December 14, 2018 • 29 mins
After getting a PET Scan, Melissa meets with a neuroscientist who believes brain patterns can identify psychopaths. Dr. James Fallon also happens to be a psychopath. He shares his incredible personal story before revealing her results.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Previously on Happy Face. Meeting Melissa's mom in person, I
was really taken aback by the fact that they don't
look alike. She absolutely looks like her father, Keith Fell
in high school. I believe it was when they interview killers.
They have found that a large percentage of them damaged
(00:21):
their frontal lobe before they were twenty two, changes their
whole personality. I went back to my truck and rehearsed
the lies I planned to tell when I was arrested.
What made me cross the line into murder? Maybe it
was my nature. There was just this thing that people
said in the family. They would say, well, that's just Keith,
(00:43):
that's just how keep this, and it seemed to be acceptable.
Did you feel you're in control? Did you just lose
it with his lost it? I didn't. I didn't. I
don't think they had anything to do with control and
just had paybacks a bit, you know. And I just
grabbed him and start a whale and on. Of course
I didn't know him to stop. I was going to
beat him the death. Scared it look like him. I
(01:06):
came here, That's okay. My heart is so turned off.
I'm afraid I'm built like him and thee and with
the sun. I don't know, shine Oh night through. The
(01:36):
worst case scenario about tomorrow when I meet with Dr
Fallon is that I'm going to find out that biologically
my brain is wired exactly the same as my dad.
Melissa's deepest fear is that somewhere in the threads of
(02:00):
her DNA are the same miss wired strands that eventually
let her father to kill. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and
this is happy face. I'm prepared for both ways that
(02:23):
it will like. I know I'm a flawed human being.
I know that I sometimes can get narcissistic like everybody else.
I know sometimes I can be selfish like everybody else.
I know that sometimes I forget to say the right
thing to someone, or to offer the hug when they
needed it. I know that sometimes I laugh at inappropriate
(02:47):
things at the inappropriate time. I know sometimes I can
be insensitive. I know that, but that's not all the time.
And I know I'm not a bad person, and I
can see other people are flawed to and make mistakes too,
and that's what makes me give some comfort. Then maybe
(03:07):
I'm not a psychopath. Is that all of these things
that I've been looking for are just common traits amongst
us all. Maybe I'm just as flawed as everybody. Even
if you are, you're going to realize that it doesn't
change any of those things. You're a good person. You
(03:28):
would never do what your father's done, and you could
never be what he is. Last week, Melissa had a
pet scan to determine if her brain had the neurological
markers associated with psychopathy. Today is a really big day
(03:51):
for me. Um. It's a moment that I am coming
face to face with something I've been running away from
from learning about how hard time sleeping last night, because
today I find out if my worst fears and insecurities
are true. My dad and I had a very close relationship,
(04:13):
almost a psychic connection, and it makes me wonder if
my connection with my dad was because our brains are similar,
or our makeup is similar, if I'm capable of being
like my dad. But I don't know, And maybe Dr
Fellon can explain to me the difference between the brain
of a serial killer and the brain of a psychopath.
(04:35):
Maybe they're different, but in my mind right now they're
one and the same, and I'm nervous about that. Are
you ready to face it today. I think that in
the past I wasn't in a space where I could
accept the results. I feel so much more secure with
who I am. I feel like with Dawn's acceptance of
(04:56):
who I am and knowing that my heart is different,
then if my brain does prove to be similar to
my father, that at least my heart is different. I'm
actually you know, when I think of the word psychopath,
I think of someone who is a killer, someone who's
cold hearted, someone who is evil, and and maybe that
(05:18):
term is the problem. Melissa's definition of a psychopath is
a description of her father. Keith's definition, however, differs. I
want to know what happens in prisons mind point to
point in their life. I don't think person is a
(05:40):
psychopath all their life. No. I think it's uh, it's
something they grow into, and it's a behavior pattern they
grow into, and it's not a It's like we live
normal lives up to a point and make that conscious
decision to go a certain way, and then it's like
watching Planet the Age, everything goes different directions. You don't
turn right or turn possibilities around with what's going through
(06:08):
your head right now? Do you know what to expect.
The doctor has my brain scans, and maybe I find
out that I am a psychopath, or maybe I find
out I have a brain tumor maybe I might have
a perfectly healthy brain. I don't know, like I could
be walking into anything actually today, but I think knowing
is better than not knowing. Why does it matter? Like,
(06:31):
what do you hope you're going to gain from today?
For me, why it matters is for a lot of people,
I feel like I've been under a microscope and I
really haven't had any tools to combat what they say.
But at this point I'm almost I really don't even
care what other people think. This is for my self awareness.
This is for me to be able to know how
(06:55):
I relate to the world. Dr James Fallon is a
neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the
University of California Irvine School of Medicine. I had first
read about him years ago in a fascinating article in
The Atlantic titled Life as a Non Violent Psychopath. In it,
(07:19):
he shares his own incredible experience of accidentally discovering he
possessed the brain, imaging pattern and genetic makeup of a
full blown psychopath while conducting unrelated research, and how that
knowledge impacted his life and relationships. When Melissa shared her
fears with me about her own potential psychopathy, I immediately
(07:43):
reached out to Fallon. I felt if anyone could walk
Melissa through her pet scan and her results, Dr Fallon
would be the perfect person for the job. Dr Allen,
how you Petria? Then nice to meet you. Great, thank you.
So this is our house. Dr Fallon's house was bright
(08:06):
and cheerful. The exterior was surrounded by colorful, well tinted
plants and flowers, and the inside was filled with family
photos and art, he explained was mostly created by various
family members. It felt like a welcoming, creative place. This
is my lap because I do analysis. We played experiments here,
(08:28):
so anyway, this is where we lived. And I was
just looking at some of the slides. Just got your slides.
You know your your pet scan. Imagine one nervous well.
I don't know what you know about my background. I
know who your dad is, certainly, but I don't know
much about you. And I didn't want to know too
much about you, you know, I just because I don't
(08:48):
want to. I didn't want to look at the scanned
with some idea of who you were. Okay, that's the idea.
The less I know going in the better Okay, Okay Again.
Because Dr Fallon's own brain exhibits in decators of psychopathy,
we felt he had the ideal insight and expertise to
help Melissa navigate and process her PET scan results. Regardless
(09:10):
of what they revealed. The behaviors are not in themselves evil.
It's the context that we consider making him evil, and
that context is defined differently in different societies. Both societies
are not the same, so there's no absolute behaviors are
good and bad for these things. So it's not just
the gene you have, Because I mean I inherited all
(09:30):
these psychopaths related genes. I don't have much anxiety. If
I'm caught by somebody doing something, I can look him
in the face and they go, he's completely innocent. So
you can inherit them. But if you've been treated okay,
and especially with love, it kind of negates that effect.
All you do is become assertive. Low anxiety kind of
(09:52):
up all the time. You could be glib and all
this stuff like that. You can sound like a salesman,
but it comes across as an earnest in a nervous way.
So are you a psychopath? I'm not a categorical psychopath.
I mean I've been analyzed. I've been a psychiatrically analyzed.
And one of the interesting reads I was looking at,
you know, one of the diagnoses, and it was basically
the summary is that here's someone who has all the
(10:15):
thoughts and urges and dreams and everything that a full
blown psychopath has, but he never acts them out. Now,
I wouldn't have known that. I thought everybody was having
these thoughts and really crazy, intense scare the hell out
of people with him. I always assumed because it was
in my head everybody was thinking this way, and they're not.
The difference is that I never act him out. I mean,
(10:35):
I got absolutely clean record, and I got a family.
I'm still dating the girl I dated at twelve years old.
We were both twelve, and we've been married forever, and
I've had a really great job forever, and I have
kids and grandkids and I've a normal family life. But somehow,
and two of the psychiatrists, I couldn't figure out why
I was not like a really bad guy because I
(10:56):
have all these other genetics, the brain pattern and some
of the traits. I just don't act the bad stuff out.
I'm a wonderful guy. I feel like I'm relating to
you right now because I feel like I'm a great girl.
I feel like I'm a great person. Oh yeah, I
think I'm terrific. And it's not that I don't have faults,
but overall, I said, who would you like to be
around me? You know, I was like, it's a grade.
(11:17):
I was like, and so I asked. Started with my
wife and I asked her. I said, you gotta tell me, now, really,
what do you think of me? I mean, tell me
I'm not gonna get mad or anything. And I did
that with my mother, my brothers, my sister, my kids,
bravery to hear what people because I don't really care.
I mean, you know, for me, it was part of
the way it is. I just was interested. I mean,
(11:40):
a scientist, you were able to sound just scientists with
and they all told me the same thing. They said,
you do really psychopathic things that you don't even realize it.
They give you examples. Oh yeah, yeah, in great detail.
I put people at risk for the fun of it.
And it's not like strangers need to worry about me,
But if you become close to me, you gotta worry
because I'll get you to do something. I'm the person
(12:02):
that runs with the bulls and tries to get you
to run with me. That's not psychopathic, but I do
it all the time, and I put my people close
to me and friends at risk. I lived in East
Africa and I went trout fishing and broke my son,
and I brought him into a place I knew the reliance,
and I said, there's only a five per chance we're
gonna get attacked, But isn't it going to be fun?
So it's not like I'm trying to kill him, but
(12:24):
it was for the thrill. So having the genes per
se is not the death sentence. What happens early to
regulate those genes, which is fixed, is the problem because
people always want to know what percent of our behavior
is determined by genes nature and how much is by
environment nurture, And it's it's almost the wrong way to
ask the question, as it turns out. And so the
(12:46):
idea is, if you have the genes, if the gun
is loaded with those alleles that tend to give you
those traits and your abuse that fixes those And in
that case, the environment means everything. So in my dad's case,
he had the genes and he had the environment. Yeah.
I mean this is almost every dictator, really aggressive dictator,
(13:09):
and every serial killer I looked that I could find
as much information were abused early, and they hadn't their
family these traits. The only one who claims he was
never abused was Pulpot. He was the only one. I
don't believe him. I think you know a lot of
sometimes they lie. I'm learning about that with my dad.
That through this journey. What has been unique about my
(13:32):
dad is that he says one thing and what he
does is another thing. But he's so believable and what
he says that people don't look at what he does.
That's it. And and being raised with that, like I
only saw what he did and believed him too. And
so as I've been going on this journey, I've been
figuring out that is not what he says, is what
he does. But it's exactly what you just said, is
how he said. It was just so matter of fact
(13:54):
and straight face that you just don't even guess. This
is the charm of it. This is real psychopath or
people even narcissistic personality disorder can do it with such
earnestness and glibness and no anxiety. You absolutely believe them.
You believe them before you believe anybody. And that's what
makes it so pernicious and insidious. You know, in fact,
they you know, a real psychopath doesn't really believe what
(14:17):
they're doing is bad. It's kind of just whereas a
sociopath knows what they're doing is wrong. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
everybody's got a different definition. But then usually people and
go they're kind of the same. They're not real psychopath.
We call a primary psychopath. And these are the ones
that are clinically psychopaths that have no moral reasoning. I
(14:39):
have have no guilt, they have no remorse. So what
makes the personality disorders so different than other psychiatric disorders
is that people don't know what they're doing is wrong
or different. And give you an example. We all know
somebody who is obsessive and compulsive. In fact, a bunch
of people have O c D obsessive compulsive disorder. But
(15:00):
there are people with O c D p D, the
personality disorder variant of this, so they have obsessive compulsive
personality disorder. The people with o c D doing the
crazy things every time they walk by the three times
and they snip over. They know what they're doing is crazy,
but they can't stop it. The people with O c
D p D the percentage thinks what they're doing is
(15:20):
perfectly okay and good and works. Big difference, right, So,
superficially the behaviors are the same, but what happens inside,
how they're generating what they mean completely different. Now, somebody
with sociopathy like we're talking about, which is called a
secondary psychopath. They know what they're doing is wrong. They
do have remorse, they do have guilt, they do have anxiety,
(15:42):
but they're still driven to do those behaviors. So both
the psychopath and the sociopath can do the exact same thing, murder, rape,
and everything different reasons, And a lot of times the
psychopath does it for fun. It's game. It's just manipulation.
They're playing a game with things, whereas a sociopath a
lot of time could be the loser who's getting even
with all the women of the world. Are all the
(16:04):
athletes of the world, we're all got you know, all
the blondes in the world, and you know, he goes
on and on and on. There's always but those people
can be maybe not wired genetically for psychopathy, but they
were like bullied when they're eight, nine, ten years old.
A lot of times these are bullied people. But if
you are wired for it and you're bullied, I mean,
it's just terrible. See when my father beat me, I
(16:29):
wondered what he was feeling when he beat me, Like
what was there so gratifying to him to beat the
ship out of me and then send me to bed
like nothing happened, and then go back in and do
what he wanted to do with mom or whatever, or
just go on with life, and then the next day
like nothing happens. He's okay. Now when I'm killing my victim,
(16:52):
I'm sitting there going like, now, is this what my
father felt when he beat the ship out of me?
Is is this the feeling he got? Get answered that
I already didn't. The question remains, does trauma trigger violence
(17:17):
psychopathy or is it a domino effect. The thing is,
there's so many of these what are called cluster B
personality disorders. These are ones that are dangerous to other people,
like histrionic. These are people that are always using sex
to manipulate people and they're really nasty be around. And
(17:39):
and also narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy, and so for those,
what you're doing is basically looking all these traits, ten
fifty twenty traits, and the standard thing is you take them.
You score each one of those traits from zero to two. Zero,
let's say zero narcissism one is kind of pretty narcissistic.
(17:59):
To aways narcissistic, like really bad. And you take all
these numbers, add them up, and if it's above a threshold,
like for psychopathy, it's above eight or thirty. Anything to forty,
it's a full blown psychopath. If you have a psychopath,
it's forty, you're talking about such a dangerous person. I've
been tested and I'm not really a psychopath because I'm
(18:19):
not a full blown psychopath, but I'm like right on
the edge, you know, I score in the twenties every time.
What I lack is the criminality and the really antisocial stuff.
I really have no interest in hurting people. When I
think of psychopath, it seems to have a negative label,
But is it actually a good thing to have? For
(18:40):
is it possible it could be good. Well, you know
full blown psychopaths, you know the thirty and above and
the hair scale, or on a number of scales. It's
kind of never a good thing because a lot of
times they never make it passed through teens or twenties,
they're in prison, and they can have a lot of
disorganized behavior. But people who are borderline or pro socials
(19:01):
that are not quite clinically there a lot of those
traits are very very useful for for navigating and becoming successful.
But there are the traits. One of the two main
groups of traits factors is called fearless dominance, and fearless
dominance is a bunch of traits, but it's basically the
person walks into the room and they got that light
(19:21):
around them people interpreted as charisma. They walk fearlessly. They'll
take chances, but they win. They know how to take
like statistical scientific chances and win. But they'll take risks
and they do quite well. And people sense it. People
sense it immediately, so they're very attracted to it. And
so that's a major psychopathic trait. And if you look
(19:42):
at you know, the study of done of US presidents
from George Washington on those that scored the highest from
their biographers and who all about them, the ones that
scored highest and fearless dominance. The top ones are like
Teddy Roosevelt, JFK F DR Bill Clinton. They're thought to
have charisma and great abilities as leaders, but they have
(20:05):
the highest psychopathy ratings. So people are attracted to it.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why psychopathy
is always with us, because people are attracted to it.
These are people who will take chances. You want that
person on your side, so I don't care if he's
a badass. I want him to be my badass. I
want to be microok, my thief, you know. And so
(20:26):
the success of psychopaths, especially the pro social or borderline
pro social psychopaths, is a reflection of people's own lack
of morals, I think, because to win, they want them
on their side, even though they know that they're probably
going to do. It's like, don't tell me what you did,
just win. You know. Those traits are very much enjoyed
and beloved by people. So you said, what are you
(20:47):
complaining about? But you know, if you want to find
out if you're a psychopath, you've got to go talk
to psychologists, psychiatrist who's an expert in personality disorders. There's
no other way. But once you are found out to
have something, then we can use the brain scans in
the genetics to note why you're that way. This puts
(21:10):
you in another world because see, people aren't expected to
murder people. And when you murder someone and you're you're
you have their life in your hand. Um, you just
think of no one else has been there about you,
and think of all the all your feelings, all your emotions,
(21:31):
put all on the one that the hurt that you have,
and the love that you have, and joy and hate
and just everything all your emotions you could ever put together.
And that's what murders like. After Fallon was able to
(21:57):
give an evolutionary and historical explanation of psychopathy, Melissa was
finally ready to face and accept her results. So I
gave there's kind of a general like how we do stuff,
you know, look at the science and the biological psychiatry
of it. And so would you like to know what
I saw by looking at your scans? I would love to.
(22:19):
I'm ready, Yeah, I'm absolutely ready. Yeah, I think after
talking with you, I now see that it might not
necessarily be a bad thing. But I'm just curious now,
I'm just would to a psychopathy can be a very
useful thing. It doesn't make you criminal or bad, but
you can still be a pain. And he has to
(22:39):
be around with somebody's right, and you really can. So
I gotta be in and then you gotta expect that
from people. Okay, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'll follow you.
Dr Fallon's office was filled with eclectic art he'd gathered
during his trap holes or was given over the years.
(23:02):
It also showcased some of his own signature paintings, which
tended to involve some very interesting and more than slightly
disturbing depictions of clowns demented booking clowns. Right, Okay, so
(23:24):
there's many ways to get a PET scan or functional
mri I. You can get a cat scan or a
regular mri I that just looks at the anatomy. Okay,
but this is then looking at the function. That's the
main thing, the task that you did. We could have
you do other tasks that test your empathy before you
go in there for a PET scan or while you're
(23:46):
doing it for fm I. You can be looking at
a mix of images of things that in normal people
provoke emotional empathy versus cognitive empathy. You could go through
different kinds of scans that probe different circuits in your brain.
Then we can compare it to the normal people and
full blown psychopaths. And really to fully do it, you
(24:07):
have to do all these different scans. That's why it's
hard for people, the average person to do it because
it becomes expensive and you've got to get into a
pipeline and research hospital pipeline. But at any rate, you
had it done and you so you had the basic
pet scan and you didn't have a task, that is,
you didn't have to look at scary pictures and discussing things.
(24:28):
You were just told to what close my eyes And
for about twenty minutes, I just kept my eyes closed
and I was relaxed. I didn't see anything, and I
try to keep my mind centered and not distracted. Okay,
so this is kind of a the non task task.
And now it's called the default mode network we're looking
for and it's a circuitry that we should see. These
(24:50):
areas of the brain and a normal person light up,
and these are connected areas that most people's lives are
in this mode because you're kind of daydreaming where you relax.
You know there's there's no task there and and so
a lot of your life is in this mode. And
if you look at the connectivity of this circuit, of
this plus with your limbic system, your emotional parts of
(25:11):
your brain, you can really get an idea on why
somebody is a certain way. You're simply given this task
and it sounds like the way you've described it is
exactly correct. And here's the raw scans. Part of the
raw scans are up here without any processing. So this
is ground truth. And here is your pet skin. Again,
it's not doctored with colors or anything, because usually you
(25:33):
see a pet scan, it's like there's blues and red skin,
and that's made in software and it's kind of fudged
a bit. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's funny. This
is like ground peer truth. And so wherever we see
the dark areas, is he right here? They're dark. That's
what has really turned on in that half hour before
you've got the pet scan. And so here you are,
(25:55):
and here's the normal. And I tried to this morning
try to match them up if I could, And it
turns out yours is completely normal. So this first test
at this is like your your clinical scan is completely normal.
So you don't have any problem in your brain that
anybody can see. And anatomically it's not tumors or anything
(26:18):
like that, and there's no no weirdness at all. It's
completely normal. And now when we looked at this, they
really match up. You look like a completely normal for
this test. So that's amazing, it's amazing normal. Yeah, it
could be disappointed to so I mean, again, this is
not a diagnostic, but you have a quite a normal reaction.
(26:41):
And you see how sort of hot you are down here.
I cannot turn this part of my brain up at all.
So when I do default mode, I can't turn that on.
And so that's a psychopathic pattern. It's normal. And so
(27:02):
after years of wondering if her father's genes had somehow
infected her with the same traits, the same buried evil tendencies,
Melissa could finally breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that
she was another step in the opposite direction of Keith.
(27:23):
The power that he had over me. Now I feel
like he doesn't have any power over me anymore. I
feel like I'm my own person. I feel liberated. I
almost feel like I gotta jail. I feel so much better.
I almost wish I would have done this a long
time ago, that I would have not have been running away,
but I would have never been ready for it. I
don't think like I am now, but I feel amazing.
(27:46):
I feel like I'm my own person and free now.
I'm excited about moving forward in the future like I can.
This is less energy devoted to worry. The energy that
I've been using scared of my connection with my dad
can now be used for something useful and purposeful, and
(28:10):
it gives me everything that I need to just look
to the future instead of the past. If you lost ready,
do you know what I be in a black white?
(28:30):
Do you know what I see? You know what I do,
but you don't know me? You could have that butt
you rather be free? Free? In the final Happy Face,
(28:58):
Melissa comes to are reckoning with her past, her present,
and her future. Happy Faces a production of How Stuff Works.
Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright Pacheco, mangesh at Ticketur,
(29:19):
and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown. Music by
Claire Campbell, Page Campbell and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story.
Editor is Matt Riddle. Audio editing by Chandler Mays and
Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Shacogne. Special thanks to
Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian Newspaper, and the
Carlisle family.
Previously on Happy Face. Meeting Melissa's mom in person, I
was really taken aback by the fact that they don't
look alike. She absolutely looks like her father, Keith Fell
in high school. I believe it was when they interview killers.
They have found that a large percentage of them damaged
(00:21):
their frontal lobe before they were twenty two, changes their
whole personality. I went back to my truck and rehearsed
the lies I planned to tell when I was arrested.
What made me cross the line into murder? Maybe it
was my nature. There was just this thing that people
said in the family. They would say, well, that's just Keith,
(00:43):
that's just how keep this, and it seemed to be acceptable.
Did you feel you're in control? Did you just lose
it with his lost it? I didn't. I didn't. I
don't think they had anything to do with control and
just had paybacks a bit, you know. And I just
grabbed him and start a whale and on. Of course
I didn't know him to stop. I was going to
beat him the death. Scared it look like him. I
(01:06):
came here, That's okay. My heart is so turned off.
I'm afraid I'm built like him and thee and with
the sun. I don't know, shine Oh night through. The
(01:36):
worst case scenario about tomorrow when I meet with Dr
Fallon is that I'm going to find out that biologically
my brain is wired exactly the same as my dad.
Melissa's deepest fear is that somewhere in the threads of
(02:00):
her DNA are the same miss wired strands that eventually
let her father to kill. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and
this is happy face. I'm prepared for both ways that
(02:23):
it will like. I know I'm a flawed human being.
I know that I sometimes can get narcissistic like everybody else.
I know sometimes I can be selfish like everybody else.
I know that sometimes I forget to say the right
thing to someone, or to offer the hug when they
needed it. I know that sometimes I laugh at inappropriate
(02:47):
things at the inappropriate time. I know sometimes I can
be insensitive. I know that, but that's not all the time.
And I know I'm not a bad person, and I
can see other people are flawed to and make mistakes too,
and that's what makes me give some comfort. Then maybe
(03:07):
I'm not a psychopath. Is that all of these things
that I've been looking for are just common traits amongst
us all. Maybe I'm just as flawed as everybody. Even
if you are, you're going to realize that it doesn't
change any of those things. You're a good person. You
(03:28):
would never do what your father's done, and you could
never be what he is. Last week, Melissa had a
pet scan to determine if her brain had the neurological
markers associated with psychopathy. Today is a really big day
(03:51):
for me. Um. It's a moment that I am coming
face to face with something I've been running away from
from learning about how hard time sleeping last night, because
today I find out if my worst fears and insecurities
are true. My dad and I had a very close relationship,
(04:13):
almost a psychic connection, and it makes me wonder if
my connection with my dad was because our brains are similar,
or our makeup is similar, if I'm capable of being
like my dad. But I don't know, And maybe Dr
Fellon can explain to me the difference between the brain
of a serial killer and the brain of a psychopath.
(04:35):
Maybe they're different, but in my mind right now they're
one and the same, and I'm nervous about that. Are
you ready to face it today. I think that in
the past I wasn't in a space where I could
accept the results. I feel so much more secure with
who I am. I feel like with Dawn's acceptance of
(04:56):
who I am and knowing that my heart is different,
then if my brain does prove to be similar to
my father, that at least my heart is different. I'm
actually you know, when I think of the word psychopath,
I think of someone who is a killer, someone who's
cold hearted, someone who is evil, and and maybe that
(05:18):
term is the problem. Melissa's definition of a psychopath is
a description of her father. Keith's definition, however, differs. I
want to know what happens in prisons mind point to
point in their life. I don't think person is a
(05:40):
psychopath all their life. No. I think it's uh, it's
something they grow into, and it's a behavior pattern they
grow into, and it's not a It's like we live
normal lives up to a point and make that conscious
decision to go a certain way, and then it's like
watching Planet the Age, everything goes different directions. You don't
turn right or turn possibilities around with what's going through
(06:08):
your head right now? Do you know what to expect.
The doctor has my brain scans, and maybe I find
out that I am a psychopath, or maybe I find
out I have a brain tumor maybe I might have
a perfectly healthy brain. I don't know, like I could
be walking into anything actually today, but I think knowing
is better than not knowing. Why does it matter? Like,
(06:31):
what do you hope you're going to gain from today?
For me, why it matters is for a lot of people,
I feel like I've been under a microscope and I
really haven't had any tools to combat what they say.
But at this point I'm almost I really don't even
care what other people think. This is for my self awareness.
This is for me to be able to know how
(06:55):
I relate to the world. Dr James Fallon is a
neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the
University of California Irvine School of Medicine. I had first
read about him years ago in a fascinating article in
The Atlantic titled Life as a Non Violent Psychopath. In it,
(07:19):
he shares his own incredible experience of accidentally discovering he
possessed the brain, imaging pattern and genetic makeup of a
full blown psychopath while conducting unrelated research, and how that
knowledge impacted his life and relationships. When Melissa shared her
fears with me about her own potential psychopathy, I immediately
(07:43):
reached out to Fallon. I felt if anyone could walk
Melissa through her pet scan and her results, Dr Fallon
would be the perfect person for the job. Dr Allen,
how you Petria? Then nice to meet you. Great, thank you.
So this is our house. Dr Fallon's house was bright
(08:06):
and cheerful. The exterior was surrounded by colorful, well tinted
plants and flowers, and the inside was filled with family
photos and art, he explained was mostly created by various
family members. It felt like a welcoming, creative place. This
is my lap because I do analysis. We played experiments here,
(08:28):
so anyway, this is where we lived. And I was
just looking at some of the slides. Just got your slides.
You know your your pet scan. Imagine one nervous well.
I don't know what you know about my background. I
know who your dad is, certainly, but I don't know
much about you. And I didn't want to know too
much about you, you know, I just because I don't
(08:48):
want to. I didn't want to look at the scanned
with some idea of who you were. Okay, that's the idea.
The less I know going in the better Okay, Okay Again.
Because Dr Fallon's own brain exhibits in decators of psychopathy,
we felt he had the ideal insight and expertise to
help Melissa navigate and process her PET scan results. Regardless
(09:10):
of what they revealed. The behaviors are not in themselves evil.
It's the context that we consider making him evil, and
that context is defined differently in different societies. Both societies
are not the same, so there's no absolute behaviors are
good and bad for these things. So it's not just
the gene you have, Because I mean I inherited all
(09:30):
these psychopaths related genes. I don't have much anxiety. If
I'm caught by somebody doing something, I can look him
in the face and they go, he's completely innocent. So
you can inherit them. But if you've been treated okay,
and especially with love, it kind of negates that effect.
All you do is become assertive. Low anxiety kind of
(09:52):
up all the time. You could be glib and all
this stuff like that. You can sound like a salesman,
but it comes across as an earnest in a nervous way.
So are you a psychopath? I'm not a categorical psychopath.
I mean I've been analyzed. I've been a psychiatrically analyzed.
And one of the interesting reads I was looking at,
you know, one of the diagnoses, and it was basically
the summary is that here's someone who has all the
(10:15):
thoughts and urges and dreams and everything that a full
blown psychopath has, but he never acts them out. Now,
I wouldn't have known that. I thought everybody was having
these thoughts and really crazy, intense scare the hell out
of people with him. I always assumed because it was
in my head everybody was thinking this way, and they're not.
The difference is that I never act him out. I mean,
(10:35):
I got absolutely clean record, and I got a family.
I'm still dating the girl I dated at twelve years old.
We were both twelve, and we've been married forever, and
I've had a really great job forever, and I have
kids and grandkids and I've a normal family life. But somehow,
and two of the psychiatrists, I couldn't figure out why
I was not like a really bad guy because I
(10:56):
have all these other genetics, the brain pattern and some
of the traits. I just don't act the bad stuff out.
I'm a wonderful guy. I feel like I'm relating to
you right now because I feel like I'm a great girl.
I feel like I'm a great person. Oh yeah, I
think I'm terrific. And it's not that I don't have faults,
but overall, I said, who would you like to be
around me? You know, I was like, it's a grade.
(11:17):
I was like, and so I asked. Started with my
wife and I asked her. I said, you gotta tell me, now, really,
what do you think of me? I mean, tell me
I'm not gonna get mad or anything. And I did
that with my mother, my brothers, my sister, my kids,
bravery to hear what people because I don't really care.
I mean, you know, for me, it was part of
the way it is. I just was interested. I mean,
(11:40):
a scientist, you were able to sound just scientists with
and they all told me the same thing. They said,
you do really psychopathic things that you don't even realize it.
They give you examples. Oh yeah, yeah, in great detail.
I put people at risk for the fun of it.
And it's not like strangers need to worry about me,
But if you become close to me, you gotta worry
because I'll get you to do something. I'm the person
(12:02):
that runs with the bulls and tries to get you
to run with me. That's not psychopathic, but I do
it all the time, and I put my people close
to me and friends at risk. I lived in East
Africa and I went trout fishing and broke my son,
and I brought him into a place I knew the reliance,
and I said, there's only a five per chance we're
gonna get attacked, But isn't it going to be fun?
So it's not like I'm trying to kill him, but
(12:24):
it was for the thrill. So having the genes per
se is not the death sentence. What happens early to
regulate those genes, which is fixed, is the problem because
people always want to know what percent of our behavior
is determined by genes nature and how much is by
environment nurture, And it's it's almost the wrong way to
ask the question, as it turns out. And so the
(12:46):
idea is, if you have the genes, if the gun
is loaded with those alleles that tend to give you
those traits and your abuse that fixes those And in
that case, the environment means everything. So in my dad's case,
he had the genes and he had the environment. Yeah.
I mean this is almost every dictator, really aggressive dictator,
(13:09):
and every serial killer I looked that I could find
as much information were abused early, and they hadn't their
family these traits. The only one who claims he was
never abused was Pulpot. He was the only one. I
don't believe him. I think you know a lot of
sometimes they lie. I'm learning about that with my dad.
That through this journey. What has been unique about my
(13:32):
dad is that he says one thing and what he
does is another thing. But he's so believable and what
he says that people don't look at what he does.
That's it. And and being raised with that, like I
only saw what he did and believed him too. And
so as I've been going on this journey, I've been
figuring out that is not what he says, is what
he does. But it's exactly what you just said, is
how he said. It was just so matter of fact
(13:54):
and straight face that you just don't even guess. This
is the charm of it. This is real psychopath or
people even narcissistic personality disorder can do it with such
earnestness and glibness and no anxiety. You absolutely believe them.
You believe them before you believe anybody. And that's what
makes it so pernicious and insidious. You know, in fact,
they you know, a real psychopath doesn't really believe what
(14:17):
they're doing is bad. It's kind of just whereas a
sociopath knows what they're doing is wrong. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
everybody's got a different definition. But then usually people and
go they're kind of the same. They're not real psychopath.
We call a primary psychopath. And these are the ones
that are clinically psychopaths that have no moral reasoning. I
(14:39):
have have no guilt, they have no remorse. So what
makes the personality disorders so different than other psychiatric disorders
is that people don't know what they're doing is wrong
or different. And give you an example. We all know
somebody who is obsessive and compulsive. In fact, a bunch
of people have O c D obsessive compulsive disorder. But
(15:00):
there are people with O c D p D, the
personality disorder variant of this, so they have obsessive compulsive
personality disorder. The people with o c D doing the
crazy things every time they walk by the three times
and they snip over. They know what they're doing is crazy,
but they can't stop it. The people with O c
D p D the percentage thinks what they're doing is
(15:20):
perfectly okay and good and works. Big difference, right, So,
superficially the behaviors are the same, but what happens inside,
how they're generating what they mean completely different. Now, somebody
with sociopathy like we're talking about, which is called a
secondary psychopath. They know what they're doing is wrong. They
do have remorse, they do have guilt, they do have anxiety,
(15:42):
but they're still driven to do those behaviors. So both
the psychopath and the sociopath can do the exact same thing, murder, rape,
and everything different reasons, And a lot of times the
psychopath does it for fun. It's game. It's just manipulation.
They're playing a game with things, whereas a sociopath a
lot of time could be the loser who's getting even
with all the women of the world. Are all the
(16:04):
athletes of the world, we're all got you know, all
the blondes in the world, and you know, he goes
on and on and on. There's always but those people
can be maybe not wired genetically for psychopathy, but they
were like bullied when they're eight, nine, ten years old.
A lot of times these are bullied people. But if
you are wired for it and you're bullied, I mean,
it's just terrible. See when my father beat me, I
(16:29):
wondered what he was feeling when he beat me, Like
what was there so gratifying to him to beat the
ship out of me and then send me to bed
like nothing happened, and then go back in and do
what he wanted to do with mom or whatever, or
just go on with life, and then the next day
like nothing happens. He's okay. Now when I'm killing my victim,
(16:52):
I'm sitting there going like, now, is this what my
father felt when he beat the ship out of me?
Is is this the feeling he got? Get answered that
I already didn't. The question remains, does trauma trigger violence
(17:17):
psychopathy or is it a domino effect. The thing is,
there's so many of these what are called cluster B
personality disorders. These are ones that are dangerous to other people,
like histrionic. These are people that are always using sex
to manipulate people and they're really nasty be around. And
(17:39):
and also narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy, and so for those,
what you're doing is basically looking all these traits, ten
fifty twenty traits, and the standard thing is you take them.
You score each one of those traits from zero to two. Zero,
let's say zero narcissism one is kind of pretty narcissistic.
(17:59):
To aways narcissistic, like really bad. And you take all
these numbers, add them up, and if it's above a threshold,
like for psychopathy, it's above eight or thirty. Anything to forty,
it's a full blown psychopath. If you have a psychopath,
it's forty, you're talking about such a dangerous person. I've
been tested and I'm not really a psychopath because I'm
(18:19):
not a full blown psychopath, but I'm like right on
the edge, you know, I score in the twenties every time.
What I lack is the criminality and the really antisocial stuff.
I really have no interest in hurting people. When I
think of psychopath, it seems to have a negative label,
But is it actually a good thing to have? For
(18:40):
is it possible it could be good. Well, you know
full blown psychopaths, you know the thirty and above and
the hair scale, or on a number of scales. It's
kind of never a good thing because a lot of
times they never make it passed through teens or twenties,
they're in prison, and they can have a lot of
disorganized behavior. But people who are borderline or pro socials
(19:01):
that are not quite clinically there a lot of those
traits are very very useful for for navigating and becoming successful.
But there are the traits. One of the two main
groups of traits factors is called fearless dominance, and fearless
dominance is a bunch of traits, but it's basically the
person walks into the room and they got that light
(19:21):
around them people interpreted as charisma. They walk fearlessly. They'll
take chances, but they win. They know how to take
like statistical scientific chances and win. But they'll take risks
and they do quite well. And people sense it. People
sense it immediately, so they're very attracted to it. And
so that's a major psychopathic trait. And if you look
(19:42):
at you know, the study of done of US presidents
from George Washington on those that scored the highest from
their biographers and who all about them, the ones that
scored highest and fearless dominance. The top ones are like
Teddy Roosevelt, JFK F DR Bill Clinton. They're thought to
have charisma and great abilities as leaders, but they have
(20:05):
the highest psychopathy ratings. So people are attracted to it.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why psychopathy
is always with us, because people are attracted to it.
These are people who will take chances. You want that
person on your side, so I don't care if he's
a badass. I want him to be my badass. I
want to be microok, my thief, you know. And so
(20:26):
the success of psychopaths, especially the pro social or borderline
pro social psychopaths, is a reflection of people's own lack
of morals, I think, because to win, they want them
on their side, even though they know that they're probably
going to do. It's like, don't tell me what you did,
just win. You know. Those traits are very much enjoyed
and beloved by people. So you said, what are you
(20:47):
complaining about? But you know, if you want to find
out if you're a psychopath, you've got to go talk
to psychologists, psychiatrist who's an expert in personality disorders. There's
no other way. But once you are found out to
have something, then we can use the brain scans in
the genetics to note why you're that way. This puts
(21:10):
you in another world because see, people aren't expected to
murder people. And when you murder someone and you're you're
you have their life in your hand. Um, you just
think of no one else has been there about you,
and think of all the all your feelings, all your emotions,
(21:31):
put all on the one that the hurt that you have,
and the love that you have, and joy and hate
and just everything all your emotions you could ever put together.
And that's what murders like. After Fallon was able to
(21:57):
give an evolutionary and historical explanation of psychopathy, Melissa was
finally ready to face and accept her results. So I
gave there's kind of a general like how we do stuff,
you know, look at the science and the biological psychiatry
of it. And so would you like to know what
I saw by looking at your scans? I would love to.
(22:19):
I'm ready, Yeah, I'm absolutely ready. Yeah, I think after
talking with you, I now see that it might not
necessarily be a bad thing. But I'm just curious now,
I'm just would to a psychopathy can be a very
useful thing. It doesn't make you criminal or bad, but
you can still be a pain. And he has to
(22:39):
be around with somebody's right, and you really can. So
I gotta be in and then you gotta expect that
from people. Okay, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'll follow you.
Dr Fallon's office was filled with eclectic art he'd gathered
during his trap holes or was given over the years.
(23:02):
It also showcased some of his own signature paintings, which
tended to involve some very interesting and more than slightly
disturbing depictions of clowns demented booking clowns. Right, Okay, so
(23:24):
there's many ways to get a PET scan or functional
mri I. You can get a cat scan or a
regular mri I that just looks at the anatomy. Okay,
but this is then looking at the function. That's the
main thing, the task that you did. We could have
you do other tasks that test your empathy before you
go in there for a PET scan or while you're
(23:46):
doing it for fm I. You can be looking at
a mix of images of things that in normal people
provoke emotional empathy versus cognitive empathy. You could go through
different kinds of scans that probe different circuits in your brain.
Then we can compare it to the normal people and
full blown psychopaths. And really to fully do it, you
(24:07):
have to do all these different scans. That's why it's
hard for people, the average person to do it because
it becomes expensive and you've got to get into a
pipeline and research hospital pipeline. But at any rate, you
had it done and you so you had the basic
pet scan and you didn't have a task, that is,
you didn't have to look at scary pictures and discussing things.
(24:28):
You were just told to what close my eyes And
for about twenty minutes, I just kept my eyes closed
and I was relaxed. I didn't see anything, and I
try to keep my mind centered and not distracted. Okay,
so this is kind of a the non task task.
And now it's called the default mode network we're looking
for and it's a circuitry that we should see. These
(24:50):
areas of the brain and a normal person light up,
and these are connected areas that most people's lives are
in this mode because you're kind of daydreaming where you relax.
You know there's there's no task there and and so
a lot of your life is in this mode. And
if you look at the connectivity of this circuit, of
this plus with your limbic system, your emotional parts of
(25:11):
your brain, you can really get an idea on why
somebody is a certain way. You're simply given this task
and it sounds like the way you've described it is
exactly correct. And here's the raw scans. Part of the
raw scans are up here without any processing. So this
is ground truth. And here is your pet skin. Again,
it's not doctored with colors or anything, because usually you
(25:33):
see a pet scan, it's like there's blues and red skin,
and that's made in software and it's kind of fudged
a bit. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's funny. This
is like ground peer truth. And so wherever we see
the dark areas, is he right here? They're dark. That's
what has really turned on in that half hour before
you've got the pet scan. And so here you are,
(25:55):
and here's the normal. And I tried to this morning
try to match them up if I could, And it
turns out yours is completely normal. So this first test
at this is like your your clinical scan is completely normal.
So you don't have any problem in your brain that
anybody can see. And anatomically it's not tumors or anything
(26:18):
like that, and there's no no weirdness at all. It's
completely normal. And now when we looked at this, they
really match up. You look like a completely normal for
this test. So that's amazing, it's amazing normal. Yeah, it
could be disappointed to so I mean, again, this is
not a diagnostic, but you have a quite a normal reaction.
(26:41):
And you see how sort of hot you are down here.
I cannot turn this part of my brain up at all.
So when I do default mode, I can't turn that on.
And so that's a psychopathic pattern. It's normal. And so
(27:02):
after years of wondering if her father's genes had somehow
infected her with the same traits, the same buried evil tendencies,
Melissa could finally breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that
she was another step in the opposite direction of Keith.
(27:23):
The power that he had over me. Now I feel
like he doesn't have any power over me anymore. I
feel like I'm my own person. I feel liberated. I
almost feel like I gotta jail. I feel so much better.
I almost wish I would have done this a long
time ago, that I would have not have been running away,
but I would have never been ready for it. I
don't think like I am now, but I feel amazing.
(27:46):
I feel like I'm my own person and free now.
I'm excited about moving forward in the future like I can.
This is less energy devoted to worry. The energy that
I've been using scared of my connection with my dad
can now be used for something useful and purposeful, and
(28:10):
it gives me everything that I need to just look
to the future instead of the past. If you lost ready,
do you know what I be in a black white?
(28:30):
Do you know what I see? You know what I do,
but you don't know me? You could have that butt
you rather be free? Free? In the final Happy Face,
(28:58):
Melissa comes to are reckoning with her past, her present,
and her future. Happy Faces a production of How Stuff Works.
Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright Pacheco, mangesh at Ticketur,
(29:19):
and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown. Music by
Claire Campbell, Page Campbell and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story.
Editor is Matt Riddle. Audio editing by Chandler Mays and
Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Shacogne. Special thanks to
Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian Newspaper, and the
Carlisle family.
Happy Face Presents: Two Face News
Hosts And Creators
Melissa Moore
Lauren Bright Pacheco
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