Have you seen this show on A&E?
If not, its truly worth watching. However, I will warn you it is very chilling.
But you get to have a front row seat into the mind of a killer.
Some lie. And some tell the truth.
It’s endlessly fascinating!
If my time allows in the coming weeks, I will share my thoughts on the latest episode.
ABC has what appears to be a fascinating show on tonight at 10 ET/9 CST on brutal psycho-killer minds. I just saw it and it appears to be a mini-series, with the first episode airing last week (which I happened to miss).
In this segment, Dr. Adrian Raine, a neurocriminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the brain of a psychopath.
“One of the key differences that we find in the brains of psychopaths is that there is a structural impairment to the part of the brain called the amygdala,” he explained. “This is the part of the brain very much involved in the generation of emotions. It was structurally deformed in the psychopaths.”
Don’t forget to set up your DVRs.
* It may be on tomorrow night…that’s what TV listings say, which contradicts this article…
Here is a blog post from In Cold Blog from Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who is an author and a specialist in the field of psychology.
Dr. Ramsland writes about the two terms, sociopath and psychopath, and how they came to be. It’s interesting reading…
Here is an interesting research study from Germany that studied the brain matter of psychopaths versus non-psychopaths.
The summary says:
This is the first study to show that psychopathy is associated with a decrease in gray matter in both frontal and temporal brain regions, in particular in the right superior temporal gyrus, supporting the hypothesis that a disturbed frontotemporal network is critically involved in the pathogenesis of psychopathy.
Of course, there is lots of research out there, but I have seen several studies over the years that talk about different brain structures of psychopaths.
Here is another fascinating study from BBC that talks about how psychopaths brains are different. In this article they talk about emotion recognition and the differences noted in the psychopathic brain. Fascinating stuff. As I always say, we are in the stone ages of understanding the brain, if you ask me.
If this is true, how can one not have sympathy for the mothers whose children kill?
