Dirty work

A reader sent me this video of James Fallon, science-famous for having killer ancestors and violent genes.  My favorite part is where he basically says that sociopaths exist to do the dirty work for everyone else.




Here are paraphrases of what I consider to be the most interesting parts:

6:48  There's a societal receptivity to psychopathology, in fact one may say that there's psychopathology in all of us because we ask the so-called successful sociopaths or psychopaths to do the dirty work for us. Ok.  And not just the dirty work but the good work.  You don't want your neurosurgeon to be empathetic and caring emotionally when they're working on you.  You want them to be cold machines that don't care.  Same thing with an investor. . . . A society almost demands that we have psychopaths.  It's a very stable feature throughout society in history that these people are there.  And they pop up in a very malignant way sometimes but these traits seem to be very useful to society so we almost ask for it, or our genes and our behavior ask for it.

8:10 Many of them . . . have excellent memories.  And there's a genetics to this.  The people who have very good memories usually have two forms of a gene that allow you to have very good memories but they also make you very anxious to depressed.

12:40  The fundamental way that a psychopath is put together is like a three legged stool.  One of the legs is a high vulnerability genetic alleles (aggression, violence, lack of bonding), brain loss, and abuse.

14:00 Two areas of the brain that are damages are orbital cortex and the ventromedial cortex

15:30 Cold cognition (logic) in balance with hot cognition (emotions, ethics, morality, etc.) in a normal brain.

Here's another video of James Fallon.