What is different about how Psychopaths decide and normal everyday people decide?
This chapter absolutely fascinated me. It is something that I have been wondering about for quite awhile and I am glad this book broached the topic for me. I have a big fascination with serial killers such as Charles Manson, Aileen Wuornos, and John Gacy, as depicted in this chapter. Psychopaths suffer from an emotional disorder, which is caused by a broken Amygdala, this part of the brain is the reason we feel emotions such as fear and anxiety. So when the Amygdala is broken, psychopaths don't seem to feel bad when others are feeling bad. "Terror isn't terrifying" basically, when you watch television and you see a person's face of fear, the psychopath's brain doesn't register it as terror and doesn't get an emotional response from watching it. So while normal everyday people's decisions are based upon emotional responses, the psychopath has a detachment from the emotion which we all feel towards something that happens which helps us to decide our course of action. Our body has emotional reactions almost involuntarily, such as a lie detector test, our body reacts when we lie out of anxiety, where as a psychopath feels no remorse for lying and can probably pass the test. This chapter was very interesting and helped me understand and realize what it exactly is that sets us apart from a psychopath and maybe what the reason is that they decide to kill. It would be almost impossible to really understand what it feels like to be inside the criminal mind.
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