we all know about the psychopath’sâ enhancedkiller instinct, their finely tuned vulnerability antennae.â but it may surprise you to knowthat there are some situations in which psychopaths are actually more adeptat saving lives than theyâ are at taking them. so let me give you an example of what i meanby that,â okay? â imagine you’ve got a train and it’s hurtling down a track. â inâ itspath, five people are trapped on the line
Android questions, and cannot escape.fortunately, you can flick a switch, which diverts the train down aâ fork in that track,away from those five people, but at a price.â there is another person trapped down that fork andthe train will kill themâ instead. question: â should you flick the switch?
now, most people have little trouble decidingwhat to do under those circumstances; though, the thought of flickingthe switch isn’t exactly a nice one, the utilitarian choiceas it were, killing just the one person instead of the five representsthe least worst option, okay. but now let me give you a variation. you’vegot a train speeding out of control down a trackand it’s gonna plow into five people on the line. â but this time youare standing behind a very large stranger on a footbridge above thattrack. the only way
to save the people is to heave the strangerover. â he will fall to a certain death, but his considerable bulk willblock the train, saving five lives. â question. â should you flickthe switch? now we’ve got what we might call a realdilemma on our hands, okay. â while the score in lives isprecisely the same as in the first scenario, five to one, one’s choiceof action appears far trickier. â now why should that be? â well,the reason it turns out, all boils down to temperature, okay? case one represents what we might call animpersonal
dilemma. â it involved those areas of thebrain, the prefrontal cortex, the posterior parietal cortex, in particular,the anterior para singular cortex, the temporal pole and thesuperior temporal sulcus - bit of neuroanatomy for you there - primarilyresponsible for what we call cold empathy, for reasoning and rationalthought. case two, on the other hand, represents whatwe might call a personal dilemma. â it involves theemotion center of the brain known as the amygdala, the circuitry of hotempathy. â what we might call the feeling of feeling what another personis feeling.
now, psychopaths, just like most normal membersof the population, have no trouble at all with caseone. â they flick the switch and the train â diverts accordingly.â killing just the one person instead of the five. â but, this is wherethe plot thickens. â quite unlike normal members of the population, psychopathsalso experience little difficulty with case two. psychopaths, without a moment’s hesitationare perfectly willing to chuck the fat guy over the rails,if that’s what the doctor orders. â now moreover, this difference inbehavior has a distinct
neural signature. â the pattern of brain activationin both normal people and psychopaths is identical on thepresentation of the impersonal moral dilemma, but radically differentwhen things start to get a bit more personal. imagine that i were to hook you up to a brainscanner, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine,and were to present you with those two dilemmas, okay. â whatwould i observe as you went about trying to solve them? â well, at the precisemoment that the nature of the dilemma switches from impersonal to personal,i would see the
emotion center of your brain, your amygdalaand related brain circuits, the medial orbital frontal cortexfor example, light up like a pinball machine. â i would witness the momentin other words when emotion puts it money in the slot. but in psychopaths, i would see preciselynothing. â and the passage from impersonal to personal wouldslip by unnoticed.
because that emotion neighborhood of theirbrains, that emotional zip code has a neural curfew. â and that’s whythey’re perfectly happy to chuck that fat guy over the side without evenbatting an eye.
directed / produced byjonathan fowler & elizabeth rodd
