Stopping Psychopaths Before It's Too Late | James Fallon | Big Think

You [Music] for me. Even though it, like I'm a borderline psychopath, a near psychopath, and a pro-social psychopath, in a way, I'm a lucky psychopath. In the sense that I grew up within such a wonderful family. In the family, my interactions with my mother and father, my aunt and uncle's, my grandparents, everybody around me, they knew that something is wrong, and they treated me really unbelievably.

So I had this wonderful... but with this wonderful upbringing, my mother and a couple of her sisters, I think they had good instincts about this, and they kept me away from things. When I had gone through a very kind of a dark period in when I was going through puberty, she noticed something's really wrong. I think she talked to some of the teachers and made sure that I was very busy.

So every day, I was in... you know, I was in five Walter high school, in college, and all sorts of very active contact sports. I was involved in the drama club and in the band, and I played an instrument. It was like I was always doing something. I think that she probably knew that for a kid, that's a good thing.

I was always successful; I always knew what I wanted to be. I always did well at school, so I never needed money, I never needed power. And I just thought to myself, "Well, what if I did? What if I did? What if I wasn't so lucky in all these ways?" And I don't feel any guilt about being lucky. You know, I'm happy it happened.

But I was just thinking, and you know, I could have turned out much differently. But I think that's so bad because I think I was treated so well that the trigger wasn't pulled down. The genes… you know, there are a couple of genes that I do have. It was a serotonin transporter that if you're early in life, if you're brought into an abusive or an abandonment situation, it's very bad for your ultimate development.

But if you have that same allele, the serotonin transporter, and you're shown a lot of love, it has the opposite effect; it kind of negates the other negative things. So this is amazing! It really made sense, and it really is like a biological hardcore reason to be good to your kids, your family's kids, neighborhood kids. Because if you just say it, it sounds like happy talk—"Great, now we hate war, be nice!"—but there's real biological reasons for it.

I think it's very compelling, and that has been exciting because for me it's exciting, because it's scientifically interesting. It opens up something about the universe, and that's what drives me. It really does, and if it didn't, it wouldn't. But on the side, I knew that I was really lucky too.