The brains of psychopaths have a key difference compared to other people when presented with these two situations.
If you’re curious about how people tick or enjoy studying any of the behavioral or brain sciences, you’ll want to see this. This is wicked.
Dr. Kevin Dutton of BigThink describes two situations of life and death that involve a trolley. If a doctor were scanning your brain and a psychopath’s brain while you listened to Dutton explain, a key marker would be missing in the psychopath’s brain.
Watch the video on BigThink to hear Dutton explain in this four minute video.
I do find the advances – so fast – that are being made in neuropsychology and understanding of human behaviour quite amazing. They just keep on outstripping our capacity to use lanaguage. I do wish we were able to change some of the language though. People like this word Psychopath cos it’s evocative and emotional. It gets really interesting what happens to language when you run experiments and change the scenarios – so when you have the five people on the railway line and one of the other line it’s easy for the Utilitarian To Win Out …. but it… Read more »
MediaHound, you’re right, the advances are pretty amazing. It blows my mind, and sometimes make me wish I had gone to school for nueroscience instead. I did think about using a different word than “psychopath”, but it was (a) what the video use, and (b) I’m not sure what we could replace it with. It’s seems like it’s much more specific than mentally ill, and “crazy” is not AT ALL a good idea for a replacement word. Is there a word you’ve heard used that would be better? Otherwise, I will join you in wishing. Thanks for reading! I love… Read more »
On a personal level I use a different word. Sociopath. The issues of Sociopathic – Psychopathic conduct have come up here quite a few times, but mainly around the issues of Trolls – Or as I prefer “Netopaths”. We can either be slaves to language or use it as a tool for communication. I keep collecting tools as a sort of word geek. Psycopath and Sociopath are to all intents and purposes interchangeable, and in the DSM debates one or even both are to vanish to be replaced with yet more verbage. The DSM 5 Antisocial Personality/Psychopath labelling system may… Read more »