Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Child

Due to a strange combination of nature and nurture, some children unfortunately develop into murderers. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian try to understand what causes juvenile homicide, how likely it is and whether these offenders may kill again. Through studies in psychopathy and neuroscience we're looking for an answer to the scariest question: Could my child be a killer?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop work
dot com. Pay you. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert la and I'm Christian saber Hey.
So did you know that you cannot only listen to
us on this podcast, but you can engage with us
on social media and read stuff that we've written, and

(00:25):
watch stuff that we're in. We're all over the place.
We're not just in your earbuds. It's a crazy time
to be alive. Yeah, it is. It is indeed, Uh,
if you follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler, where
we are blow the mind. On all those platforms, we're
curating all kinds of weird science that we're not putting
into the episodes, all the stuff that Robert and Joe
and I find throughout the day that is just utterly bizarre. Uh.

(00:48):
And then we've got videos like our Monster Science series
and lots of blog posts. Robert in particular is profound
and prolific on our blog side. So if you want
to hear more from us about I don't know, music,
Monster science, which would you cook up this week? Um?
I'm actually working on another Higher Human Forms post, which

(01:10):
is a body modification series that I've been doing with
a focus more on uh, sort of religious themes and
body modification and sort of like religious trans humanism. I
can't remember we talked about American Mary before. I think
it may have come up a few times. You've seen it? Yeah, Yeah,
a very interesting horror film. Yeah, great horror movie, really

(01:31):
interesting take on the body modification community. And uh directed
by twin female sisters that just did an excellent job
and co star in the movie. Yeah, and they're Canadian. Yeah,
I forgot about that, right, all right. System. One more
way that you can interact with us, especially if you
want to talk about horror movies, because that seems like
a big thing that goes on there is on Fridays

(01:51):
at noon Eastern Standard time, we are on periscope uh
and basically for you know, twenty minutes, we will sit
there and uh answered questions that you have. Last week,
Joe brought a pretty interesting article about outer space to
the table that we discussed with our fans on there. Uh,
and we'll tell you, you know, some kind of behind
the scenes stuff too, like what we're recording that week,

(02:14):
what what kind of you know things are coming up
on the show and Vice versa. But in this episode
we are discussing UM an interesting and troubling topic and
UH and then that is the idea of psychopathy in
children and UH an adolescence. UM. This is I definitely

(02:34):
want to preface here that that I I am particularly
I'm approaching this UH topic not only is someone who
just finds the trope itself kind of fascinating from a
cultural standpoint. You know, you can't get away from the
killer child, the terrible Tieu child, the what the the infant.
It's a it's a trope I guess or archetype that

(02:57):
I think is like ingrained into human culture. The fear
of our own children come for us. And and as
a father now I have to say I feel a
lot of that, you know, I mean you when you
have this strange creature becoming more and more human and
your your life, you think about that you can't help
but worry about about all the things that could go
wrong um or or you know, all the problems that

(03:20):
could arise. And so I definitely want to to drive
home that that's in my mind the whole time. So
I don't want anyone to come into this thinking that
we're gonna take a real callous approach to it that
we're all just about, you know, talking about horror movie
tie ins for the topic, because obviously it's a very
it's a very sensitive issue and if anyone out there
who is planning to have children already has a child

(03:40):
and watching that child developed, that this is something that
could topic that could produce a fair amount of anxiety. Yeah,
but I also think to like from reading the literature,
that there's a lot to be learned here too if
you're a parent, right both about Uh, we're definitely going
to be talking about nature, not versus nurture, but and
nurture they're working together here, right, And there's things to

(04:02):
look out for. But there's also ways techniques of parenting
that work especially well, especially if you know, you think
that your child may have the traits of being callous
or unemotional in the way that we're going to describe
here that subsequently lead to some of these attacks. Yeah.
I do want to say the original idea for this
did come from our October marathon of doing things that

(04:25):
were kind of related to Halloween, and it was just
one of the things that I couldn't get in under
the deadline. I was thinking about the premise of Michael
Myers and the Halloween movies, which is that he was
a kid who killed members of his family, was taken
away to a mental asylum for that and when he
was like nine years old or something like that. Uh,

(04:45):
and and then subsequently grew up escaped and you know
it was a serial killer. Yeah, but he's just essentially
a black hole of of emotion. Yeah. And so what
I wanted to look into there was is that actually possible?
Is Michael Meyer the the idea there of a child
first of all of a and it's hard to find

(05:07):
this under search term, but the term that's used clinically
is juvenile homicidal offender because when you type in child killer,
it usually is associated with people who kill children, not
children who kill um. And so I was looking to see,
you know, what's the likelihood of this actually happening. And
then also, you know, in the case of the Michael

(05:27):
Myers myth, what's the recidivism look like? So when these
children are released as adults, you know, what what do
their lives look like? Yeah? And ultimately we're also going
to discuss the bright side and some of the treatment
options that are becoming available that are showing promise because
it's easy to get hung up on just the trope,
right on the idea of the oh, this is a

(05:49):
bad seed, this child is just a black hole of
emotion and there's no altering that. But that's the myth
and that's what the media loves to grab onto anytime
we have one of these incidents happen, especially in the
United States. And it's way more complex than that, right.
The thing that's really interesting is, like you said, like
as we study this further and further and understand the

(06:10):
biology behind it, we also find it really interesting ways
to treat it. So just to get out of the way.
Some of the more common versions of the trope of
the bad seat trope that we see, um, you have
a Damien from the Omen, that's a big one, the
kids from the Village of the Damned. Um, there's the
Bad Seat itself, which was the ninety six theatrical film,

(06:32):
uh and a TV movie. And five you have the
good Son, you have the Ring. You have Peter Wiggin
and or some Scott Cards enters game who like to
torture animals and physically and mentally tormented siblings and the
animals thing is real as well as we'll talk about
there's a there's a murderous newborn in Ray Bradberry's short
story Small Assassin. Uh, there's the young Tom Riddle and

(06:55):
Harry Potter, of course. Uh, there's Aaliya and Dune. There's
a Mordred to Shame and Stephen King's at Dark Towers series.
You could probably count Stewie Griffin. Um. But but yeah,
so we have this trope of this child that is
just unredeemably bad, that that that is that is evil
in a in some inhuman way, generally with some sort

(07:16):
of magical scenario backing up whither that way. I think
it's particularly helpful actually here to use Halloween and John
Carpenter's vision for Michael Myers as what isn't happening? That's
the fantastic version, right, and that John Carpenter is always
referred to that character as the shape. Right. He's not human,

(07:38):
it's he's not a product of upbringing or things, you know, uh,
mental problems necessarily as much as it's just a body
full of evil. Right now, Rob Zombies version that ultimately
changes that in the remake, we don't really need to
go down that Rabbit hole. But but I think that
it's important to say that's not what's going on here

(08:01):
with children who do kill, right, and and just to
get it out of the way, psychopathy in general, like
what is the psychopath? The psychopath demonstrates significantly reduced empathy
with the feelings of others, uh, and supporting the theory
that this uh, that this deficit makes it easier for
them to inflict pain on victims their mirror neurons or

(08:21):
two out of whack for them to feel their victims pain,
making the most you know, cold blooded of homicides a
little a little easier to to to commit. So it uh,
it has to do with a lack of empathy and
a callousness in nature. But it's it's a a neurological
condition and certainly not some sort of supernatural occurrence. So

(08:43):
let's get this out of the way to start off
with and answer you know what my initial question was,
which is really how likely are juvenile killers? And in fact, uh,
the U. S. Department of Justice has plenty of statistics
about this on their website, so you can go there
and find this. But I'll share a couple of with
you here that I think are important The first is
that in so that's as far back currently as our

(09:06):
our data shows. Uh, the known juvenile offenders that were
involved were in six hundred and ten murders in the US,
and so that sounds like a lot, I know, but
that represents seven percent of all known murder offenders from
that time, so it is relatively small. Actually. Also, as
of the number of juvenile homicidal offenders is at its

(09:30):
lowest level in thirty four years since we started tracking this,
which is pretty wild. Uh. And in fact, I really
recommend going to the to the Department of Justices site
and looking at the charts that they have built out
of this, because apparently the real spike for this was
in the nineties, UH and ninety four were particularly bad,
and you just see this huge spike. But we are

(09:51):
right now, as we're recording this episode, at an all
time low, or I guess all time in terms as
long as they've been recording it. UH. Homicide offending also
increases with age, so it's less likely that it's going
to happen if you are, say, under fifteen years old.
Only ten percent of the offenders were under fifteen, whereas

(10:13):
seventies six of them were sixteen or seventeen years old.
And in my mind when I was thinking about this,
I was thinking more along the lines of like preteens, juveniles,
like under thirteen. I guess, um, and that does happen,
but it is again significantly small. In the Justice Department
released information saying that twenty nine children under the age

(10:34):
of fourteen, So this is more along the lines of
what I was thinking had committed homicides that year. And uh.
The other interesting thing is that the victims are more
likely to be acquaintances. So as of data, thirty seven
percent of them were acquaintances, while twenty percent of them
were total strangers. So the idea of a young child
going completely psycho and murdering a total stranger is rare

(10:59):
and unlikely. Now, male juvenile homicide offenders varied substantially, but
female juvenile homicide offenders have a steady rate um accounting
for a very small share. Less than one hundred were
implicated in homicide since two thousand two, and in two
thousand twelve, of the eight thousand, five fourteen people arrested
for murder in the US, only one was a girl

(11:22):
under thirteen. In two thousand thirteen, the number was is
to at its lowest since at least nineteen eighty and
there is no evidence that homicide among young girls is increasing.
And this is uh, I think important to note because
as some of our listeners will probably have immediately come
to mind, I believe it was in well it's related
to the creepypasta episode. Yeah it was, I can't remember,

(11:48):
but uh, you know, two young girls who were fascinated
with the creepy pasta stories about Slenderman tried to murder
one of their peers. Uh, and we're unsuccessful. But that story,
like you know, when for these stories pop up, scared
a lot of people and made them think, oh my god. Uh,
look at this, this evidence that young girls are becoming murderers,
and in fact, that's not the case if you look

(12:09):
at all the data. The other important thing to remember
here to data wise, is that a lot of this
activity happens in groups. Remember that I mentioned that it
was two girls in the slender Man case. Wasn't just
one girl on her own. About half of the number
of homicides committed by known juvenile offenders as of involved
multiple offenders, So that's important to realize. You know, children

(12:31):
are more likely We've all been kids. And even if
you're a child, if you're under fourteen listening to this
show right now, you know you're more likely to do
things that you together than you would alone. I'm sure.
I well, I know I did things that I regret
that I have done on my own that I did
with a group of friends. Yeah. So it's easy to
imagine us in any variety of scenarios in which a

(12:54):
younger individual is just roped into some sort of horrible
situation with older children. Yeah. And you know, the kids
can kind of ramp one another up in this exactly,
it becomes reality through them talking, and then ultimately peer
pressure leads to these risky choices. And many children don't
even really understand what dead means. You know, a lot

(13:16):
of the kids that are interviewed after they commit these murders,
they don't understand that this is a permanent thing. They
think of it as sort of being magical. Uh. So
that's important to remember as well too, that there's a
lack of understanding here of of the crime that's being committed.
Uh And and lastly, before we get into the you know,
the meat behind what's going on inside juvenile homicidal offenders.

(13:40):
It's important to note that in June of the Miller
versus Alabama case that was heard by the Supreme Court
ultimately decided that juvenile murders did not have to serve
their lives in jail for crimes. The tight decision was
a five four decision in which they chose to ban
mandatory life sentence says of life imprisonment for juvenile offenders.

(14:04):
So now as as as of that, uh, you know,
a decision there can those who are convicted of these
murders have a possibility of eventual freedom. This is in
the US. Mind you that, you know, this stuff happens
in other countries as we'll talk about as well, but
you know, we're here in America. A lot of the
research was done in America. So that's, you know, what
I'm going to base our information off of. As of

(14:25):
right now, the Supreme Court is waiting to hear Montgomery
versus Alabama, which is another UH case that will basically
see whether or not they can apply this retroactively, meaning
that children who were in prison for life for murders
before the twelve decision will eventually be able to be released. Yeah,
and obviously it's It's such a tough situation to weigh

(14:48):
in on because you you're ultimately dealing with adults and
and trying to figure out how to treat this adult
who in their youth, in their childhood even uh committed
a fact but before they actually were fully formed as
if an individual. So there's a few examples here that
let's get out of the way of just you know,
known cases where this has happened that have been popularized. One,

(15:11):
obviously the you know Michael Myers being the inspiration for
looking into this research, is a guy named Edmund Kemper.
There's also a person who is known only as girl
A in Japan. She was uh fourteen years old and
killed in eleven year old in Japan in n and
mounted his head outside their school. So when this happened,

(15:34):
the country's parliament actually lowered the age of criminal responsibility
from sixteen to fourteen. So you can see how these
singular incidents, which are horrible, by the way, I get
a lot of press coverage and then it becomes an
issue for politicians to exact exactly. So we've seen just
in the last you know, five minutes, how both Japan
and the United States have changed their laws based on these.

(15:56):
There's a slender man girls that we were talking about earlier.
And one thing I'd like to mentioned here just as
an anecdote. I don't want to dive into that whole affair,
but that one psychiatrists interviewed one of the children who
was responsible. She said that she believes in unicorns, that
she can communicate with Lord Voldemort and the teenage muntant
Ninja turtles. And she also believes that she has the

(16:17):
ability of vulcan mind control. So that helps you to
kind of put into place here. This is a child
who's fantasizing about things. I don't think that she quite
understood what was going on. Yeah, I mean she this
seems to illustrate a real inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Yeah.
And one last example that I want to throw out there,

(16:37):
especially because um one of our fans UH mentioned it
on Facebook earlier this week, is Mary Flora bell Uh.
In nineteen sixty eight, she strangled two young boys when
she was a child. She took a new name and
started her life over when she was released from prison
in the nineteen eighties. I believe that she's British, UM,

(16:58):
so that would explain why you know, she was released.
She and her daughter she now has a daughter, were
promised a lifetime of anonymity, and this is now referred
to over there as a Mary Bell order. So basically,
if you commit a crime as a child and they
you know, deem that you're able to be released, you
are and you can live your life in anonymity if

(17:19):
you so choose so that you don't have to you know,
have that hanging over your head. I guess now from
from some of the readings I had about Mary Bell,
apparently she was somehow involved in a book about her
life and received money for it, and that somehow subsequently
let her daughter know about her past actions. So there

(17:39):
was a little bit of conflict there and a little
bit of controversy about the fact that she was being
paid to talk about these horrible acts that she had done.
So obviously with as with any topic dealing with with childhood,
this is a big there's a big discussion of nature
and nurture here, like how much of this is genetics,
how much of this is just uh, you know, tendencies

(18:00):
that are going to be inherent in you as a person,
and then how much of it is the nurturing. How
much of it is is that the level of attention,
the level of of of parental presence and parental guidance
that are present there Where, Where does this behavior emerge from?
And how can either side of the scenario curve it.
There's a quote from a book about this that I

(18:23):
want to use as sort of a guiding principle for
us going forward. It's almost like a thesis statement of
what I think that the data and research reveals. And
it's by Deborah Niehoff. She's the author of a book
called The Biology of Violence. And her quote is behavior
is the result of a dialogue between your brain and
your experiences. So it's not just your biology and it's

(18:44):
not just your experiences. It's those two interacting together. Uh.
And we you know, I remember, especially in school, often
being told about the nature v. Nurture argument, you know,
most like a Supreme Court Supreme Court case, which one
is and it's both, especially in this situation. Um, So
think about it this way. Childhood development essentially works like this.

(19:07):
In our preteen and teenage years, both girls and boys
develop intense social relationships. Especially when we're adolescence, we like
to you know, become independent, and we feel everything really intensely. Right.
What's going on there is that our prefrontal cortex, is
the part of our brain that's in charge of critical thinking, judgment,
and deliberation hasn't fully developed. In fact, like even when

(19:30):
we're adolescence. You know, some of us like to think
of when I was fifteen, I was basically an adult
or whatever. I don't know. I don't want to look
back that I was an idiot. But uh uh, that's
essentially what's going on. Our brains are still developing, so
there's lots of room for how they develop, right. Uh.
And one of the quotes about this from a researcher
looking into it said, it's like they're in a muscle

(19:52):
car without breaks. I like that analogy. That's that's what
high school felt like for me. That sounds I mean,
it's easy to forge it. Just how much is going
on in the high school mind. Um, it seems like
so high schoolers can seem so alien. Teenagers can see
seems so alien, and in a sense they are like
they're they're they're thinking and changing, uh, in some very

(20:13):
dramatic ways. National Institute of Health Projects scanded over a
hundred teen brains as well as some younger individuals and
some older ones. And they found that as we grow,
our brains undergo just massive reorganization between our twelfth and
twenty five year That's crazy to think, like, even up
until twenty five, we are still maturing and developing. Yeah,

(20:33):
I mean and my I look back and I'm like, yeah,
that that totally totally at least being older than now. Yeah,
I can definitely look back. I remember being twenty five though,
and thinking like I got this under control, totally didn't. Yeah.
I've seen it described as a slow wave. Uh. And
subsequent imaging work has has shown that these the physical changes,

(20:54):
they all start in the brain's rear and they moved
towards the front from areas close to the brain. Still
that that look after older, you know, more basic primal functions, uh.
And then move forward through our our ability to process
all that stimuli. And then during this period two you see, um,
you see this idea that that the teenage brain also

(21:15):
is going to be super obsessed with making social connections
with other individuals. Um. And I've seen this argued is
kind of an evolutionary advantage to where the teen is
has evolved to leave um it's family and find a
home with new people. And therefore the brain is looking
for that example, and it's willing to take more risks

(21:36):
in order to carry it out. This brain development is
definitely something that I have to wonder if it's more
recent for humanity in that like that we're developing up
until the age of I mean that somewhat makes sense
for us now, and that like we don't in our
current culture in America, we don't consider ourselves quote adult
until we're eighteen, right, but like uh, responsibilities of children

(22:03):
in much earlier ages, even just going back to the
medieval age, we're so much earlier. You know, I wonder
if over time that there was a gradual progression of
getting to this point where the brain was allowed to
develop more and more and more as we got older,
or you know, you can think of it in terms
of something like a butterfly. All the stages that take

(22:23):
place in order to reach that point where a butterfly
is just around to to breed and do its thing
and die. So you could say that really past twenty
five or not too much past twenty five is just
kind of extra time. Uh, just the you know, the
landingstrip everything we got after. That's why after twenty five
you're like a village elder. Yeah. Yes, that's scary, isn't it. Yeah,

(22:49):
But I mean the bottom line is that, yeah, a
ton of of of mental development takes place during this
time span. And uh and the brain of the child,
the brain of the team even know on up in
year old, is a different beast than the adult brain. Yeah. Absolutely.
So let's get into psychopathy then, specifically in kids, right,

(23:11):
So right up front, I want to distinguish like psychopathy
and being psychotic are two totally different things. We are
talking about psychopathy and psychopaths today, and there's also those
are basically the same thing as sociopathy, right, So when
these terms are thrown around, it's important to remember that

(23:32):
that there's there's a difference here. But so it gets
back to what we were talking about earlier. They referred
to in some corners as see you kids, right because
their callous and unemotional. H they show a little empathy
for others or remorse for their own actions, and like
you said earlier, they're prone to violence. Yeah. And the
c U thing I think is important to when it
comes to labeling, so that in the treatment of these

(23:53):
children who have something other than psychopath to throw around,
which is such a loaded, superloaded and it's especially uh,
you know, just to have to be a parent and
to have that term applied to your kid is terrifying,
not only because of you know, the implications, but also
because that is a label that is going to determine

(24:15):
the outcome of their life. And I think the research
is showing more and more that psychopathy is it's not
that that situation where oh, this this child has the
mark and this one present, but rather they're varying levels.
There's a spectrum upon which vast majority of people are
going to pop up in a lot of ways. I
saw it compared in the literature to both autism and
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and not that there are similar

(24:39):
things going on in the brain, in fact, they're not,
but but that, like you said, there's gradations, uh, and
there's different ways in which that affects the person's ability
to interact with their community, right. Uh. But at the
same time, there are also different and growing ways to
treat and uh, not cure necessarily, don't think that's the

(25:00):
right word, but to to help these children grow out
of it, right, So how do they figure that out.
They've got a couple of different tools that are essentially
tests that they give them. One is the Inventory of
Callous Unemotional Traits. I really wish we had access to
one of these, uh we could have taken before the beast,

(25:21):
because I I have to wonder if I where I
would uh score on these. The other is the Child
Psychopathy Scale, and then they use a modified version of
a test for adults. It's called the Antisocial Process Screening Device.
So all these are various, i think written in oral
tests that essentially tell psychologists, you know, kind of where
on the spectrum these children fall. Now, this is a

(25:43):
crazy statistic right here. A recent estimate by the neuroscientist
Kent Keel placed the national cost of psychopathy this is
in the US at four hundred and sixty billion dollars
a year. That's ten times the cost of depression. And
the reason why is because in part, psychopaths tend to
be arrested repeatedly, So that leads us to you know,

(26:07):
we're jumping ahead a little bit, but that insinuates that
there's a bit of recidivism that goes on here. So
setting Aside the examples you've seen in movies and whatnot,
here's some actual examples of this kind of behavior one
might encounter with with cu kids. So cows and emotional
children tend to be highly manipulated. Um. And again this

(26:29):
is this is one of those situations where you can
look at any child and you can see levels of manipulation.
So it's it's easy to get carried away in uh
in diagnosing the children in your life, trying to get
that cookie right, kind of manipulate a parent into letting
them do this or that. Yeah. And I would imagine
too that there are times, not being a parent myself,
but I would imagine there are times when you are

(26:50):
a parent that your patients is running thin, and you
might be more prone to just say, wait a minute, yeah,
I gotta get this little psychopath to me a psycho path. Yeah.
So you kids also may lie frequently, uh not, just
to avoid punishment, as all children will. That's important to
distinguish or to just get out of brushing their teeth.

(27:13):
Your kids lie, Yeah, It's like it's like something out
of the wire, like all children lie. Yeah, I mean
the power of discovering the lie, you know, the almost
magical nature of it. You can say a thing and
in doing so kind of make it true. Like that's
big magic, even as an adult and as a kid
all the more. But with see you children, there's going

(27:34):
to be more likelihood that they're just gonna lie for
the sake of line for no reason. Um, you're gonna
see poor impulse control and I should probably just go
ahead drive home. The impulse control is something that that
you see sort of gradually come online as well. Yeah,
it's gonna vary from child the child, but generally speaking,
the younger the child, the less impulse control. Uh. And

(27:55):
then as they can fell up, it's going to improve.
That makes sense. Yeah, by generally by age fifteen, Um,
a an individual taking an impulse control test are going
to be able to do as well um as as
an adult about of the time. Um, if they're applying
themselves and you know and thinking about it. Um. But

(28:18):
with with see you kids in particularly poor impulse control, also,
you're gonna see see that they're unrepentant in their behavior.
They're they're not gonna you know, cave and say they're
sorry about something. And like adult psychopaths, they can seem
to lack humanity for you know, for to an outside observer,
they might they might seem like that Michael Myers kid. Um.

(28:41):
But of course there's a lot more going on. Yeah. Absolutely,
So I'd like to add here before we go on
that a really great piece that we found for the
literature for this episode was in the New York Times
magazine actually, and it was published in the article is
called can you Kill Sorry? And you call a nine
year old psychopath? And I posted it to our Facebook

(29:04):
page this week, but you can easily google that if
you want a really fascinating long form read that this
journalist embedded herself in a family with a child I
can't remember how old he was, but who was diagnosed
as being see you, potentially a psychopath and was actually
attending a I don't know what school isn't the right word.

(29:26):
It was like a center. It was more of a
like a summer camp program, a summer program, it was
kind of it was an offshoot of a program aimed
at children with autism, and this was in this branch
of the camp was aimed at children see you kids. Um. Yeah,
the piece and we're discussing here is excellent, Uh, and
it really puts a human face on absolutely, it goes,

(29:50):
it goes very in depth into the experiences of this
child's mother and father, uh and and also his siblings
as well as well as into the data and talking
to psychologists. I just I was very impressed with the
work in there. Yeah. Incidentally that the camp that we're
talking about was held by a Florida International University. Yeah,

(30:10):
And speaking of the heredity of the kid, we kind
of come back to the nature side of it here
and heredity, the heridability of callous and emotional traits might
be as high as eight percent and if and from
that piece, what I remember is they spoke to his
father and the father said, Yeah, when I was a kid,
I also had social issues. I also was unemotional and unresponsive,

(30:34):
but I grew out of it. Yeah. And in the
piece they also quote to produce psychologist Donald Line them
and he points out that it's no higher than the
Herida heritability for anxiety and depression, and both of those
conditions have large genetic risk factors, but of course we
can we can treat them. And so the idea, the
idea here is that there's there's a lot of a

(30:55):
lot of hope and a lot of data that supports
the notion that this is treatable as well. This is
not um, you know, cosmic black mark on an individual
that can't be addressed. Right, absolutely, even though it sounds
like it. Again, I think there's a stigma attached to
the word psychopath, right Um. In fact, I almost think
that it would benefits psychology to come up with a

(31:18):
different term. And maybe that's why they use see you kids.
You know, yeah, definitely, um, because because it doesn't cling
to this kind of outdated notion that you know, that
it can't be treated, that it can't be cured. And
we're seeing more and more research that shows that yes,
there are ways there, there are treatments that can work
with adults, even to um to bring some level of

(31:40):
compassion online. Whereas the term psychopath implies culturally, this child
is evil, nothing will do anything about it. Well, and
so we talked about how it's assessed, but you know,
I threw out those tests earlier. But in fact, there's
no standard way to just figure this out. Uh. In fact,
some psychologists believe that it's a distinct neural logical condition, uh,

(32:01):
and that you know, maybe we'd be able to identify
it and children as young as five years old. But
it's difficult, right, especially because their brains are still developing,
and because normal behavior at these ages can sometimes be
misinterpreted as psychopathic. I could totally see that. My my
interactions with under five year olds is limited. But you

(32:23):
have quite a few. Yeah. Yeah, it's like I say,
there there are days when you think of they're all
complete psychopaths, but really, yeah, they're they're kids sor right.
While you may have a genetic disposition for these behaviors,
childhood trauma and a lack of connection with other people
helps bring them out. Okay, So this is the nurture

(32:45):
side of the angle. This is the experiences side of it.
So psychologists try to work on intervention with kids who
have early signs of psychopathy so that they can prevent
those experiences from exacerbating it. So, yeah, we think that
there's a genetic component that's involved. You're in antisocial personality disorders,
but depending on how we grow up that can either

(33:05):
exaggerate those problems or help us straighten them out. That
that's the terminology that that some people use straighten it out.
I think the idea was that sort of like a
rubber band right in adults. Real life psychopathy doesn't always
lead to violence either too, so that's important to distinguish.
Some successful members of society would be deemed psychopaths if

(33:27):
they were assessed by a clinician. In fact, this reminds
me our colleagues that stuff they don't want you to know.
Did a video one time on I believe it was
on corporate CEOs and the psychopathy scale and where they
would fall on it, and in a lot of times
I believe the thesis of their video, who is that? Yes, uh,
those who tend to be successful also tend to be

(33:49):
to rate as psychopaths. It reminds me of the study
that we were talking about in our episode on the
Ignoble Prizes about CEOs who had experienced disastrous natural disasters
where um, where there were fatal incidents and those who
hadn't uh seen those repercussions were more likely to take risk. Yeah,
so you have the idea that the CEO themselves is

(34:11):
a psychopath. The I think, of course, studies would say
that a company as a whole is essentially a psychopath,
and it's it's policies and it's treated as a person
as treated as a person and U. Yeah, And on
top of that, I feel like that the more you
read about actual psychopathic traits and and and how actual
sociopaths function, you begin to just see more and more

(34:32):
of them around you in your tailor life. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.
And and here's the thing too, especially if you're a parent.
So some parenting can actually make child psychopathy worse. And
it depends on how you're parenting, right, So, uh, you know,
some psychologists say that by punishing your child for behaving
violently or callous lee, that actually leads the child to

(34:55):
acting out in even more extreme ways. And in that
New York Times article certainly saw that with the child
that was the case study there. But there's therapies for
intervention and therapies that can kind of help parents out too, uh,
sometimes starting as young as when the child is two
years old, which kind of blows my mind because I
can't imagine being able to diagnose a two year old

(35:17):
with this. But it is very difficult to identify, not
just in at risk children, but especially because they haven't
started socializing yet, right, So it's only up until they
start socializing that you're gonna start seeing the callousness and
the unresponsiveness. UM. And also, like as we talked about earlier,
kids with autism or a d h D maybe similarly antisocial,

(35:39):
but that's a whole totally different kind of brain structure.
So there's screening tests, there's the oral and written tests
that we talked about, uh, and they'll help a clinician
identify psychopathy, but there's still a lot of complications involved.
And lastly, I just say that parents who are withdrawn
or remote are also risking shaping a child shuts down emotionally.

(36:01):
And this is difficult when you think about the hereditary aspect, right,
because if a parent had some unemotional, potentially callous behaviors
in their nature, then it's going to be even more
difficult for them to be interactive and not shut down
emotionally with your children. Right. So it's sort of a

(36:22):
you know, this is a silly term, but it's a
vicious cycle. Yeah. I mean because if the if the
nature is already skewing psychopathic, uh, then the nurture is
likely going to as well from the parent contributing to
those genes. Yeah. So uh, in the same way that
punishment can contribute to it. And neglect can also contribute
to it that it can actually impair cortex development. And

(36:46):
this is the stuff that controls the feelings or belonging
an attachment in our brains. And that is a perfect
segue into talking about brain anatomy. But first, let's take
a quick break. We'll be right back. All right, we're back.

(37:07):
So according to m R I scan, psychopaths tend to
have smaller sub genial cortex, five percent reduction in brain
density and parts of the paralympic system that's where empathy
and social values and moral decision making takes place. And
this includes the orbitofrontal cortex UH and the call date.
These are all critical for reinforcing positive outcomes and discouraging

(37:30):
negative outcomes. So this gets down to just the basic
uh principles of why do I behave the way that
I behave? What's what's encouraging me to do the right
thing and feel responsible from actions? Yeah, it really made
me consider, huh, like I wonder what the shape of
my brain is and how it's contributing to my behaviors

(37:50):
and characteristics and things like that. It's it's not something
that we usually is human beings going to back up
and think about you know, it's difficult to do right
viewed into that whole blind brain idea that the brain
can't really perceive itself and we're trying to two. We
can't stand on the outside of self and look in uh,
so we have this kind of backdoor mirror way of
trying yeah, yeah, which is often distorted. So there's one

(38:16):
really great study that I think contributes to the dialogue
about children with psychopathy, specifically juvenile homicidal offenders and how
the biology is working here. And this came out in
It was published in NeuroImage Clinical volume four, and the
article has a ton of authors, so I'm not going

(38:37):
to list them all, but it was called Abnormal Brain
Structure and Youth who commit Homicide. So essentially, this group
of researchers looked at young incarcerated homicidal offenders uh and
they found that they have reduced gray matter volumes in
their medial and lateral temporal lobes, including the hippocampus and

(38:58):
the posteer insula. And this is relative to compared youth
who are not homicidal offenders. So from this we know
that their brains are shaped differently and they have less
gray matter. That's the essential discovery here. The growing research
indicates that the temporal polls are responsible, that these are
the areas where there is less gray matter for social

(39:19):
and emotional processing. And this included detecting deception and moral
decision making, as well as inferring the emotional states of others.
So that makes sense in terms of thinking about the
traits of psychopathy that we talked about earlier. So these
are the regions of your brain that cover critical cognitive
control and emotion. And they cited some other studies here too.

(39:42):
One was that mail youth with conduct disorder had reduced
gray matter in their left amygdala and interior insula compared
to the healthy control subset, and these reductions were related
to aggressive behaviors. And yet another study adolescent males with
conduct disorder had reduced gray matter in the left orbital

(40:04):
frontal cortex and bilateral temporal lobes, as well as the
left amygdala and the hippocampus. So all of this together
is kind of saying, all right, they had previously looked
at boys with conduct disorder. They had looked at, um,
you know what kind of gray matter they were missing,
And they said, well, wait a minute, conduct disorder seems

(40:25):
to be connected to homicidal incidents with juveniles, Is the
same thing going on there? And yes it is. It's
less gray matter, it's just in different parts of the
brain essentially. So in this specific study, the way that
they analyzed the brain structure was they took youth who
committed homicides and they did m R I scans on them,
and they introduced the following variables into their data set.

(40:47):
They added their i Q, their age at the time
of scan, the number of traumatic brain injuries they had
received with a loss of consciousness. They used a test
for psychopathy called the Hair Psychopathy Test List, and they
used the quote youth version. I guess there's separate versions
depending on how old you are, whether or not these
kids had substance dependences, the years of regular substance abuse

(41:12):
that they had, and what their psychiatric diagnoses and violent,
non violent drug and total other convictions were. So all
of these things combined right now. Like I said, prior
work showed that there was reduced temporal pole gray matter
that was related to psychopathic traits. But the interesting thing
in this particular study is that the homicide group and

(41:32):
the non homicides subsample did not differ in psychopathic traits
per the scores that they took on that test there
that I mentioned earlier, the psychopathy, the hair psychopathy youth version.
So they, the authors of the studies say there is
no observation that can be made that psychopathy is involved here. Right,

(41:53):
We can't we can't say that. What we can say
is that juveniles who commit murder have less of the
gray matter. Okay, so yeah, it becomes the increasingly more
difficult to try and say this, this is the brain
of a homicidal young offender. This it's far more complicated
than me. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, uh And but here's the

(42:13):
good news. Other research has shown that our gray matter
is malleable. Right, So one study shows that fifteen minutes
of daily mirror reading for two weeks can increase the
dorsolateral occipital gray matter. That's fascinating to me that just
by doing that you can change the shape of your
brain or the volume of Yeah. So it's possible that

(42:36):
through cognitive training like this or possibly you know, uh,
pharmaceutical interventions or therapy or other types of behavior modification,
that you can help these kids to develop out of
these behaviors that could potentially lead to them killing someone. Now,
there does seem to be a link between low levels
of cortisol and below normal function of the amygdala. That's

(42:58):
the part of our brains the processes fear and shame.
So usually we want to avoid these sensations, and that
plays a big role in our behavioral motivation. So it
gets down at route to just how our brains function
uh in the in the face of fear and shame,
and how how much of our behavior is aimed at
avoiding those sensations. So when researchers have looked specifically at

(43:23):
areas of the brain that are associated with fear and empathy,
they found a couple of things. Sheila Hodgkins or Hodgens,
she's a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal.
She conducted experiments. You know, a lot of this comes
down to basically m r I scans uh. And in
this case, she did MRI I scans on adult psychopaths.
I don't believe that they are homicidal offenders. Uh, And

(43:45):
she found that even if they're non violent, their brains
are different. UH. They have abnormal connections between their posterior
singulate and the insular cortex. Similar structures were found in
preteon preteen boys with callous unemotional dates. So I believe
that that's referring to those other studies before, the one
looking specifically at juvenile homicidal offenders. Um. But these brains are,

(44:10):
like we said, they're malleable, they're highly plastic. Uh, kids
can grow out of these Remember what we were talking
about earlier. I mean, we're our brains are developing until
we're twenty five years old. Like, this is something we
we can take action. Yeah, it's it's worth remembering that
in a Clockwork Orange, Alex essentially grows out of his
behavior in the Yeah, I think they left that last
chapter out of the movie. But getting so, okay, we're

(44:31):
talking a lot about the brain part here, right, but
let's remember that there's the nurture part as well. So. Uh,
young brains, especially those from zero to three years old,
are especially vulnerable to hurt. Right, And that's you know,
probably part of why culturally we're so averse to the
idea of anybody hurting Uh an infant or a toddler, right. Uh,

(44:52):
So children who suffer physical abuse, stress, neglect, or terror
can absolutely have changes in their brains. From this, the
flood of stress chemicals resets how the brain is triggered
during fight or flight situations. Right, So in some cases
they'll be triggered too much, in some cases they won't
be triggered at all. Uh, it can lead to impulsive aggression.

(45:15):
So yeah, not abusive parents can lead to youth violence.
That makes sense, right, especially given like I guess, our
world experience. But also remember it's not just abusive parents
doing this. It's also that there's there's something going on
with the brain ahead of time that contributes. And it's
also worth noting that the conditions that we mentioned there
can often line up, unfortunately with institutionalized care in the

(45:39):
form of orphanages, So that's also a factor to take
into account here. And so you know, on the other
end of that, it could lead to antisocial personalities when
the brain system of stress has just become totally unresponsive.
So typically these kind of kids, and I think this
is the uh c U type kids, they have low
heart rates, uh, they have impaired emotional sensitivity. Right. In fact,

(46:02):
Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans,
has studied the risk factors for psychopathy and children for
twenty years. And he described one boy who used a
knife to cut off the tail of their family cat,
bit by bit over a period of weeks. This is
from that New York Times article. In fact, the parents

(46:22):
didn't even notice. It took them quite a long time
because it was so small. I don't think the cat
was like, uh, in pain and letting them know, or
bleeding or something like that. Um. But this gets back
to kind of what we insinuated earlier, is that a
common symptom in these traits of see you kids is
that they will abuse animals. Yeah, and of course it's

(46:42):
important to note to that some level of like if
your child hits the cat or steps on a bug,
a certain level of this is just a natural way
in which a child figures out how pain works, how
the limits of its body and its powers to impact
it's in environmental surroundings, how all of that functions. So,

(47:03):
so don't freak out if you listen to this and
then you you catch a child slapping at the cat.
You know out there you can make judgments about a
childhood me. Uh, but I believe I was like maybe
three or four years old, and I took the family
cat and put him inside my toy chest and just
closed him in there. I mean it was a big chest.
It wasn't like a tiny thing. But I didn't understand.

(47:24):
I was just like, oh, he goes in here now
with the toys, and uh my, my parents are like,
where's the cat, and they find the cat in there,
you know, and uh, I just didn't. I didn't get it,
you know. I I would hesitate to say that at
any point I've been callous or unemotional in my life.
That's probably the opposite. Uh See, we've curved a lot

(47:44):
of that by just having a largely callous in an
emotional cat. So oh yeah, that's perfect. So she lashes
out against our sign and then just bats him occasionally.
Yeah yeah, that's how my cat treats my dog. But
so okay, to be serious about this, Without unconditional love,
children can fail to develop the right neural circuits that

(48:06):
control their capability to feel or form healthy relationships. Uh.
And in particular, this makes them especially hyper sensitive to
perceived injustice uh and also often accompanied by when they're
feeling powerless as well. So we saw that in the
New York Times article. There was a lot of examples

(48:26):
of this with the child Michael that was the case
study in which he perceived an injustice against himself and
he perceived powerlessness, and so he would lash out against
his siblings or he'd lash out against his parents. Are
other kids in the program that he was in. Now,
there's some other brain pathologies that can lead to violence
as well. Lesions of the frontal lobe can induce apathy
and distort judgment and emotion. The singulate gyrus that curves

(48:51):
through the center of the brain is hyperactive in murders
and it just shifts from one thought to another. When
it becomes impaired, people get stuck on one thought comes
in the obsession. The prefrontal cortex is sluggish in murderers
as well, and these damages to the brain can result
from head trauma as well as exposure to toxic substances
like like alcohol, even during the gestation. Okay, so I

(49:14):
think that what we've established up to this point is
that there's a lot of evidence that damage to the brain,
however it occurs, can contribute to this, but that also
experiences in childhood can also contribute not only to your behaviors,
but how your brain is formed. Yeah, the the human
mind is a nature nurture cocktail and a rather complicated

(49:37):
recipe at that there are a number of things that
can throw it off whack. And even if it's off whack,
even if the drink recipe is a little different, it
doesn't mean it's not drinkable. That doesn't mean it can
fully function within society. So now let's let's get to
the third part of the question that I wanted to
answer when we started out on this, which is how
likely is juvenile homicide recidivism? Right? Remember we were talking

(50:00):
at the beginning about that girl uh In in Britain
who had committed murder as a young child in sixties
and then was released and was anonymous Mary Bell and
had a child. In fact, I think she's a grandmother. Now, um,
how how likely is it? You know, in her case
she didn't recede, But what about other children? Well, unfortunately,

(50:24):
this is really hard to predict. In fact, the fourteen
national report from the National Center for Juvenile Justice in
the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention says that
there is no national recipivism rate for juveniles. The reason
why is that each state has a very different juvenile

(50:45):
justice system that differs in organization, administration, and data capacity,
So we can't pull all this data together and make
national judgments on it, is essentially what they're saying. UH.
And in fact, eleven states in the United States don't
even report data on juvenile offenders, so it's really difficult

(51:07):
to make any kind of you know, judgment call in
the United States. But what about other countries. Well, there
is a study out of the Netherlands that indicated that
male juvenile homicidal offenders and those in particular that maintain
relationships with delinquents are at a greater risk for reoffending.
So it is possible. Uh, that is a very different

(51:29):
subsample that's just in the Netherlands, but in that particular study,
they did find that they're at a high rate for recidivism.
So another thing that came out of this New York
Times study was a really interesting UH look into a
researcher named Lee Robbins. He was a psychiatry researcher, and
he conducted a series of studies on children who had

(51:50):
behavioral problems and followed them into adulthood. UH, and his
studies revealed two things. The first was that nearly every
psychopathic a alt was deeply antisocial as a child. The
second was that almost fifty percent of the children who
scored high on measures of antisocial qualities did not go
on to become psychopathic adults. So, in other words, they

(52:14):
were necessary, but not sufficient in predicting who ultimately would
become a violent criminal. So that's good to know. So
these tests don't necessarily indicate if your child and you
score high on them, that you're going to grow up
and become a violent criminal, right, because growing up is key.
There's still so much growing up, so much development to come.
This is not the finished product, all the experiences. Yeah,

(52:35):
and even again, like I keep coming back to that
we're maturing. Our brain is maturing until we're twenty five
years old. That you know, in my experience, that's you
get seven years out of high school where your brain
is still maturing based on whatever experiences you have there. Yeah, totally.
I mean, just it forces you certainly to to reevaluate
your own life up till and maybe make you a

(52:58):
little more compassionate towards the the teenagers in your midst. Now,
I think I understand why in America you have to
be twenty five before you can rent a car. Oh, yeah,
that would make sense giving only full form your organisms.
So one of the big questions of course here is
yet what extent is it treatable? So the big hope here,
and there's some good evidence to back this up, is

(53:20):
that there's still a capacity for empathy uh and it
controlled by specific parts of the brain. Is still exist
in a weakened state, and then they can be strengthened,
especially if we act early enough to we rewire the
developing brain. And this UM, this brings to mind a
couple of studies that I've I've looked at in the past.
There's a two thousand thirteen both were two thousand thirteen studies.

(53:43):
Actually one was published in Frontiers and Human Neuroscience and
the O there's a study from the Social Brain Lab
and of the University Medical Center in uh Growningen uh
and these looked at psychopathic inmates adults, UH and it
looked a treatment opportunity. So the one NUTS and front

(54:03):
Ears and Human Neuroscience that I mentioned, they used f
m r I scans the brains add twenty one medium
security prison inmates during the viewing of painful visual stimuli
stub toes, smashed fingers, that sort of thing, you know,
the kind of stuff that makes you go out. The
researchers then asked the stubdies to imagine the pain happening
to themselves as well as to others. The results will.
When highly psychopathic subjects imagine the pain happening to themselves,

(54:28):
brain regions involved in empathy for pain lit up like
normal in their minds. But when they but when they
imagine the pain inflicted on others, the same regions failed
to activate. And this lines up with that with that
two thirteen study from the Social Brain Lab that they're
finding suggested that to pay the psychopaths, empathic abilities didn't
kick in automatically, but could be turned on by conscious will,

(54:51):
by exercise, by repetition. So both of these studies, it's essentially, Yeah,
it's like it's like a muscle. Think of it is
a muscle that needs to be strengthened as a default
setting that is off rather than on, and there has
to be a little more conscious will and just requires
a little training and moments. Yeah. Yeah, they seem to
suggest that these sort of treatments, these mirror treatments, these

(55:14):
empathy treatments UH are going to show a lot of
promise with the individuals of varying ages the equipment there,
it's just a matter of making sure that it's turning on.
So all right, let's go back to where we started here.
We had three questions. The first was how likely our
juvenile homicidal offenders? How likely is it that there's that

(55:34):
children will kill people? And the answer is not very Yeah,
it's pretty pretty slim. They're blown out in the media
and in our sort of cultural mythology, but realistically speaking,
slim chance. Yeah. And then the second question would be, well,
why is this happening? Why do they do this? And
the answer is that it's a very complicated mixture of

(55:57):
nature and nurture, right, brain act of it, as well
as their experiences and their interaction with their families and peers. Right.
And then the third question was, well, how likely is
it that the very small amount of them UH that
do commit these crimes will recede if they're released from jail,
And the answer is that we don't know, Like maybe

(56:19):
the Netherlands, it seems to be the case that they might,
but u S data is all over the place, So
as of right, now, it's it's really hard to pinpoint
an answer on that one. They're just so many factors involved,
and with each individual, it's not like the psychopath is
like a one clone of another. They're just oh, those
are psychopathic organisms. There. No, it's it's it's it's a

(56:40):
far more complex neurological condition. But so the good news though, is,
like what we were talking about just now and earlier,
the brain is malleable, that our behaviors can be formed
and we can learn to better interact with other human beings.
You know, it's a it's a taught thing, and and
and and the actual activity of doing that sort of

(57:03):
rewires and reshapes things so that it's easier to do. Alright.
So there you have it, Um, the psychopathic child, the
the homicidal child, the callous and emotional child, uh, A
reasonably deep dive into what's going on inside their minds
as far as we can tell, um, and what can

(57:24):
be done to to cope with it. So I guess
the answer to my initial question is of is Michael
Myers possible? Is yes, but not likely. Yeah, sure it
could happen, but it's very unlikely. Now I know, we
have a lot of listeners out there with something to
share about this. We've all had childhood's the number of
people out there have children as well in their life.
Uh so then we may even have some some listeners

(57:47):
who themselves have caluson emotional traits or have children with
cawuson emotional traits. And we would love to hear from you.
And certainly if you want your name to remain anonymous,
just make a note of that and absolutely always respect
with that. Uh. How to get in touch with us, well,
you can always go to stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's where you'll find all of the podcast episodes.

(58:08):
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just write us directly and have us read your mail

(58:30):
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we'd love to do that too. And you can always
reach us at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.

(58:51):
Is that how stuff works? Dot com man fo