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prefrontal cortex. These are involved in inhibition, social behavior, ethics, and morality. I expected psychopaths would also have damage to the front of the temporal lobe, including the amygdala, which processes emotions, leading to cold behavior. I’d seen these neural deficits in other scans of psychopathic killers, and they’d also been identified in more formal research by other labs.
    So I pointed to the scans I thought belonged to the psychopathic killers. When we looked up their code numbers, I’d nailedit. When a neuroanatomist sees a pattern, he goes crazy. I could have been studying butterflies and I still would have gotten excited. Patterns are where we get our buzz. And that’s when I really became interested in psychopathy.
    Combining these scans with others of diagnosed psychopaths I’d collected over the years, I noticed a more intricate pattern. In psychopaths, I saw a loss of activity that extends from the orbital cortex into the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and into a part of the prefrontal cortex called the anterior cingulate. The loss then continues along the cingulate cortex to the back of the brain as a thin strip, then loops down into the lower part of the temporal lobe into the very tip of the temporal lobe and the amygdala.
    FIGURE 3C : Brain areas dysfunctional in psychopaths.

    FIGURE 3D : PET scans of normal brains and that of a psychopath.
    All of these areas of loss make up the major chunk of brain called the limbic, or emotional, cortex, since this is the main area regulating emotion. This loop of loss of cortical function comes full circle, as I noticed that the “connector” strip of cortex between the orbital, cingulate, and temporal cortex—the insula—also showed signs of damage or low function in these psychopathic killers. In previous studies of psychopaths’ brains, most attention had been on the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortex andthe amygdala. I filled in the picture, identifying other areas related to anxiety and empathy, and explaining how psychopaths could sometimes remain so cool and collected. The simplicity and elegance of this pattern exhilarated me as I felt I had perhaps discovered a sliver of the Holy Grail for understanding awful, predatory human behavior.
    I wondered how the functioning of the frontal lobe, specifically the lower (ventral) and medial (along the midline) portions of the prefrontal cortex, would lead to some of the traits generally seen in psychopathy. A psychopath has a poorly functioning ventral system, usually used for hot cognition, but he can have a normal or even supernormal dorsal system, so that without the bother of conscience and empathy, the cold planning and execution of predatory behaviors becomes finely tuned, convincing, highly manipulative, and formidable. Because psychopaths’ dorsal systems work so well, they can learn how to appear that they care, thus making them even more dangerous.
    The other brain areas related to psychopathologies are the amygdala in the anterior inner region of the temporal lobe, the hidden insula, bridging the orbital cortex and anterior temporal lobe, and the cingulate and parahippocampal cortices, also connecting the prefrontal cortex and amygdala in a looping fashion. These areas of the brain of the psychopath were later shown in a thorough and well-done series of MRI studies in 2011 and 2012 by Kent Kiehl’s research group at the MIND Institute at the University of New Mexico.
    As discussed before, all of these are lumped together as thelimbic cortex, or cortices associated with the processing and elaboration of emotion. These areas are critical to understanding the psychopathic brain, for these, as well as the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, are maldeveloped or have sustained early damage. This finding was not a surprise to me, as all these brain areas had been implicated in individual syndromes related to lack of inhibition, sexual