CurveLight
Rookie
- Oct 16, 2009
- 9,768
- 317
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- Banned
- #61
Note to truth: Let's get back to serial killers. I am trying to understand this in a PSYCHOLOGICAL/SCIENTIFIC way. Can we put politics aside?
There can be a problem with brain chemistry that causes some human beings to act evilly.
Recent reports in science have found discrete locations in the brain that are used in intricate systems that serve as the human moral compass (1).Changes in the brain have long been known to change the behaviors of a man. In the famous example of Phineas Gage, an accident at his job caused an iron rod to pierce through Gage's skull. Gage was able to stand and speak a few moments later. His intelligence was intact, but it soon became clear that this once model young man had been changed by the incident. He now cursed, lied and behaved horribly to people around them. Gage's doctor, John Harlow, said that Gage was no longer Gage, and that the balance "between his intellectual faculty and his animal propensities" had been destroyed. Can this example of brain-injury be used to explain the 'animal propensities' of serial killers?
Serial Killers
There can be a problem with brain chemistry that causes some human beings to act evilly.
Recent reports in science have found discrete locations in the brain that are used in intricate systems that serve as the human moral compass (1).Changes in the brain have long been known to change the behaviors of a man. In the famous example of Phineas Gage, an accident at his job caused an iron rod to pierce through Gage's skull. Gage was able to stand and speak a few moments later. His intelligence was intact, but it soon became clear that this once model young man had been changed by the incident. He now cursed, lied and behaved horribly to people around them. Gage's doctor, John Harlow, said that Gage was no longer Gage, and that the balance "between his intellectual faculty and his animal propensities" had been destroyed. Can this example of brain-injury be used to explain the 'animal propensities' of serial killers?
Serial Killers
The Gage case has been greatly exaggerated.
It's an example. No more, no less. There are others.
Researcher Dominique LaPierre believes that the "prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in long-term planning and judgment, does not function properly in psychopathic subjects." Paleopsychologists also believe that there is some sort of malfunction in the brain of serial killers, that somehow their primitive brain overrides the "higher" brain: reason and compassion take a backseat to lust, aggression, and appetite. A study by Pavlos Hatzitaskos and colleagues reports that a large portion of death-row inmates have had severe head injuries, and that approximately 70% of brain-injured patients develop aggressive tendencies.
What Makes Serial Killers Tick? - The Crime Library - Crime Library on truTV.com
They are still largely grasping at straws ignoring some anomalies while making other ones definitive in conjunction with the false assumption of tying correlation into causation.
The brain is a translation of our minds and evaluations of brain activites are largely grounded in materialism believing that since only the physical exists all answers may be found in trying to map the brain. The obvious is being missed: all our actions and words are third (possibly more) generation translations. We are not machines like cars where our parts can be dissambled, explored and completely explained.