Saturday, November 16, 2013

Empath hypocrisy

I'm not saying all empaths are stupid and illogical, although some of them are. Similarly, there are some sociopaths that are stupid, horrible, evil, or whatever else. But let's focus on illogical empaths for a second. This is from a recent comment:

I'm an empath.
I believe that all humans are born with free will.
I believe that every human life is intrinsically valuable.
I believe that good and evil exist as absolutes, even if at times it is difficult to distinguish between them.
I believe that sociopaths are evil. 
If I could find an effective way to screen for you guys without too many false positives, then I would kill you as children. Of course, given that you are master manipulators I can already see you arguing your way out of a corner, convincing the other empaths that I am the evil one for suggesting the killing of children, suggesting that there is some error in my detection system. 
How many times do you have to burn your fingers before you realize that fire is hot? In love, you get back 100 times what you give. 
In war you fight to win.
I know I'm right. 

Now, I am not great at understanding sarcasm, so it's possible this was said with tongue firmly planted in cheek. But I have heard enough very similar statements from other people that I believe this person was being sincere. This person believes that every human life is intrinsically valuable but would kill sociopathic children? Really? Kill small children in a genocide? Just as long as the test wouldn't lead to "too many" innocent deaths due to "too many false positives"? Wow. Ok. An "empath" who seems not at all capable of understanding (must less empathizing with) someone sociopathic. Also, this person absolutely certain he is right. Good to know. 

Friday, November 15, 2013

Mistaken identities

I was visiting some friends over the weekend whom I hadn't seen in a while. I got picked up from the airport by one of them who had brought a health drink, saying, "I know that you only drink healthy things," when really I have a raging caffeine addiction and always have. After we fooled around a little, the same person remarked about how much gayer I seem and that I should just get over it and come out of the closet already. Later that evening when telling the story to another friend with her own self-interest in the subject, she argued that the fact that I could tell the happenings of the afternoon in such clinical detail indicated how not gay I seemed.

The next day I was at an invitation only party hosted by another friend. There was drama when someone uninvited showed up -- an ex of one of the guests. I asked if I should act as "enforcer," hockey style. My friend jokingly told me that I should and I nicely nicely showed the gentleman the door. When I came back, people were aghast that I had actually gone through with it, as if he were an innocent victim himself. I reminded the friend (who knows what I am) that I don't understand sarcasm, and you better be serious when you ask me to do something.

As I was taken back to the airport, I was talking to a different friend about my recent activities. She was amazed at how much I have been able to accomplish since I last saw her. In her words, I went from "fuck up" to "legitimate player." I shrugged at this because I didn't ever think I was ever so low as a "fuck up," nor am I successful enough now to be a "legitimate player."

I was amazed at how poorly all of my friends knew me. Perhaps they were projecting, misremembering, or making very inaccurate small talk, or maybe I used to be a different person around them.

I know this must happen to everyone -- to go back to a place you used to know and realize that you have since become someone different. But it still amazes me how much people will take every piece of information they learn about you, and somehow cram it to fit their own preconceived notions about you. People's knee jerk reaction is to cram a square peg into a round hole, for whatever reason.

Some of the readers here wonder how they weren't able to recognize the sociopaths in their lives for what they are. Part of it is the sociopath wearing masks, but mostly he doesn't have to try hard at all -- all of the work is being done for him.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Quote: Why I fight bullies and hate mobs

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom.

Clarence Darrow

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

James Fallon: The Psychopath Inside Q&A

Professor James Fallon has written an exciting new book combining his background in neuroscience with his personal experience having many characteristics (and the brain scan) of a psychopath. THE PSYCHOPATH INSIDE: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain (Kindle version here) is part memoir and part scientific review of both the recent genetic and neuroscience research that has been done on psychopaths.

As a special offer to this blog's audience, Dr. Fallon has graciously offered to answer some of your questions. If you have a question for Dr. Fallon, please post it in the comments addressed to "Dr. Fallon:". I will collect your questions (or a representative sample) and send them to him. When I receive his answers, I will post them in a future blog post.

Here is an except from his book:

I was thinking about putting something up about the book and then asking my readers and twitter followers if they had any questions in particular that they would like to ask him. I could select a representative sample, if he would be willing to give his thoughts? 

One October day in 2005, as the last vestiges of an Indian summer moved across Southern California, I was inputting some last-minute changes into a paper I was planning to submit to the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. I had titled it “Neuroanatomical Background to Understanding the Brain of a Young Psychopath” and based it on a long series of analyses I had performed, on and off for a decade, of individual brain scans of psychopathic murderers. These are some of the baddest dudes you can imagine—they’d done some heinous things over the years, things that would make you cringe if I didn’t have to adhere to confidentiality agreements and could tell you about them. 

But their pasts weren’t the only things that separated them from the rest of us. As a neuroscientist well into the fourth decade of my career, I’d looked at a lot of brain scans over the years, and these had been different. The brains belonging to these killers shared a rare and alarming pattern of low brain function in certain parts of the frontal and temporal lobes—areas commonly associated with self-control and empathy. This makes sense for those with a history of inhuman violence, since the reduction of activity in these regions suggests a lack of a normal sense of moral reasoning and of the ability to inhibit their impulses. I explained this pattern in my paper, submitted it for publication, and turned my attention to the next project. 

At the same time I’d been studying the murderers’ scans, my lab had been conducting a separate study exploring which genes, if any, are linked to Alzheimer’s disease. As part of our research, my colleagues and I had run genetic tests and taken brain scans of several Alzheimer’s patients as well as several members of my family, who were serving as the normal, control group. 

On this same October day, I sat down to analyze my family’s scans and noticed that the last scan in the pile was strikingly odd. In fact it looked exactly like the most abnormal of the scans I had just been writing about, suggesting that the poor individual it belonged to was a psychopath— or at least shared an uncomfortable amount of traits with one. Not suspicious of any of my family members, I naturally assumed that their scans had somehow been mixed with the other pile on the table. I generally have a lot of research going on at one time, and even though I try to keep my work organized it was entirely possible for things to get mixed up. Unfortunately, since we were trying to keep the scans anonymous, we’d coded them to hide the names of the individuals they belonged to. To be sure I hadn’t mixed anything up, I asked our lab technician to break the blind code. 

When I found out who the scan belonged to, I had to believe there was a mistake. In a fit of pique, I asked the technician to check the scanner and all the notes from the other imaging and database technicians. 

But there had been no mistake. 

The scan was mine.

Reprinted from THE PSYCHOPATH INSIDE: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon with permission of Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) James Fallon, 2013.

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