Free Murderous Minds by Dean Haycock Page A

be involved in the perception, recognition, analysis, or other cognitive function related to viewing an image.
    It’s true that this cluster of nerve cells in the temporal lobe is activated when someone is afraid. But few amygdala stories also mention that this brain region is also activated when you look at pleasant pictures that interestyou. It is possible that the police officer on Boston Legal accused of racism was attracted to African-Americans. His amygdalae might have responded the same way if he looked at a happy face.
    Find Your Amygdala
    Joseph LeDoux provides easy directions for locating your amygdala. 25 Point a finger at your ear. Point another finger at your eye, on the same side of your head. If both fingers projected a beam of light that could pass through flesh, bone and brain, then the two beams would intersect at one of your amygdalae. You have another one in the same relative position on the other side of your brain.
    If you could illuminate all of the cells in the amygdala with the beam of light, part of the structure might remind you of an almond, amygdala in Latin. That is what early anatomists thought it looked like. Neuroanatomists have since decided that there is more to the amygdala than first recognized. More subsections, a dozen or so subnuclei, are included in the structure so, on the whole, it has lost its almond shape but, thanks to its Latin name, it has retained its almond identity. “Its actual shape resembles more a strap carrying an old style dumbbell,” according to neuroanatomist Jim Fallon, whose own brain we’ve already discussed as an interesting example of a brain that looks like it belongs to a psychopathic murderer but has never produced criminal behavior.
    Like Batman and the Boston Legal district attorney, many people connect the amygdala exclusively with fear, and it definitely plays a key role in this important emotion. This small group of brain cells has a role in the processes that allow people to recognize fear and initiate aggression, among other emotional responses. But, like its size and shape, its role in other functions has expanded as neurobiologists have learned more about it. It appears to help integrate emotional processing, behavior, and motivation. All of the senses communicate with the amygdala. This is something to at least keep in the back of your mind when you consider that the amygdala has been reported to be less active and smaller in the brains of criminal psychopaths.
    If the amygdalae are damaged in a person, that person may have trouble recognizing fear in facial expressions, 26 a trait seen in psychopaths.
    Multiple studies indicate that high psychopathy scores are associated with an impaired ability to recognize emotional expressions in faces and to link clues to fearful situations. Psychopaths just don’t process fear the way most people do. Harvard Medical School associate professor of psychiatry Jordan Smoller points out in his book, The Other Side of Normal, 27 that a few unfortunate individuals born without psychopathic traits show the same response after their amygdalae are damaged.
    Yaling Yang, Adrian Raine, and their collaborators tapped five temporary employment agencies to find subjects for their study which measured the volume of the amygdalae in 27 people with PCL–R psychopathy scores ranging between 23 and 40. They compared them to 32 controls with psychopathy scores ranging from 5 to 14. 28 Their finding that the amygdalae of higher-scoring psychopaths are around 18 percent smaller in volume than they are in low-scoring or non-psychopaths, suggests that the amygdala has a role in the brain processes that work differently or are defective in psychopaths.
    The amygdala, as discussed in Chapter 6, is connected to another brain region that has been linked to an impaired ability to identify emotional states and lack of empathy, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in the frontal lobe. James Blair, Ph.D., of the U. S. National