Andrew Goldbaum Current Event 18 C Even` 3/8/19

Semple, Jeff. “Former B.C. Student Using Neuroscience to Predict Psychopaths, Serial Killers.” Global News, © 2019 Global News, a Division of Corus Entertainment Inc. Corus News. All Rights Reserved. Powered by WordPress.com VIP, 7 Mar. 2019, 6:05 am, globalnews.ca/news/5029321/neuroscience-psychopaths-serial-killers-explainer/.

In Jeff Semple’s, “Former B.C. student using neuroscience to predict psychopaths, serial killers”, he describes how the ability to predict who will commit violent crimes when people are still children by using neuroscience is within reach. Kent Kiehl, a former graduate student from the University of British Columbia who now works at the nonprofit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, states that his organization now has techniques that can demonstrate how the brains of psychopaths are different from those of normal people. This feat is building on Kiehl’s original studies at UBC. After scanning the brains of 5000 inmates over two decades, the scans revealed that the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala are dysfunctional, and these are the regions of the brain that lead to the feelings psychopaths lack, such as guilt, remorse, and fear. Kiehl explains how these regions of the brain in psychopaths are smaller in volume and contain less tissue than their normal counterparts, so it is in a sense a “weaker muscle” that cannot do the “heavy lifting” that a normal version of these regions can do. Lastly, it is explained how most psychopaths are not killers but are living “normal” lives right in our midst due to their superior ability to blend in with others. Kiehl specifies that it is when psychopathy is combined with other factors, like a traumatic childhood, that they become dangerous people. Lastly, prevention of new crimes is improving, as a therapy clinic for psychopathic young men has reduced reoffending for violent crimes by 50%.

This article does a thorough job explaining the significance of these findings to the world of violent crime prevention: by explaining how 25% of the North American prison population are psychopaths, that psychopaths lack remorse or empathy, and that nearly all psychopaths will commit a crime in the next 10 years, he makes it fairly obvious that the ability to understand the differences in the psychopathic brain so that they can be stopped as children from ever committing a crime will have a sizeable positive impact on society. However, this is not even close to all of the impact brain scanning technologies can make at this level of sophistication. For example, brain scans are being used today to find structural trends in the brains of people with ADHD, depression, autism, and even epilepsy at the Amen Clinic, where I intern. Additionally, sampling many people of a certain neurological disease to find the exact structural differences in their brains will be instrumental in understanding how to more directly understand and treat the disease at the source, and with the ability of AI to pick up even subtler trends (as it did with the glucose levels in Alzheimer’s patients), it will be even easier to notice the exact details of the causes and progression of the disease in question.

I found that this article was overall well written, and it had some very clear strengths and weaknesses. Its strong suits were that it repeatedly emphasized the significance of the findings by describing shocking crime statistics involving psychopaths (ie the ones cited earlier) and that the article was written under the assumption that the average person does not know many fundamental facts about psychopaths and neuroscience, so both the condition of psychopathy and their brain deficiencies were very clearly explained so that the reader is not confused and overwhelmed: for example, what the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex do and what happens to them in psychopaths, the traits that make psychopaths dangerous (ie ability to blend in but lack of conscience) and the differences between the lives of violent and nonviolent psychopaths. However, because so much of the article was basic explanation on psychopaths, very little of it was dedicated to the study itself. For example, the article should have described the kind of brain scans performed and how it works, whether it was assisted by artificial intelligence, the future of brain scans, and what made this particular experiment more able to yield results than other experiments in this subject. Although the article was still interesting nonetheless, it missed the opportunity to describe aspects of the progress in this field that would interest the reader even more than just the profile of psychopaths, which can be looked up elsewhere online, and the findings of the experiment.