James Fallon, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, lived the first 58 years of his life thinking he was an average American, well-suited to social life, with a brilliant academic career. , husband and father fulfilled. When one day in 2005, while studying MRI images of different brains as part of a serial killer research project, he was asked to question his own identity.
“That day, I had to study dozens of scans of human brains: scans of murderers, schizophrenics, depressed people but also normal brains” he told the American Smithsonian magazine. However, among these images of “normal” brains, there was his, since he had participated shortly before in a study on Alzheimer’s disease.
Reviewing these images, he lingered on one of them, which showed low activity in the parts of the brain responsible for empathy, morality and self-control: characteristics that are often linked. criminal behavior. It was while trying to discover who was hiding behind this image that he discovered that this brain was none other than his! A truly disturbing experience that he has just recounted in a book published in the United States and entitled “The inner psychopath”.
“Since I had never killed or raped anyone, the first thing I thought about was that my research hypothesis was wrong and that these areas of the brain did not reflect the psychopathy or murderous behavior. ”But as we continued to research, some pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
Going back through his family tree, James Fallon discovered he was linked to 7 suspected murderers. “I think we have in common genes with high risk of aggression, violence and low empathy but with genetic variations. So, I am someone who loves competition and I am able to do weird things that annoy people. But this gene of aggression is sublimated. “No doubt because I was brought up by very loving parents and that in my turn I built a couple and a loving family, ”he says in his book, admitting that as a good scientist that he is, he has struggled to recognize that genetics are not everything.
