What one can do when one discovers one is related to Lizzie Borden
this is your non-psychopathic brain not on drugs
Recently at work we’ve been exploring the potential for using information from brain imaging technologies to assess individual performance. For example, could we learn about how well a person multi-tasks by giving them some simple puzzles and scanning their brain? Anyway, this has been on my mind for the past few weeks, and then I heard this story on NPR this morning that really made me think.
A neuroscientist named James Fallon has been studying the brains of serial killers, and has noted that a specific part of a psychopath’s brain is dormant – the orbital cortex, which controls impulses and has been linked to rage and violence when dormant. Upon nudging from his own mother, he started poking around his ancestry to find the “cuckoos” that she suspected were there. Among many other less-well-known serial killers, he found that he was actually related to Lizzie Borden. You know the old tune, “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks, when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one”. (As an aside here, she shares a birthday with me – July 19th. I visited the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast a couple of years ago… talk about creeeeeeepy! I also found a terrible metal band named after her. Whoa.)
Once you find Lizzie Borden in your family tree, the only thing to do is to find out whether your brain resembles that of a psychopathic murderer’s. And that’s exactly what James Fallon found. He had the same dormant orbital cortex in his PET scan. He also found what is referred to as the “warrior gene” in his DNA. According to his scientific findings, he should have been a murderer or at least full of rage. So why wasn’t he?
With a little digging, James found that almost all of the psychopath’s brains that were scanned in prison had experienced some sort of childhood abuse or violence. Lucky for him, James didn’t experience any kind of abuse as a child. This finding totally changed his mind about nature vs. nurture. He used to be almost 100% on the nature side of the argument, but looking at his own scientific data he had to conclude that nurture plays a bigger role than he originally thought.
This brings us to the following question: should we assume that everyone’s development is based on the same relative amount of nature and nurture? Or, in other words, might nurture play a bigger role in one person’s development, while nature is primary in another’s development? What might this mean for how the results of imaging technologies are interpreted and used?
