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Bill Heath's avatar

He is largely correct. Psychopathy is usually genetic but can be induced through epigenetics, childhood abuse or organic defect. Also, some people are just jerks

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William Whitten's avatar

Thank you for your input Bill.

Let me add to that a bit.

It is proposed by numerous brains scientists that the Amygdala is a likely reason for Psychopathy, either in that it is misformed as a birth defect, or damaged in an accident, or by abuse.

Amygdala Hijack

An amygdala hijack is an emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. The term was coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

The amygdala is specialized for input and processing of emotion, while the hippocampus is essential for declarative or episodic memory. During emotional reactions, these two brain regions interact to translate the emotion into particular outcomes.

Psychopathy can thus involve damaged or misformed hippocampus as well as the amygdala. Or both.

I has also been posited that the pineal gland can be part of the equation, especially if it has experienced calcification and becomes disfunctional.

The pineal gland was described as the “Seat of the Soul” by Renee Descartes and it is located in the center of the brain. The main function of the pineal gland is to receive information about the state of the light-dark cycle from the environment and convey this information to produce and secrete the hormone melatonin.

The pineal gland actually is physically shaped like an eyeball, and is often referred to as the third eye.

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William Whitten's avatar

Images of prisoners' brains show important differences between those who are diagnosed as psychopaths and those who aren't, according to a study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

The results could help explain the callous and impulsive antisocial behavior exhibited by some psychopaths.

The study showed that psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety.

Two types of brain images were collected. Diffusion tensor images (DTI) showed reduced structural integrity in the white matter fibers connecting the two areas, while a second type of image that maps brain activity, a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), showed less coordinated activity between the vmPFC and the amygdala.

Read more at:

https://www.med.wisc.edu/news-and-events/2011/november/psychopaths-brains-differences-structure-function/

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Bill Heath's avatar

Thanks. I don't have the advantage of being an autodidact nor a polymath. I'm just a regular guy who went to med school almost forty years ago and wad part-way through a residency in psychiatry in Germany when I had to return to the US. Needing to relearn medical terminology in English so I could take the Boards and then compete with a bunch of 23-year-olds for a residency in my forties wasn't enticing. But, I had a family to support and did other things.

Physiology hasn't changed. There have always been multiple theories about the origin and heritability of psychopathy; the more specific they become, the less accurate they usually are. The amygdala is as capable of managing brain functions as the prefrontal cortex, it simply doesn't form traceable memories nor have a moral or ethical compass, The roles of the hippocampus exceed those you've described, and in the event of emotional trauma the hippocampus isn't directly involved in the formation of memory, it simply receives the memory without an audit trail. That memory can change over time as the event is relived in the imagination, and each one adds a new layer to what the individual believes is the real memory.

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William Whitten's avatar

The amygdala is as capable of managing brain functions as the prefrontal cortex, it simply doesn't form traceable memories nor have a moral or ethical compass.

The data I presented had nothing to do with memory. what it did have tdo with is the correlation between individuals who have displayed psychopathic behavior, with anomalous configurations of their amygdala. Moral and ethical functions and actions are decided by societies.

Society has already judged these prisoners as being morally disfunctional.

One question worth asking is, do psychopaths dream?

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