_ShotgunJoe_: Dr Fallon is actually faculty at my school – I never met him in person, but the professors in the Neuro department all say he’s a really nice guy.
For one of our classes we watched one of his interviews, and he said the same thing here; most likely the reason he isn’t violent is because his parents loved him and gave him attention as a child. When you look at serial killers, violent offenders, people who fit the bill for psychopathy, they usually (not always) have a history of maltreatment in early childhood.
I think it’s kind of beautiful that love has that power.
kiwijews: >Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind, what he and others call a “pro-social psychopath,” someone who has difficulty feeling true empathy for others but still keeps his behavior roughly within socially-acceptable bounds.
Huh, TIL of pro-social psychopathy.
ZXander_makes_noise: Same guy also took his unwitting brother along on a hike through the Kitum caves in Africa, [the point of origin for the Marburg virus](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how-i-discovered-i-have-the-brain-of-a-psychopath)
TooShiftyForYou: *I asked everybody that I knew, including psychiatrists and geneticists that have known me for a long time, and knew my bad behavior, what they thought. They went through very specific things that I had done over the years and said, “That’s psychopathic.” I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they said, “We did tell you. We’ve all been telling you.” I argued that they had called me “crazy,” and they all said, “No. We said you’re psychopathic.”*
*I said, “Well, I don’t care.” And they said, “That proves that you have a fair dose of psychopathy.”*
Someone who is truly a psychopath would probably not normally realize that they are in fact a psychopath.
[Source](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/life-as-a-nonviolent-psychopath/282271/)
wonderfullypretty: This story also comes up in The Psychopath Test which is an easy to read, comical and enlightening book by Jon Ronson.
darkstarohio: This explains why he constantly looks into the camera and does a fake laugh. It’s to appear normal.
ThePixeljunky: This is why I stay off WebMD
GregConan: Reminds me of the [neurocriminologist Dr. Adrian Raine](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/may/12/how-to-spot-a-murderers-brain):
>When Raine started doing brain scans of murderers in American prisons, he was among the first researchers to apply the evolving science of brain imaging to violent criminality … He conducted PET [positron emission tomography] scans of 41 convicted killers and paired them with a “normal” control group of 41 people of similar age and profile …
>Raine was in part drawn to his discipline by his own background. In the course of scanning his murderers, Raine also examined his own PET profile and found, somewhat to his alarm, that the structure of his brain seemed to share more characteristics with the psychopathic murderers than with the control group.
>He laughs quickly when I ask how that discovery felt. “When you have a brain scan that looks like a serial killer’s it does give you pause,” he says. And there were other factors: he has always had a markedly low heart rate (which his research has shown to be a truer indicator of a capacity for violence than, say, smoking is as a cause of lung cancer). He was plagued by cracked lips as a child, evidence of riboflavin deficiency (another marker); he was born at home; he was a blue baby, all factors in the kind of developmental difficulties that might set his own researcher’s alarm bells ringing.
>”So,” he says, “I was on the spectrum. And in fact I did have some issues. I was taken to hospital aged five to have my stomach pumped because I had drunk a lot of alcohol. From age nine to 11 I was pretty antisocial, in a gang, smoking, letting car tyres down, setting fire to mailboxes, and fighting a lot, even though I was quite small. But at that age I burnt out of that somehow. At 11, I changed schools, got more interested in studying and really became a different sort of kid. Still, when I was graduating and thinking ‘what shall I research?’, I looked back on the essays I’d written and one of the best was on the biology of psychopaths; I was fascinated by that, partly, I think, because I had always wondered about that early behaviour in myself.”
MEAN_MUG_SHOT: Is it because he took peoples brain out of their heads to scan them?
honeynut-queerios: TIL Jimmy Fallon is a psychopathic neuroscientist in addition to being a late-night talk show host.
meltingintoice: >Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured.
In other words, being a psychopath, he didn’t care about the ethical rules imposed by the study design and unilaterally decided to ignore them.
bobrossthemobboss: Ill be disappointed if his book isn’t riddled with mad scientist jokes.
bloatedplutocrat: *”Oooooh…that explains the all the bodies…”*
Penetrator_Gator: His book gave me one of the most fascinating facts.
Although it is not certain if it is a psychopathy gene, or a cluster of genes, but it resides in the X chromosome. This means that in women, if something is wrong with one of the chromosomes, the other chromosome takes over, while in men, since there is only one X chromosome, doesn’t have a backup.
So this is why there are more male psychopaths than female psychopaths.
bobswagger12: Edgy 12 year olds reading this right now: “OMG, this is so me.”
FelixVulgaris: TIL: there is such a thing as a pro-social psychopath.
_renlo_: You spend all day classifying psychopaths and suddenly everyone and everything begins to look like a psychopath.
PJM1990: He definitely thought he was a psychopath, and then set out to prove it, as a man of science.
I_m_High: Oh boy time to go killing again
ProfessionalCheese: ITT: really cheesy and repetitive jokes about the well known talk show host. -_-”
quad_copter_cat: Research is me-search.
itspeterj: How do you think he was getting all them brains?