The Anatomy of Violence Read online

  Figure 3.6 Jane Toppan

  That moral feeling, centered on the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, is the emotional engine that translates the cognitive recognition that your act is immoral into behavioral inhibition. It holds you back from committing an immoral act, even though a part of you wants to move forward to gain your voluptuous pleasure. I submit that this emotional brake on immorality functions much more poorly in psychopathic individuals like Jolly Jane.

  Jane could look into her victims and literally see them suffer. But what she could not see was her functional brain scan. There I believe she would have seen the faulty emotional wiring of her immoral brain that contributed to her killings. Jane died at the age of eighty-one, just before the outbreak of World War II, so of course I cannot test my theory. Yet if we look back at Jane’s history, we can at least recognize the many social and psychological trappings of a psychopathic personality.

  Jane was born into a desperately poor family of Irish immigrants. Her mother died when she was only a year old, and she clearly suffered from the type of maternal deprivation and breakage of the mother-infant bonding process found in the backgrounds of psychopaths.79 Add to this a poor father who was mentally ill and could not care for his family, and a grandmother equally destitute and unable to care for the children. Jane was institutionalized until the age of five, and passed off as an Italian orphan because of the shame of being Irish. She was “adopted” into a home where she was treated as a servant girl.80 With an early environment like this, the seeds of psychopathy grow rapidly.

  The young Jane duly went on to exhibit the psychopathic traits of being sociable and charming, developing the reputation of being the life and soul of the party. She evidenced pathological lying and deception, weaving fanciful stories of her father living in China, her sister marrying an English lord, and the czar of Russia offering her a nursing position. She was a stimulation-seeker who also committed acts of petty theft against other nurses and patients. She conned and manipulated her hospital superiors. Among her victims were her own stepsister and her stepsister’s husband. She was essentially superficial, with her surface joviality hiding a more disturbed, deep-seated personality disorder.

  All of these characteristics are features of psychopaths,81 and psychopathy provides a fertile ground for serial killers. While Jane gave detailed confessions on thirty-one murders, she claimed before she was locked away, in 1902, “It would be safe to say that I killed at least 100 persons.”82 Unless you are like Randy Kraft, who used a scorecard to keep an accurate tally, it’s easy to lose count.

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH JOLLY JANE’S PSYCHOPATHIC BRAIN?

  So Jane was a psychopath. But would she have the type of brain functioning that might explain her moral insanity? While we cannot scan Jolly Jane’s brain, we can scan the brains of her fellow psychopaths today and put them through the same moral dilemmas given to normal people.

  This is exactly what my gifted graduate student Andrea Glenn did. We’d discovered that temp agencies are home to higher-than-normal numbers of psychopaths, a point we’ll discuss in greater detail in chapter 4. Just like Josh Greene, Andrea confronted our subjects with personal, emotional, and moral dilemmas that involved harm to other people: Should you smother your crying baby to save yourself and other townspeople hiding from terrorists who would otherwise hear the sound and kill you all? We also presented subjects with less emotional, impersonal moral dilemmas: Should you keep money you found in a lost wallet?

  Andrea found that individuals with high psychopathy scores showed reduced activity in the amygdala during emotional, personal moral decision-making.83 While the amygdala, the neural seat of emotion, shows a bright glow in normal people when faced with emotion-provoking moral dilemmas, this emotional candle is barely flickering in highly psychopathic individuals.

  Findings demonstrate that amygdala functioning is disrupted during moral decision-making in psychopathy and seems to be at its core. Without such amygdala activation, individuals may not think twice about conning and manipulating others. Just like Jane, they happily live out their immoral lives without feeling guilt or remorse. So when Jolly Jane manipulated others, stole their possessions, or thought about killing someone for frivolous reasons, she did not have that amygdala activation firing inside her to hold her back—no sense of shame.

  Indeed, Jane’s emotions were almost dead. Like a pathological stimulation-seeker, she was so removed from her natural feelings that she had to go to very extreme lengths to register a tangible feeling of “voluptuous delight.” Consider the killing of Elizabeth, her sister-in-law. Jane confessed that she had deliberately prolonged her life so that she could witness more of her suffering: “I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”84 Cuddling and groping in bed with Elizabeth in the moments of her sister-in-law’s death was just about the only way Jolly Jane could apparently be truly happy, and experience some sense of emotion in her life.

  We know the amygdala is centrally involved in responding to cues of distress in others, thus guiding individuals away from antisocial behavior,85 and we also know from work by the leading psychopathy researcher James Blair that psychopaths are less capable of recognizing negative emotions—including fear and sadness—in others’ faces. So when Jane with her malfunctioning amygdala peered with intense curiosity into her victim’s hapless eyes and felt their bodies, I think she was trying to register an emotion in the face of her victim. Was her patient experiencing fear? Was it sadness? Or perhaps it was pleasure? Jane’s emotional brain and amygdala were desperately stumbling around, trying to work it all out. That voyeuristic experience piqued her curiosity while, simultaneously, she was devoid of any natural feeling that could give her cause for moral concern at what she was doing.

  Andrea Glenn found that the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate, and the angular gyrus were also dysfunctional in psychopaths during moral decision-making and were particularly associated with interpersonal features of the psychopath—superficial charm, lying and deception, egocentricity, and manipulation. These brain areas are also part of the neural circuit of moral decision-making and are involved in self-reflection, emotion perspective-taking, and integrating emotion into social thinking.86 In turn, we can certainly see that Jane’s social thinking was very disturbed. She could not take the emotional perspective of her victims. Try as hard as she might, she could not reflect and understand emotionally even her own behavior—she could not integrate emotion into social thinking. This partly explains her perplexing, psychopathic behavior. And given our brain-imaging findings on psychopaths, I suspect that Jane’s aberrant behavior can be explained by a fundamental failure in the neural circuitry of morality. That’s what I believe was egregiously wrong with Jane’s psychopathic brain.

  PIECING THE BRAIN TOGETHER

  We have seen in this chapter that the violent brain functions very differently from yours. If we had to pick the area of primary difference, it would be the prefrontal cortex. We’ve seen how impulsive, reactive aggression can result from a lack of normal regulatory and inhibitory functioning. We have witnessed this in the reactive, impulsive, hot-blooded homicide committed by Antonio Bustamante. Being more regulated and controlled, proactively aggressive murderers do not have that same degree of prefrontal dysfunction, but like their reactively aggressive counterparts they do have a mass of limbic activity bubbling over in their brains that fuels violent, aggressive outbursts follows their careful planning.

  We’ve also seen that there is not one but multiple brain areas which, when dysfunctional, can predispose one to violence. It’s not just the dorsal and ventral regions of the prefrontal cortex that are dysfunctional, but also the amygdala, the hippocampus, the angular gyrus, and the temporal cortex. Yet future research will show it’s even more complicated. The antisocial brain is a patchwork of dysfunctional neural systems and we are only just on the threshold of putting together these pieces to better understand it.

  We’ve seen that poo
r brain functioning is not restricted to rare forms of violence. We’ve witnessed a frontal-limbic imbalance in relatively common forms of violence like domestic abuse—the overactivation of the amygdala combined with under-activation of the regulatory frontal cortex. Increasingly, the scope of functional brain imaging research is seeping into our personal lives. We are detecting a network of brain areas that unite in shaping the moral decisions we make on a daily basis—brain areas that are just not functioning normally in “morally insane” psychopaths and serial killers like Jolly Jane Toppan. These individuals lack the feeling of what is moral, and that partly accounts for their inexplicably egregious behavior.

  But let’s return to our point of departure. What do we really make of the horrific homicides perpetrated by Randy Kraft? We’ve seen how highly regulated and controlled this computing consultant was. Surely Randy had enough prefrontal control to keep his carnal desires in check. Randy was a heartless, cold-blooded killer—and I mean heartless almost literally. In our next stop through the body in this anatomy of violence we will leave the brain and travel to the heart of the matter—to the cardiovascular and autonomic nervous system.

  4.

  COLD-BLOODED KILLERS

  The Autonomic Nervous System

  Imagine committing a heinous crime that benefits you but brings harm to others. Putting a knife into a hateful husband who beats you. Strangling a belligerent boss at work. Breaking into a house at night and robbing it. Taking revenge on the man who stole your girlfriend. Embezzling millions of dollars from your company. Worse still, abducting, torturing, raping, and killing innumerable strangers, one by one.

  Think hard about it, putting yourself into the actual situation. You’ve been drinking late at night on campus and your passion and mind have gotten out of control. Your girlfriend seemed bored with you, started making eyes at other guys, then gave some lame excuse to go. She jilted you right there at the bar. You’d really wanted sex with her that night and now you feel frustrated and angry.

  You are walking back to your dorm and it’s late at night. Then, not far ahead, you see a pretty student. You increase your pace to catch up, but keep a safe distance and walk softly so as not to make too much noise. As you come to the part of the path that breaks away from the buildings and moves into the trees, shrubs, and bushes, you catch up with her. You look quickly over your shoulder and no one is there. You grab her from behind. You place one hand on her mouth and shove her into the bushes and onto the ground. You take out a knife and threaten to take her life unless she performs specified sex acts with you. You rape her. You can hear and feel her heart beating, loud as thunder in her terror, and it turns you on. Then, with one hand over her mouth, you take the knife and stab her through the heart as you gaze into her eyes to watch her expression of utter and complete fear, see her pupils contract, feel her body writhe, and hear her breathing shorten.

  After committing the crime you attempt to cover your tracks. But the next day the police arrive outside your door. You are arrested. You must create an alibi and stick with it as you are grilled by suspicious authorities, keeping track of the lies, knowing that one false move could send you to the death chamber.

  What’s going on inside you? What’s going on inside an actual perpetrator? I want to argue in this chapter that you and a real-life criminal radically differ—or at least I hope you do. It’s likely that you would perspire and your heart would quicken when you initially contemplated raping that girl, or during the interrogation. You may have been slightly nauseated just reading what I asked you to envision. Even the thought of it probably evoked negative emotions like disgust. But many violent offenders barely break a sweat when they violate the law, no matter how grave the transgression.

  You have a conscience that was prickled at just the thought of committing the act, let alone the actual commission and completion. Others do not. You have a heart, while others are heartless. I’ll argue here that your conscience is predicated on the good functioning of your autonomic nervous system, a part of the body sometimes referred to as the “visceral” nervous system due to its key role in emotion. The most important breakthrough in our understanding of this region of the anatomy of violence is that the nervous system of some offenders is simply not as “nervous” as the rest of ours. It confers on them a fearless, risk-taking, conscience-free personality that can result in criminal, violent, and even psychopathic behavior. They are biologically different from us. At the heart of this autonomic predisposition to violence, to which we first turn in this chapter, is the heart itself.

  It may seem obvious to say that bomb-disposal experts and Theodore Kaczynski have something in common. Ted Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, started off as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, before embarking on his deadly career of violence, from 1978 to 1995. During this time he killed three people and injured twenty-three others with bombs he sent in the mail or placed on planes. His first target was Northwestern University, and then he moved on to the University of Utah, Vanderbilt, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and Yale. He left bombs on an American Airlines flight and sent a mail bomb to the president of United Airlines. His success is marked by his years-long evasion of one of the FBI’s most expensive investigations in its history.

  His big mistake came when he published a 35,000-word manifesto in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He had threatened to kill again unless it was published, and both the FBI and the attorney general acquiesced. The manifesto ranted against industrialized society, leftism, and scientists, and how they were controlling society and restricting freedom. In a flash of bad luck for Kaczynski, his estranged brother picked up the newspaper and happened to recognize some unusual words and phrases, such as “cool-headed logicians.” These phrases were reminiscent of letters he had received from Ted. Sections of the search warrant that allowed agents to search Kaczynski’s remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana, document that even then, many FBI experts didn’t believe that he was the author of the Unabomber manifesto. But all of that doubt was put to bed when FBI agents dropped in on him in 1996 and happened to notice a live bomb on the table together with the manifesto.

  So, outside of the obvious, what would Ted Kaczynski have in common with a bomb-disposal expert? One key trait: in dealing with deadly contraptions both need nerves of steel and a certain degree of fearlessness. One British Army bomb-disposal expert working in Bosnia reflected on his job in this way: “It sounds dangerous but … I’ve not been in any situations where I felt in danger.”1 He is able to put that fear aside. Furthermore, both bomb-disposal experts and serial killers are intelligent. Kaczynski was a child mathematics prodigy who went to Harvard University at the tender age of sixteen. After gaining his PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan, he was welcomed into a professorship at UC Berkeley. His IQ was above the genius level2—he scored 167 at age eleven.3 Despite the despicable nature of Kaczynski’s acts, he, like a bomb-disposal expert, was an intelligent and, in many ways, a highly rational individual.

  But digging a bit deeper into the biology that our “test subjects” share, we find something else in common—a low resting heart rate. Some people kill in such a manner that we call them cold-blooded killers without thinking too much about the term. Yet what if this description turns out to be more literal than figurative?

  HURTFUL HEARTS

  In the anatomy of violence, the heart is a central organ orchestrating the tendency to antisocial and violent behavior. As we so often do in biology, let’s start with animals. Rabbits who are aggressive and dominant indeed have lower resting heart rates than subordinate, nonaggressive rabbits.4 Furthermore, when dominance in these rabbits is experimentally manipulated, heart rate goes down as dominance goes up. The same relationships have been found throughout the animal kingdom in macaques, baboons, tree shrews, and mice.5

  Yet the idea that a low heart rate can raise the odds of someone becoming antisocial and violent may strike you as something too simple
to believe.6 In an age of powerful and sensitive diagnostic tools like functional brain imaging, there is something crude about linking violent behavior with a biomarker that is so astonishingly simple and easy to measure. Does this claim for the biology of crime and violence stand up to serious scientific scrutiny?

  In my first research as a PhD student, at York University, in England, I found that a low resting heart rate characterizes antisocial schoolboys.7 I found the same result when I moved to Nottingham University.8 Maybe it was a fluke? So when I moved to the University of Southern California my colleagues and I conducted a meta-analysis of the heart rate–antisocial relationship. This involved us taking into account all studies we could find that had investigated this issue in child and adolescent samples.9 We found forty publications, involving a total of 5,868 children. Pooling all studies gives you a much clearer view of the true picture.

  What stood out clearly was that antisocial kids really do have lower resting heart rates.10 We also looked at heart rate during a stressor—for example, while the subject was waiting for a medical exam. In the laboratory, kids would be asked to do a difficult mental arithmetic task like counting backward in sevens from 1,000. If you don’t think it’s all that stressful, just try it! In these cases involving stress, the overall differences become even larger.

  In our meta-analysis, resting heart rate explained about 5 percent of the differences between subjects in antisocial behavior. That might not seem like much to you, but put into medical context, the relationship is strong.11 It’s much stronger than the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, or the effectiveness of taking aspirin to reduce the risk of death from a heart attack, or antihypertensive medication and reductions in strokes. Each of these are important and powerful relationships in the medical world, and in each case they are dwarfed by the strength of the heart rate–antisocial relationship.12