There’s a piece on the BBC website today talking about how neuroscientists have discovered that ‘psychopathic criminals have an empathy switch’ that they can turn on and off at will. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23431793

I’m always a bit suspicious of any study that comes from an fMRI machine, because every fMRI person I ever spoke to gave me a massive lecture on how the brain works and ended it with “but of course we have no idea how the brain works”.

Anyway, this morning I got an email from the man who wrote me this long ‘email from a psychopath’ back in 2011:

http://jonathanronson.tumblr.com/post/43313551453/an-email-from-a-psychopath

His new one is short but interesting, so here it is with his permission (I’m not going to copy emails from psychopaths without their permission):

I came across this today on the BBC - to me this makes infinitely more sense than most of the literature that’s out there. I’m not sure its a cut-and-dry ‘switch’ though, that seems a little too robotic to be sensible. 

I remember describing it in therapy as ‘speaking a second language’; you can do it, and if you practice enough you can become quite fluent, but it usually takes a lot of energy and its easy to slip back, which is why the ‘psychopath charm’ is often thought so contrived and calculated.

In my view, once empathy starts to deliver practical benefits to the individual (rather than being totally at odds with every aspect of ones life) psychopaths can genuinely be helped. In other words, its hard to learn Mongolian in Brooklyn; you have to immerse yourself in the language, both to become proficient, and for it to seem purposeful to the student that they do so. 

Best

C