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A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into The Dark Side Of The Brain
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November 2013
On Sale: October 31, 2013
246 pages ISBN: 1591846005 EAN: 9781591846000 Kindle: B00C5R729S Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
"The last scan in the pile was strikingly odd. In
fact it looked exactly like the most abnormal of the scans I
had just been writing about, suggesting that the poor
individual it belonged to was a psychopath—or at least
shared an uncomfortable amount of traits with one....When I
found out who the scan belonged to, I had to believe there
was a mistake....But there had been no mistake. The scan was
mine."
For the first fifty-eight years
of his life James Fallon was by all appearances a normal
guy. A successful neuroscientist and medical school
professor, he'd been raised in a loving, supportive family,
married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and
lots of friends. Then he learned a shocking truth that would
not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but
would lead him to question the very nature of his own
identity. The Psychopath Inside tells the
fascinating story of Fallon's reaction to the discovery that
he has the brain of a psychopath. While researching serial
murderers, he uncovered a distinct neurological pattern in
their brain scans that helped explain their cold and violent
behavior. A few months later he learned that he was
descended from a family with a long line of murderers which
confirmed that Fallon's own brain pattern wasn't a fluke. As
a scientist convinced that humans are shaped by their
genetics, Fallon set out to reconcile the truth about his
brain with everything he knew about the mind, behavior, and
the influence of nature vs. nurture on our personalities.
How could he, a successful scientist and a happy family
man with no history of violence, be a psychopath? How much
did his biology influence his behavior? Was he capable of
some of the gruesome atrocities perpetrated by the serial
killers he had studied? Combining his personal experience
with scientific analysis, Fallon shares his journey and the
discoveries that ultimately led him to understand that,
despite everything science can teach us, humans are even
more complex than we can imagine.
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