A Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath (2013)
I think it&#x27;s easy to draw a flawed conclusion from research like this. While it can be shown that a majority of psychopathic serial killers have the prefrontal cortex brain anomaly, it&#x27;s also the case that almost all such criminals are male. Yet we have an abundance of plainly apparent counterexamples to dismiss the idea that being male implies criminality. Interestingly, there are similarities here, as one of the largest brain differences between genders is in the development of the amygdala. The brain anomaly here concerns the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.<p>&gt; So the first thing I thought was that maybe my hypothesis was wrong, and that these brain areas are not reflective of psychopathy or murderous behavior.<p>&gt; Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind ...<p>It sounds to me as though he simply combined his finding with more research possessing the same systematic error, in order to support his conclusion, in spite of a counterexample. He then bends an established definition to suit his theory.<p>When sampling the extremes of a population (e.g. the most prolific murderers), combinations of compounding additive factors will naturally be common. To draw a causal link about any of them would be flawed, without a thorough and unbiased analysis of the rest of the population.