Jim Fallon, a good psychopath

The story of Jim Fallon inspires many reflections since he is someone who can be classified as a “good psychopath.” His experience has very anecdotal overtones, but beyond this opens big questions about what really determines the typical behavior of those with psychopathic traits.

Jim Fallon is living proof that a psychopath does not necessarily have to become a criminal, nor someone determined to manipulate and harm those around him. It proves that the brain is much more than an organ that can be scanned and explored: What this complex organ can produce is not determined in advance.

Let’s start by saying that Jim Fallon is a professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California-Irvine (United States), he is also an advisor to the Pentagon. Part of his job was to analyze scans of the brains of murderers comparing them with those of “normal” people. It all ended up being a big surprise for him.

The brain and psychopathy

Jim Fallon’s research group started from the idea that a murderer’s brain is observable through a scanner. It is not the first time in history that these biological determinisms have been talked about. In criminology, prototypes of the criminal have been made several times, based on their physical appearance.

This time it was no longer based on appearance as such, but rather on the anatomy of the brain. The idea has been proposed that the brains of psychopaths has less gray matter in the frontal areas. This is related to empathy and understanding the emotional world of other people; So, if there is less gray matter, there would be less room for empathy.

In addition, the amygdala is said to It is also smaller in those who have psychopathic traits. This is associated with feelings of fear. The smaller size would imply that there is less capacity to experience fear.

In general terms, A psychopath is someone who is incapable of love, lies and manipulates masterfully to others. They tend to be charming and are very cold in situations that stress others. They don’t know what guilt or regret is.

Jim Fallon and a big surprise

To do their research, Jim Fallon and his team relied on the brain scans of several known psychopathic murderers. In this type of experiments, a control group is always taken as a reference point, which in this case was a group of brain scans of “normal” people. Fallon took his own family as a control group.

Everything was going on as usual, until one particular scan seemed to Fallon like a typical psychopath. The pattern was very clear and matched perfectly with the pathological model. The big surprise came when he discovered that the scan corresponded to his own brain..

After that surprising discovery, he inquired with his mother and learned that within his father’s family there were at least seven people who had committed murders. Several of them had committed very violent crimes, such as cold-blooded homicides with axes. What was happening to him then?

Anatomy and culture

Although Jim Fallon remains convinced of biological determinism, his own experience led him to question that premise. He concluded that for this criminal and sociopathic behavior to occur, it was not enough to have a brain predisposed to it. According to his conclusions, the truly determining factor is childhood experiences.

Fallon says that He has not known a single case of murderous psychopaths that was not accompanied by a tragic childhood.. In particular, the fact of suffering humiliation, beatings and mistreatment, in his opinion, was the decisive factor for these people to end up dedicated to crime, without the slightest trace of guilt.

He believes that, unlike others, He received a lot of love and good treatment from his parents. He says that’s why he didn’t develop the patterns of the typical psychopath. and he did not become a murderer, but a prestigious scientist. However, after discovering him, he recognizes that he himself has great difficulty experiencing empathy.

There are no definitive conclusions in this regard, but most psychiatrists, and studies, agree with Fallon’s assessment. It is not biology as such, but rather it is in combination with the environment, culture and the symbolic world that ends up shaping what a person is. Deterministic views are often incomplete.

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