Murderous Minds (25 page)

You may wince when you think about seeing such an accident because a specific neural network involved in processing the feeling of empathy is activated in your brain. These pathways include parts of the brain’s cerebral cortex, as well as parts of the brain located beneath the cortex. The cortical regions that have been implicated in the process of sharing the feelings of another person include the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). These are connected in a network with each other and with the subcortical regions of the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the brain stem. Working together, these and perhaps other parts of the brain allow you, from childhood, to “feel” someone else’s pain and share their emotional state.

Consider now the psychopathic version of empathy that Richard Kuklinski showed his daughter Merrick, who related the exchange to Richard’s biographer, Philip Carlo. The exchange followed one of the killer’s violent outbursts in the home he kept with his abused wife and three children: “There were times at home when Richard would have one of his outbursts and break things and then lock himself in his office. Merrick would ask him to please calm down, to ‘please relax, Daddy.’ During these episodes, Richard would then explain in a matter-of-fact way, ‘You know if … if I kill Mommy, if something happens and she dies, I’ll have to kill you all … I can’t leave any witnesses… . But you, Merrick … you’ll be the hardest to kill. You understand that?’”
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Perhaps this approach to parenting was Richard’s way of expressing his warped concept of affection and reassurance. But even here, Richard puts what would be an unthinkable concept for most parents into terms describing how it affects him and him alone, not his potential victim. It would be hardest for him to kill her compared to other members of his family. With this mind-boggling exchange, he revealed the value system of a man who lacked empathy.

Richard’s behavior is certainly more typical of a real criminal psychopath’s behavior and outlook than that of the fictional psychopath Tony
Soprano. Soprano had a sincere affection for his children, whom he would never harm in the television show The Sopranos. For Richard Kuklinski and other real criminal psychopaths, family members are possessions. It would be inconvenient to have to destroy them, but, in their minds, there is no question they would do it to protect themselves. That is what distinguishes real criminal psychopaths from fictional psychopaths. Counting on sincere sentimentality from a criminal psychopath would be like expecting a hungry shark to pass up a meal. Such grotesque demonstrations of morally deficient reasoning convince many researchers that psychopathy is indeed a mental disorder that renders psychopaths not liable for their actions. Others say that since they know right from wrong, they are responsible for their actions, no matter how they think, no matter how different their brains are.

The results of the brain-imaging studies discussed so far strongly suggest that the biological material that generates and regulates emotions and feelings is closely associated with a set of structures in the brain collectively known as the limbic system. It is located “inside” the brain, deep under the wrinkly surface of the brain’s outer cortex, and includes the thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, cingulate gyrus, and basal ganglia (Figures 10 and 11).

The limbic system is occasionally referred to as the “emotional brain” because so many of its diverse functions are related to emotionality and to the “fight-or-flight” response. The motivations for fighting or fleeing, after all, include anger or fear and frequently the desire to survive a threat.

Behaviors related to survival also can be linked to the motivation to have a good time. Neurobiologists call it “reward seeking.” It translates into behaviors that increase the chances of an individual getting some food or having sex. Even the memory storage functions that have been linked to this part of the brain frequently involve a strong emotional component.

Three Brains in One

The psychiatrist who named the limbic system, Paul MacLean, was intrigued by human beings’ ability to be rational, caring, and thoughtful as well as primitive, violent, and selfish. This led him to begin studying how the brain controls emotional behavior when he began his research career after the Second World War.

His work provided a helpful way to think about how our brains are organized. His Triune (three-in-one) Brain Theory, which he introduced in 1970, is based on the evolution of its different parts. MacLean referred to the oldest part of our brain as the reptilian brain. Its history goes back 500 million years, to when fish used it to survive. Reptiles thrived 250 million years later with a more sophisticated version. It still controls essential tasks that we mostly perform without conscious effort, such as breathing, balancing, maintaining body temperature, and keeping our hearts beating. It consists of the brain stem, which sits atop our spines, and the cerebellum, the large structure that looks like a mini-brain tucked under the back of the larger brain. If you have ever tried to relate to or bond with a turtle or lizard, you know that this part of the nervous system is not liable to impress or surprise you with warmth or spontaneity. It is rigid and predictable.

The development of the second component of the Triune Brain, the limbic brain, coincided with the evolution of mammals. That means it was at least 150 million years in the making. It includes many of the brain structures that show abnormal functioning in fMRI scans of criminal psychopaths.

The third component, the majority of the cerebral cortex called the neocortex, evolved with primates just 2.5 million or so years ago. Many people assume that the neocortex is more important than other brain regions in its contributions to what makes humans unique in the animal kingdom. It is credited with making language, culture, imagination, abstract thought, and consciousness possible. But this might not be the most accurate way to describe its relationship to the limbic system.

Psychiatrist Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said MacLean’s Triune theory was “outside the mainstream of scientific effort,” according to the New York Times.
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He did, however, give it credit for opening “the door for neuroscience to ‘ask big questions about consciousness and philosophy, instead of the more tractable questions about vision and movement.’” Since its introduction, the Triune Theory has propped open the door for neuroscience, which is now exploring these big questions with brain-imaging technology.

Limbic system theory divided the brain into old and new subdivisions. The more primitive parts (in terms of cognition) consisted of the evolutionarily older regions of the brain. The more sophisticated parts (again, in
terms of cognition) consisted of evolutionarily more recent developments, like the neocortex, the gray matter that is responsible for our higher intellectual abilities. Early on, the limbic system was thought to be the seat of emotion. It was thought that the separation was definite: the older limbic system took care of emotions, and the newer cortex took care of high-level thinking. But the limbic system is highly connected, if you follow enough connections, to the entire brain. So where do emotions originate? Does one part of the brain run the show?

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.

Then I realized who was telling me this.”

—Emo Philips

Its outer, wrinkly surface is the brain’s public face. That is what most people picture when they think of the brain. It consists of gray matter, a synonym for the stuff that makes us smart, allows us to paint pictures, compose symphonies, write novels, and solve equations. It enables us to plan and organize and learn. It allows most of us to master our baser emotions, desires, and drives. Most of us.

Many people assume that the brain represents a culmination of primate evolution since it includes the recently evolved frontal lobes, the portion of the brain most closely associated with higher, executive functioning. It is a common assumption that the cerebral cortex is the dominant and most significant part of the central nervous system. It is seen as overseeing and controlling the evolutionarily more primitive brain structures lying beneath it, the structures whose counterparts we share with reptiles, the part of the brain devoted in large part to survival, fighting, eating, and sex.

This view is consistent with that of many people who consciously or subconsciously regard humans as the ultimate in evolution, as if evolution was leading to us. In fact, squirrels, deer, beetles, and millions of walking, flying, creeping, crawling creatures are the ultimate in evolution as long as they are well-adapted to their environments. They may not have produced novels, symphonies, scientific theories, or reality television shows, but their accomplishments are still impressive enough to have ensured their survival—the number one end goal of the evolutionary process.

In a similar sense, the human brain, which has evolved by adding new layers of complexity over old, may not have culminated in the neocortex, the most recently evolved component. There is another way to look at the brain’s hierarchy, according to neuroanatomist Charles Ouimet, Ph.D., of the Florida State University College of Medicine. Perhaps the limbic system, the emotional brain, is not lower down in the brain’s hierarchy. Instead, the neocortex might be seen as something that evolved to assist or improve the function of the “more primitive” limbic brain.

“I think the limbic system, including thalamic components, is primary,” Ouimet said.
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“The function of the forerunner of the neocortex in reptiles, for instance, is to provide finer sensory discrimination and finer motor control so the limbic system can make better informed choices and responses. With evolution, I think it is likely that that system did not change; the neocortex is still there to give finer discrimination and motor control so the limbic system can be better informed.”

The job of the limbic system, after all, is to keep the animal alive and breeding. “The job of the neocortex,” Ouimet suggests, “is to help the limbic system do just that.” He doesn’t think the limbic system was ever superseded by the neocortex. “It’s just that the neocortex likes to think so: ‘I think, therefore I am in charge.’”

This leads Ouimet to wonder about the issue of consciousness, which is often thought of as a cortical phenomenon. “But,” he asks, “aren’t feelings one aspect of consciousness? You never read about that.” He considers the prefrontal cortex, with its close connections to the limbic system, an extension of the limbic system. He sees its function to be making “good” choices. “Good” means conducive to survival and breeding. It is a subjective term used to meet very concrete ends.

“One mistake we make,” Ouimet observes, “is in thinking that the limbic system is one thing and the neocortex is another, whereas in fact one is a functionally differentiated outgrowth of the other. The limbic system did not get ‘overrun’ by the neocortex during evolution; it just got a better computer.”

Based on wide-ranging evidence from neurology, neuroanatomy, paleontology, and neuropsychology, Antonio Damasio and his colleagues at the University of Iowa suggested back in 1982 that changes in the limbic
system may have played a key role in our evolution.
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They noted that our limbic system differs from that of other primates with less-developed mental capabilities. Our limbic system appears to influence “higher” brain functions associated with the cerebral cortex. Furthermore, they suggested that changes in the limbic system during the evolution of our human ancestors may have come before changes in the neocortex and were central to the development of our current behaviors, including social and sexual behaviors.

Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., a Professor of Science at New York University, is an authority on the biological mechanisms of emotional memory as well as being the lead singer for the rock band “The Amygdaloids,” for which he also writes songs. After studying the neurobiological underpinning of emotion for much of his forty-year-long career, he concludes that: “There is no emotion system. There are systems that are responsible for the various functions we label as ‘emotional’ but there is not an emotion system.”
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The inspiration for LeDoux’s rock band is an important component of many of these systems. But it is also one of the most misrepresented in popular media.

The Limbic System Celebrity

The amygdala has become a celebrity among the limbic structures of the brain. If it were a person, it would have an entourage. The hypothalamus and the frontal cortex sometimes join it on the pop-neuroscience A-List, but other regions of the brain, like the cerebellum, never walk the red carpet of popular neuroscience with the amygdala, which makes frequent appearances in the popular media. A search for “amygdala” on the Huffington Post website, for example, delivered more than 5,100 hits in the fall of 2013, making it far more popular than the prefrontal cortex and the hypothalamus, which scored 722 and 221, respectively.

You may not yet have heard of the criminal Aaron “Amygdala” Helzinger. Batman has. Aaron once overpowered the comic book hero after Aaron’s amygdalae were removed (his incompetent neurosurgeon was aiming for his hypothalamus) in an attempt to reduce his violent rages.
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Incomprehensibly, this psychosurgery left Aaron with extraordinary strength.

A character on the other side of the law, a district attorney, accused a police officer of being a racist on “Attack of the Xenophobes,”
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an episode of the television series Boston Legal. The officer faced prosecution after he shot and killed an unarmed black youth whose can of soda he mistook for a pistol. The evidence against the officer came straight from a hospital/ neuroscience lab. He was shown pictures of people of different ethnic backgrounds while having an fMRI brain scan. The fictional scientist/ expert witness testified that he “measured the response in the part of his brain that controls fear. It’s called the amygdala.” The defendant’s response to pictures of African-Americans, according to the fictional witness and fictional prosecutor, proved the officer was guilty.