organize, track, and back up all of it.

Finally, the last computer interfaced with the projection system to present a video of a cartoon fish tank to the prisoners. I had found that it was very helpful to start off the scan sessions with the fish tank display so that the inmates would know where the video screen was located in the MRI chamber and where to focus their attention. The fish tank also served to calm individuals who might be a little claustrophobic in the tight confines of the MRI bore.

The electrical, heating, and cooling systems of the mobile MRI were upgraded to handle the additional computers. Special tubes, called
wave guides
, were installed between the control room and the projector room at the rear of the trailer. Through these wave guides we would install the LumiTouch fiber-optic response devices I had designed with a company in Vancouver, British Columbia. These devices were able to collect responses from the inmates while they were performing the cognitive and emotional tasks in the MRI.

In parallel, I scheduled visits to New Mexico once a month for the remainder of 2006 and planned to move my laboratory staff in early 2007. We would have the first four months of 2007 to conduct interviews and testing with the inmates before the mobile MRI would arrive in May.

During my visits, I began to establish relationships with the staff of the New Mexico Corrections Department and the New Mexico
Children, Youth and Families Department. We developed plans to set up research laboratories in the Western Men’s Prison and the Women’s Prison of New Mexico, both of which were located in the small town of Grants, about eighty miles from Albuquerque. We also started a youth project at the Youth Diagnostic Detection Center, the only maximum-security facility for teenage offenders in the state. Finally, we planned a home base for the mobile MRI crew at the Mind Institute headquarters on the campus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

I also had three grant projects to set up, two supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and one funded by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

The first NIMH project was designed to test my paralimbic dysfunction hypothesis of psychopathy in adults. My team and I planned to examine the brain structure and function of psychopathic and nonpsychopathic inmates. We designed several emotional and cognitive tasks to probe the function of the paralimbic system.

The NIDA project was the largest and most ambitious of the three. We planned to recruit 150 inmates with substance abuse problems into a twelve-week treatment program. During the treatment program, the inmates would receive one of three different types of cognitive behavioral therapy to help them stop using drugs. The mobile MRI would be used to scan the inmates before, during, and after completion of treatment. In this way we could examine how the brain changes with treatment. We could also study whether certain parts of the brain or certain functions of the brain predict who will do well and who will fail in treatment and return to drug use.

The project necessitated recruiting and training over a dozen qualified clinical psychologists to deliver the cognitive behavioral therapy. We also had to track down and interview the inmates after they were released in order to collect data about whether or not they had relapsed to substance abuse.

The second NIMH project was conducted at the maximum-security juvenile prison. We planned to examine whether youth
with elevated callous and unemotional traits looked similar to or different from adults with psychopathy. We also planned to carefully assess the environments in which the youth had been raised, collecting data on parenting styles, stress and trauma, and other variables that might be related to the development of CU traits. We also planned to examine the influence of drug abuse in teenagers.

The MRI was installed in the custom trailer and driven out to New Mexico for delivery on May 15, 2007.

On the day it arrived, I was the first to climb in to get a picture of my brain. As the MRI surged to life and started whirring and beeping, I could not believe that my dream of using a mobile MRI to study psychopaths in prison had come true.

We had a week to test the scanner before “accepting” it and finalizing the last payment in our contract with Siemens. The MRI sequences pushed the technology to the limits. And then we had our first hiccup. We fried a circuit board in an amplifier by pushing the unit too hard. Working with the Siemens engineers, we determined that an upgrade was needed. Some of the hardware in the mobile MRI had been shrunk to fit in the small confines of the trailer.

We had to replace some of the mobile MRI hardware with regular-strength hardware. It was a quick fix, and we were back to testing within a couple days. After that first glitch, the mobile MRI stabilized and performed well. The overall quality of the data generated during our testing was amazing. The mobile MRI was more stable than many MRI systems installed in hospitals. Medical Coaches Inc. had done a great job building the trailer, and Siemens had tuned the scanner perfectly. Following the week of testing, we installed all our computers and fMRI equipment. Then our driver picked up the Mind Mobile MRI System and moved it out to Western Prison.

I called Dominic, the facilities director at Western Prison in Grants, New Mexico, to tell him the MRI was on its way, thanking him for his patience and letting him know that he could get that picture of his brain now.

Around the same time as the mobile fMRI was being deployed, I was approached by my good friend Dartmouth College professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong about whether I might be willing to join a research network on neuroscience and law being directed by Dr. Mike Gazzaniga. The John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation had been asked to fund a think tank of psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, law professors, and state and federal judges to examine contemporary issues in neuroscience and law. The research network was tasked with deciding and then funding research that would stimulate growth in this emerging field.

Walter mentioned that initial discussions had centered on whether the neuroscience of psychopathy might have an enormous impact on philosophical thinking regarding legal constructs like criminal responsibility, punishment, and capacity for change.

Membership in the network was a significant time commitment. Members would attend three general network meetings per year; two subnetworks would meet every other month. Finally, small working groups examining hot topics would meet as needed. Over the next three years, I traveled at least once a month to the MacArthur neuroscience and law meetings.

At these monthly meetings, I was tossed into an academic melting pot of some of the best scientific and legal minds in the country. My fellow neuroscientists and I described the methods of our field, their strengths and limitations, and their promise to improve mental health diagnosis and treatment. The law professors described the philosophical underpinnings that the law held most dear, underpinnings that some had argued would be completely transformed by the emerging findings from neuroscience. Judges described the difficult decisions they had to make every day in court, raising questions about whether neuroscience might provide information that would make decision making easier.

There were no easy answers to some of the questions raised, but it was clear that modern neuroscience and the law were colliding at many levels and in numerous domains.

The intellectual environment of the inaugural MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience was one of the best academic experiences of my career.

During graduate school, it had taken our lab five years to organize and transport fifty inmates from prison to scan them on the university MRI. My lab scanned fifty inmates on the mobile fMRI in the first week it was deployed in prison.

By the end of the first year, the mobile fMRI had scanned the brains of over five hundred inmates. In just one year we had collected the world’s largest database of brain scans from forensic populations.

I had found my remedy to at least one of the issues raised by the editors of the journal
Science
. I was never going to publish a small sample size study again—especially given the potential societal impact of this work. Indeed, if there was one thing that the scholars on the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience agreed about, it was that the neuroscience of psychopathy was going to have a big impact in the legal system.

The prison staff and inmates of the New Mexico Corrections Department were generously supportive of our research efforts. Our relationship was a true reflection of the power of collaboration between a state entity and an academic research program. Indeed, there were even collateral security benefits. After the first year of research, one of the deputy wardens told me that institutional infractions had gone down since we started doing research with the prisoners. The prisoners had told the deputy warden that they enjoyed participating, and they stayed out of trouble so they would not get put in segregation, where they would not be able to do research. The New Mexico Corrections Department allowed us to expand our research program into other prisons around the state. After just a few short years, we were working in more than half of the prisons in New Mexico.