Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Child

to be alive. Yeah, it is. It is indeed, Uh, if you follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler, where we are blow the mind. On all those platforms, we're curating all kinds of weird science that we're not putting into the episodes, all the stuff that Robert and Joe and I find throughout the day that is just utterly bizarre. Uh. And then we've got videos like our Monster Science series and lots of blog posts. Robert in particular is profound

and prolific on our blog side. So if you want to hear more from us about I don't know, music, Monster science, which would you cook up this week? Um? I'm actually working on another Higher Human Forms post, which is a body modification series that I've been doing with a focus more on uh, sort of religious themes and body modification and sort of like religious trans humanism. I can't remember we talked about American Mary before. I think

it may have come up a few times. You've seen it? Yeah, Yeah, a very interesting horror film. Yeah, great horror movie, really interesting take on the body modification community. And uh directed by twin female sisters that just did an excellent job and co star in the movie. Yeah, and they're Canadian. Yeah,

I forgot about that, right, all right. System. One more way that you can interact with us, especially if you want to talk about horror movies, because that seems like a big thing that goes on there is on Fridays at noon Eastern Standard time, we are on periscope uh and basically for you know, twenty minutes, we will sit there and uh answered questions that you have. Last week, Joe brought a pretty interesting article about outer space to

the table that we discussed with our fans on there. Uh, and we'll tell you, you know, some kind of behind the scenes stuff too, like what we're recording that week, what what kind of you know things are coming up on the show and Vice versa. But in this episode we are discussing UM an interesting and troubling topic and UH and then that is the idea of psychopathy in

children and UH an adolescence. UM. This is I definitely want to preface here that that I I am particularly I'm approaching this UH topic not only is someone who just finds the trope itself kind of fascinating from a cultural standpoint. You know, you can't get away from the killer child, the terrible Tieu child, the what the the infant. It's a it's a trope I guess or archetype that I think is like ingrained into human culture. The fear

of our own children come for us. And and as a father now I have to say I feel a lot of that, you know, I mean you when you have this strange creature becoming more and more human and your your life, you think about that you can't help but worry about about all the things that could go wrong um or or you know, all the problems that could arise. And so I definitely want to to drive

home that that's in my mind the whole time. So I don't want anyone to come into this thinking that we're gonna take a real callous approach to it that we're all just about, you know, talking about horror movie tie ins for the topic, because obviously it's a very it's a very sensitive issue and if anyone out there who is planning to have children already has a child and watching that child developed, that this is something that

could topic that could produce a fair amount of anxiety. Yeah, but I also think to like from reading the literature, that there's a lot to be learned here too if you're a parent, right both about Uh, we're definitely going to be talking about nature, not versus nurture, but and nurture they're working together here, right, And there's things to

look out for. But there's also ways techniques of parenting that work especially well, especially if you know, you think that your child may have the traits of being callous or unemotional in the way that we're going to describe here that subsequently lead to some of these attacks. Yeah. I do want to say the original idea for this did come from our October marathon of doing things that were kind of related to Halloween, and it was just one of the things that I couldn't get in under

the deadline. I was thinking about the premise of Michael Myers and the Halloween movies, which is that he was a kid who killed members of his family, was taken away to a mental asylum for that and when he was like nine years old or something like that. Uh, and and then subsequently grew up escaped and you know it was a serial killer. Yeah, but he's just essentially a black hole of of emotion. Yeah. And so what I wanted to look into there was is that actually possible?

Is Michael Meyer the the idea there of a child first of all of a and it's hard to find this under search term, but the term that's used clinically is juvenile homicidal offender because when you type in child killer, it usually is associated with people who kill children, not children who kill um. And so I was looking to see, you know, what's the likelihood of this actually happening. And then also, you know, in the case of the Michael

Myers myth, what's the recidivism look like? So when these children are released as adults, you know, what what do their lives look like? Yeah? And ultimately we're also going to discuss the bright side and some of the treatment options that are becoming available that are showing promise because it's easy to get hung up on just the trope, right on the idea of the oh, this is a bad seed, this child is just a black hole of

emotion and there's no altering that. But that's the myth and that's what the media loves to grab onto anytime we have one of these incidents happen, especially in the United States. And it's way more complex than that, right. The thing that's really interesting is, like you said, like as we study this further and further and understand the biology behind it, we also find it really interesting ways to treat it. So just to get out of the way.

Some of the more common versions of the trope of the bad seat trope that we see, um, you have a Damien from the Omen, that's a big one, the kids from the Village of the Damned. Um, there's the Bad Seat itself, which was the ninety six theatrical film, uh and a TV movie. And five you have the

good Son, you have the Ring. You have Peter Wiggin and or some Scott Cards enters game who like to torture animals and physically and mentally tormented siblings and the animals thing is real as well as we'll talk about there's a there's a murderous newborn in Ray Bradberry's short story Small Assassin. Uh, there's the young Tom Riddle and Harry Potter, of course. Uh, there's Aaliya and Dune. There's a Mordred to Shame and Stephen King's at Dark Towers series.

You could probably count Stewie Griffin. Um. But but yeah, so we have this trope of this child that is just unredeemably bad, that that that is that is evil in a in some inhuman way, generally with some sort of magical scenario backing up whither that way. I think it's particularly helpful actually here to use Halloween and John Carpenter's vision for Michael Myers as what isn't happening? That's the fantastic version, right, and that John Carpenter is always

referred to that character as the shape. Right. He's not human, it's he's not a product of upbringing or things, you know, uh, mental problems necessarily as much as it's just a body full of evil. Right now, Rob Zombies version that ultimately changes that in the remake, we don't really need to go down that Rabbit hole. But but I think that it's important to say that's not what's going on here with children who do kill, right, and and just to get it out of the way, psychopathy in general, like

what is the psychopath? The psychopath demonstrates significantly reduced empathy with the feelings of others, uh, and supporting the theory that this uh, that this deficit makes it easier for them to inflict pain on victims their mirror neurons or two out of whack for them to feel their victims pain, making the most you know, cold blooded of homicides a little a little easier to to to commit. So it uh, it has to do with a lack of empathy and

a callousness in nature. But it's it's a a neurological condition and certainly not some sort of supernatural occurrence. So let's get this out of the way to start off with and answer you know what my initial question was, which is really how likely are juvenile killers? And in fact, uh, the U. S. Department of Justice has plenty of statistics about this on their website, so you can go there

and find this. But I'll share a couple of with you here that I think are important The first is that in so that's as far back currently as our our data shows. Uh, the known juvenile offenders that were involved were in six hundred and ten murders in the US, and so that sounds like a lot, I know, but that represents seven percent of all known murder offenders from

that time, so it is relatively small. Actually. Also, as of the number of juvenile homicidal offenders is at its lowest level in thirty four years since we started tracking this, which is pretty wild. Uh. And in fact, I really recommend going to the to the Department of Justices site and looking at the charts that they have built out of this, because apparently the real spike for this was in the nineties, UH and ninety four were particularly bad,

and you just see this huge spike. But we are right now, as we're recording this episode, at an all time low, or I guess all time in terms as long as they've been recording it. UH. Homicide offending also increases with age, so it's less likely that it's going to happen if you are, say, under fifteen years old. Only ten percent of the offenders were under fifteen, whereas seventies six of them were sixteen or seventeen years old.

And in my mind when I was thinking about this, I was thinking more along the lines of like preteens, juveniles, like under thirteen. I guess, um, and that does happen, but it is again significantly small. In the Justice Department released information saying that twenty nine children under the age of fourteen, So this is more along the lines of what I was thinking had committed homicides that year. And uh. The other interesting thing is that the victims are more

likely to be acquaintances. So as of data, thirty seven percent of them were acquaintances, while twenty percent of them were total strangers. So the idea of a young child going completely psycho and murdering a total stranger is rare and unlikely. Now, male juvenile homicide offenders varied substantially, but female juvenile homicide offenders have a steady rate um accounting

for a very small share. Less than one hundred were implicated in homicide since two thousand two, and in two thousand twelve, of the eight thousand, five fourteen people arrested for murder in the US, only one was a girl under thirteen. In two thousand thirteen, the number was is to at its lowest since at least nineteen eighty and there is no evidence that homicide among young girls is increasing.

And this is uh, I think important to note because as some of our listeners will probably have immediately come to mind, I believe it was in well it's related to the creepypasta episode. Yeah it was, I can't remember, but uh, you know, two young girls who were fascinated with the creepy pasta stories about Slenderman tried to murder one of their peers. Uh, and we're unsuccessful. But that story, like you know, when for these stories pop up, scared

a lot of people and made them think, oh my god. Uh, look at this, this evidence that young girls are becoming murderers, and in fact, that's not the case if you look at all the data. The other important thing to remember here to data wise, is that a lot of this activity happens in groups. Remember that I mentioned that it was two girls in the slender Man case. Wasn't just one girl on her own. About half of the number of homicides committed by known juvenile offenders as of involved

multiple offenders, So that's important to realize. You know, children are more likely We've all been kids. And even if you're a child, if you're under fourteen listening to this show right now, you know you're more likely to do things that you together than you would alone. I'm sure. I well, I know I did things that I regret that I have done on my own that I did

with a group of friends. Yeah. So it's easy to imagine us in any variety of scenarios in which a younger individual is just roped into some sort of horrible situation with older children. Yeah. And you know, the kids can kind of ramp one another up in this exactly, it becomes reality through them talking, and then ultimately peer pressure leads to these risky choices. And many children don't

even really understand what dead means. You know, a lot of the kids that are interviewed after they commit these murders, they don't understand that this is a permanent thing. They think of it as sort of being magical. Uh. So that's important to remember as well too, that there's a lack of understanding here of of the crime that's being committed. Uh And and lastly, before we get into the you know, the meat behind what's going on inside juvenile homicidal offenders.

It's important to note that in June of the Miller versus Alabama case that was heard by the Supreme Court ultimately decided that juvenile murders did not have to serve their lives in jail for crimes. The tight decision was a five four decision in which they chose to ban mandatory life sentence says of life imprisonment for juvenile offenders. So now as as as of that, uh, you know, a decision there can those who are convicted of these murders have a possibility of eventual freedom. This is in

the US. Mind you that, you know, this stuff happens in other countries as we'll talk about as well, but you know, we're here in America. A lot of the research was done in America. So that's, you know, what I'm going to base our information off of. As of right now, the Supreme Court is waiting to hear Montgomery versus Alabama, which is another UH case that will basically see whether or not they can apply this retroactively, meaning that children who were in prison for life for murders

before the twelve decision will eventually be able to be released. Yeah, and obviously it's It's such a tough situation to weigh in on because you you're ultimately dealing with adults and and trying to figure out how to treat this adult who in their youth, in their childhood even uh committed a fact but before they actually were fully formed as if an individual. So there's a few examples here that let's get out of the way of just you know,

known cases where this has happened that have been popularized. One, obviously the you know Michael Myers being the inspiration for looking into this research, is a guy named Edmund Kemper. There's also a person who is known only as girl A in Japan. She was uh fourteen years old and killed in eleven year old in Japan in n and mounted his head outside their school. So when this happened, the country's parliament actually lowered the age of criminal responsibility

from sixteen to fourteen. So you can see how these singular incidents, which are horrible, by the way, I get a lot of press coverage and then it becomes an issue for politicians to exact exactly. So we've seen just in the last you know, five minutes, how both Japan and the United States have changed their laws based on these. There's a slender man girls that we were talking about earlier. And one thing I'd like to mentioned here just as

an anecdote. I don't want to dive into that whole affair, but that one psychiatrists interviewed one of the children who was responsible. She said that she believes in unicorns, that she can communicate with Lord Voldemort and the teenage muntant Ninja turtles. And she also believes that she has the ability of vulcan mind control. So that helps you to kind of put into place here. This is a child who's fantasizing about things. I don't think that she quite

understood what was going on. Yeah, I mean she this seems to illustrate a real inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Yeah. And one last example that I want to throw out there, especially because um one of our fans UH mentioned it on Facebook earlier this week, is Mary Flora bell Uh. In nineteen sixty eight, she strangled two young boys when she was a child. She took a new name and started her life over when she was released from prison

in the nineteen eighties. I believe that she's British, UM, so that would explain why you know, she was released. She and her daughter she now has a daughter, were promised a lifetime of anonymity, and this is now referred to over there as a Mary Bell order. So basically, if you commit a crime as a child and they you know, deem that you're able to be released, you are and you can live your life in anonymity if you so choose so that you don't have to you know,

have that hanging over your head. I guess now from from some of the readings I had about Mary Bell, apparently she was somehow involved in a book about her life and received money for it, and that somehow subsequently let her daughter know about her past actions. So there was a little bit of conflict there and a little bit of controversy about the fact that she was being paid to talk about these horrible acts that she had done.

So obviously with as with any topic dealing with with childhood, this is a big there's a big discussion of nature and nurture here, like how much of this is genetics, how much of this is just uh, you know, tendencies that are going to be inherent in you as a person, and then how much of it is the nurturing. How much of it is is that the level of attention, the level of of of parental presence and parental guidance that are present there Where, Where does this behavior emerge from?

And how can either side of the scenario curve it. There's a quote from a book about this that I want to use as sort of a guiding principle for us going forward. It's almost like a thesis statement of what I think that the data and research reveals. And it's by Deborah Niehoff. She's the author of a book called The Biology of Violence. And her quote is behavior is the result of a dialogue between your brain and your experiences. So it's not just your biology and it's

not just your experiences. It's those two interacting together. Uh. And we you know, I remember, especially in school, often being told about the nature v. Nurture argument, you know, most like a Supreme Court Supreme Court case, which one is and it's both, especially in this situation. Um, So think about it this way. Childhood development essentially works like this. In our preteen and teenage years, both girls and boys

develop intense social relationships. Especially when we're adolescence, we like to you know, become independent, and we feel everything really intensely. Right. What's going on there is that our prefrontal cortex, is the part of our brain that's in charge of critical thinking, judgment, and deliberation hasn't fully developed. In fact, like even when we're adolescence. You know, some of us like to think of when I was fifteen, I was basically an adult

or whatever. I don't know. I don't want to look back that I was an idiot. But uh uh, that's essentially what's going on. Our brains are still developing, so there's lots of room for how they develop, right. Uh. And one of the quotes about this from a researcher looking into it said, it's like they're in a muscle car without breaks. I like that analogy. That's that's what high school felt like for me. That sounds I mean, it's easy to forge it. Just how much is going

on in the high school mind. Um, it seems like so high schoolers can seem so alien. Teenagers can see seems so alien, and in a sense they are like they're they're they're thinking and changing, uh, in some very dramatic ways. National Institute of Health Projects scanded over a hundred teen brains as well as some younger individuals and

some older ones. And they found that as we grow, our brains undergo just massive reorganization between our twelfth and twenty five year That's crazy to think, like, even up until twenty five, we are still maturing and developing. Yeah, I mean and my I look back and I'm like, yeah, that that totally totally at least being older than now. Yeah, I can definitely look back. I remember being twenty five though, and thinking like I got this under control, totally didn't. Yeah.

I've seen it described as a slow wave. Uh. And subsequent imaging work has has shown that these the physical changes, they all start in the brain's rear and they moved towards the front from areas close to the brain. Still that that look after older, you know, more basic primal functions, uh. And then move forward through our our ability to process

all that stimuli. And then during this period two you see, um, you see this idea that that the teenage brain also is going to be super obsessed with making social connections with other individuals. Um. And I've seen this argued is kind of an evolutionary advantage to where the teen is has evolved to leave um it's family and find a home with new people. And therefore the brain is looking for that example, and it's willing to take more risks

in order to carry it out. This brain development is definitely something that I have to wonder if it's more recent for humanity in that like that we're developing up until the age of I mean that somewhat makes sense for us now, and that like we don't in our current culture in America, we don't consider ourselves quote adult until we're eighteen, right, but like uh, responsibilities of children in much earlier ages, even just going back to the

medieval age, we're so much earlier. You know, I wonder if over time that there was a gradual progression of getting to this point where the brain was allowed to develop more and more and more as we got older, or you know, you can think of it in terms of something like a butterfly. All the stages that take place in order to reach that point where a butterfly is just around to to breed and do its thing and die. So you could say that really past twenty five or not too much past twenty five is just

kind of extra time. Uh, just the you know, the landingstrip everything we got after. That's why after twenty five you're like a village elder. Yeah. Yes, that's scary, isn't it. Yeah, But I mean the bottom line is that, yeah, a ton of of of mental development takes place during this time span. And uh and the brain of the child, the brain of the team even know on up in year old, is a different beast than the adult brain. Yeah. Absolutely.

So let's get into psychopathy then, specifically in kids, right, So right up front, I want to distinguish like psychopathy and being psychotic are two totally different things. We are talking about psychopathy and psychopaths today, and there's also those are basically the same thing as sociopathy, right, So when these terms are thrown around, it's important to remember that that there's there's a difference here. But so it gets

back to what we were talking about earlier. They referred to in some corners as see you kids, right because their callous and unemotional. H they show a little empathy for others or remorse for their own actions, and like

you said earlier, they're prone to violence. Yeah. And the c U thing I think is important to when it comes to labeling, so that in the treatment of these children who have something other than psychopath to throw around, which is such a loaded, superloaded and it's especially uh, you know, just to have to be a parent and to have that term applied to your kid is terrifying, not only because of you know, the implications, but also because that is a label that is going to determine

the outcome of their life. And I think the research is showing more and more that psychopathy is it's not that that situation where oh, this this child has the mark and this one present, but rather they're varying levels. There's a spectrum upon which vast majority of people are

going to pop up in a lot of ways. I saw it compared in the literature to both autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and not that there are similar things going on in the brain, in fact, they're not, but but that, like you said, there's gradations, uh, and there's different ways in which that affects the person's ability

to interact with their community, right. Uh. But at the same time, there are also different and growing ways to treat and uh, not cure necessarily, don't think that's the right word, but to to help these children grow out of it, right, So how do they figure that out. They've got a couple of different tools that are essentially tests that they give them. One is the Inventory of

Callous Unemotional Traits. I really wish we had access to one of these, uh we could have taken before the beast, because I I have to wonder if I where I would uh score on these. The other is the Child Psychopathy Scale, and then they use a modified version of a test for adults. It's called the Antisocial Process Screening Device. So all these are various, i think written in oral tests that essentially tell psychologists, you know, kind of where

on the spectrum these children fall. Now, this is a crazy statistic right here. A recent estimate by the neuroscientist Kent Keel placed the national cost of psychopathy this is in the US at four hundred and sixty billion dollars a year. That's ten times the cost of depression. And the reason why is because in part, psychopaths tend to be arrested repeatedly, So that leads us to you know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but that insinuates that

there's a bit of recidivism that goes on here. So setting Aside the examples you've seen in movies and whatnot, here's some actual examples of this kind of behavior one might encounter with with cu kids. So cows and emotional children tend to be highly manipulated. Um. And again this is this is one of those situations where you can look at any child and you can see levels of manipulation.

So it's it's easy to get carried away in uh in diagnosing the children in your life, trying to get that cookie right, kind of manipulate a parent into letting them do this or that. Yeah. And I would imagine too that there are times, not being a parent myself, but I would imagine there are times when you are a parent that your patients is running thin, and you might be more prone to just say, wait a minute, yeah, I gotta get this little psychopath to me a psycho path. Yeah.

So you kids also may lie frequently, uh not, just to avoid punishment, as all children will. That's important to distinguish or to just get out of brushing their teeth. Your kids lie, Yeah, It's like it's like something out of the wire, like all children lie. Yeah, I mean the power of discovering the lie, you know, the almost magical nature of it. You can say a thing and in doing so kind of make it true. Like that's big magic, even as an adult and as a kid

all the more. But with see you children, there's going to be more likelihood that they're just gonna lie for the sake of line for no reason. Um, you're gonna see poor impulse control and I should probably just go ahead drive home. The impulse control is something that that you see sort of gradually come online as well. Yeah, it's gonna vary from child the child, but generally speaking, the younger the child, the less impulse control. Uh. And then as they can fell up, it's going to improve.

That makes sense. Yeah, by generally by age fifteen, Um, a an individual taking an impulse control test are going to be able to do as well um as as an adult about of the time. Um, if they're applying themselves and you know and thinking about it. Um. But with with see you kids in particularly poor impulse control, also, you're gonna see see that they're unrepentant in their behavior. They're they're not gonna you know, cave and say they're

sorry about something. And like adult psychopaths, they can seem to lack humanity for you know, for to an outside observer, they might they might seem like that Michael Myers kid. Um. But of course there's a lot more going on. Yeah. Absolutely, So I'd like to add here before we go on that a really great piece that we found for the literature for this episode was in the New York Times magazine actually, and it was published in the article is called can you Kill Sorry? And you call a nine

year old psychopath? And I posted it to our Facebook page this week, but you can easily google that if you want a really fascinating long form read that this journalist embedded herself in a family with a child I can't remember how old he was, but who was diagnosed as being see you, potentially a psychopath and was actually attending a I don't know what school isn't the right word.

It was like a center. It was more of a like a summer camp program, a summer program, it was kind of it was an offshoot of a program aimed at children with autism, and this was in this branch

of the camp was aimed at children see you kids. Um. Yeah, the piece and we're discussing here is excellent, Uh, and it really puts a human face on absolutely, it goes, it goes very in depth into the experiences of this child's mother and father, uh and and also his siblings as well as well as into the data and talking to psychologists. I just I was very impressed with the work in there. Yeah. Incidentally that the camp that we're

talking about was held by a Florida International University. Yeah, And speaking of the heredity of the kid, we kind of come back to the nature side of it here and heredity, the heridability of callous and emotional traits might be as high as eight percent and if and from that piece, what I remember is they spoke to his father and the father said, Yeah, when I was a kid, I also had social issues. I also was unemotional and unresponsive,

but I grew out of it. Yeah. And in the piece they also quote to produce psychologist Donald Line them and he points out that it's no higher than the Herida heritability for anxiety and depression, and both of those conditions have large genetic risk factors, but of course we can we can treat them. And so the idea, the idea here is that there's there's a lot of a lot of hope and a lot of data that supports

the notion that this is treatable as well. This is not um, you know, cosmic black mark on an individual that can't be addressed. Right, absolutely, even though it sounds like it. Again, I think there's a stigma attached to the word psychopath, right Um. In fact, I almost think that it would benefits psychology to come up with a different term. And maybe that's why they use see you kids.

You know, yeah, definitely, um, because because it doesn't cling to this kind of outdated notion that you know, that it can't be treated, that it can't be cured. And we're seeing more and more research that shows that yes, there are ways there, there are treatments that can work with adults, even to um to bring some level of compassion online. Whereas the term psychopath implies culturally, this child

is evil, nothing will do anything about it. Well, and so we talked about how it's assessed, but you know, I threw out those tests earlier. But in fact, there's no standard way to just figure this out. Uh. In fact, some psychologists believe that it's a distinct neural logical condition, uh, and that you know, maybe we'd be able to identify

it and children as young as five years old. But it's difficult, right, especially because their brains are still developing, and because normal behavior at these ages can sometimes be misinterpreted as psychopathic. I could totally see that. My my interactions with under five year olds is limited. But you have quite a few. Yeah. Yeah, it's like I say, there there are days when you think of they're all complete psychopaths, but really, yeah, they're they're kids sor right.

While you may have a genetic disposition for these behaviors, childhood trauma and a lack of connection with other people helps bring them out. Okay, So this is the nurture side of the angle. This is the experiences side of it. So psychologists try to work on intervention with kids who have early signs of psychopathy so that they can prevent those experiences from exacerbating it. So, yeah, we think that

there's a genetic component that's involved. You're in antisocial personality disorders, but depending on how we grow up that can either exaggerate those problems or help us straighten them out. That that's the terminology that that some people use straighten it out. I think the idea was that sort of like a rubber band right in adults. Real life psychopathy doesn't always lead to violence either too, so that's important to distinguish.

Some successful members of society would be deemed psychopaths if they were assessed by a clinician. In fact, this reminds me our colleagues that stuff they don't want you to know. Did a video one time on I believe it was on corporate CEOs and the psychopathy scale and where they would fall on it, and in a lot of times I believe the thesis of their video, who is that? Yes, uh, those who tend to be successful also tend to be

to rate as psychopaths. It reminds me of the study that we were talking about in our episode on the Ignoble Prizes about CEOs who had experienced disastrous natural disasters where um, where there were fatal incidents and those who hadn't uh seen those repercussions were more likely to take risk. Yeah, so you have the idea that the CEO themselves is

a psychopath. The I think, of course, studies would say that a company as a whole is essentially a psychopath, and it's it's policies and it's treated as a person as treated as a person and U. Yeah, And on top of that, I feel like that the more you read about actual psychopathic traits and and and how actual sociopaths function, you begin to just see more and more of them around you in your tailor life. Yeah. Absolutely. Um. And and here's the thing too, especially if you're a parent.

So some parenting can actually make child psychopathy worse. And it depends on how you're parenting, right, So, uh, you know, some psychologists say that by punishing your child for behaving violently or callous lee, that actually leads the child to acting out in even more extreme ways. And in that New York Times article certainly saw that with the child

that was the case study there. But there's therapies for intervention and therapies that can kind of help parents out too, uh, sometimes starting as young as when the child is two years old, which kind of blows my mind because I can't imagine being able to diagnose a two year old

with this. But it is very difficult to identify, not just in at risk children, but especially because they haven't started socializing yet, right, So it's only up until they start socializing that you're gonna start seeing the callousness and the unresponsiveness. UM. And also, like as we talked about earlier, kids with autism or a d h D maybe similarly antisocial, but that's a whole totally different kind of brain structure.

So there's screening tests, there's the oral and written tests that we talked about, uh, and they'll help a clinician identify psychopathy, but there's still a lot of complications involved. And lastly, I just say that parents who are withdrawn or remote are also risking shaping a child shuts down emotionally.

And this is difficult when you think about the hereditary aspect, right, because if a parent had some unemotional, potentially callous behaviors in their nature, then it's going to be even more difficult for them to be interactive and not shut down emotionally with your children. Right. So it's sort of a you know, this is a silly term, but it's a

vicious cycle. Yeah. I mean because if the if the nature is already skewing psychopathic, uh, then the nurture is likely going to as well from the parent contributing to those genes. Yeah. So uh, in the same way that punishment can contribute to it. And neglect can also contribute to it that it can actually impair cortex development. And this is the stuff that controls the feelings or belonging an attachment in our brains. And that is a perfect

segue into talking about brain anatomy. But first, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So according to m R I scan, psychopaths tend to have smaller sub genial cortex, five percent reduction in brain density and parts of the paralympic system that's where empathy and social values and moral decision making takes place. And this includes the orbitofrontal cortex UH and the call date. These are all critical for reinforcing positive outcomes and discouraging

negative outcomes. So this gets down to just the basic uh principles of why do I behave the way that I behave? What's what's encouraging me to do the right thing and feel responsible from actions? Yeah, it really made me consider, huh, like I wonder what the shape of my brain is and how it's contributing to my behaviors

and characteristics and things like that. It's it's not something that we usually is human beings going to back up and think about you know, it's difficult to do right viewed into that whole blind brain idea that the brain can't really perceive itself and we're trying to two. We can't stand on the outside of self and look in uh, so we have this kind of backdoor mirror way of

trying yeah, yeah, which is often distorted. So there's one really great study that I think contributes to the dialogue about children with psychopathy, specifically juvenile homicidal offenders and how the biology is working here. And this came out in It was published in NeuroImage Clinical volume four, and the article has a ton of authors, so I'm not going to list them all, but it was called Abnormal Brain

Structure and Youth who commit Homicide. So essentially, this group of researchers looked at young incarcerated homicidal offenders uh and they found that they have reduced gray matter volumes in their medial and lateral temporal lobes, including the hippocampus and the posteer insula. And this is relative to compared youth who are not homicidal offenders. So from this we know that their brains are shaped differently and they have less

gray matter. That's the essential discovery here. The growing research indicates that the temporal polls are responsible, that these are the areas where there is less gray matter for social and emotional processing. And this included detecting deception and moral decision making, as well as inferring the emotional states of others. So that makes sense in terms of thinking about the

traits of psychopathy that we talked about earlier. So these are the regions of your brain that cover critical cognitive control and emotion. And they cited some other studies here too. One was that mail youth with conduct disorder had reduced gray matter in their left amygdala and interior insula compared to the healthy control subset, and these reductions were related

to aggressive behaviors. And yet another study adolescent males with conduct disorder had reduced gray matter in the left orbital frontal cortex and bilateral temporal lobes, as well as the left amygdala and the hippocampus. So all of this together is kind of saying, all right, they had previously looked

at boys with conduct disorder. They had looked at, um, you know what kind of gray matter they were missing, And they said, well, wait a minute, conduct disorder seems to be connected to homicidal incidents with juveniles, Is the same thing going on there? And yes it is. It's less gray matter, it's just in different parts of the

brain essentially. So in this specific study, the way that they analyzed the brain structure was they took youth who committed homicides and they did m R I scans on them, and they introduced the following variables into their data set. They added their i Q, their age at the time of scan, the number of traumatic brain injuries they had received with a loss of consciousness. They used a test for psychopathy called the Hair Psychopathy Test List, and they

used the quote youth version. I guess there's separate versions depending on how old you are, whether or not these kids had substance dependences, the years of regular substance abuse that they had, and what their psychiatric diagnoses and violent, non violent drug and total other convictions were. So all of these things combined right now. Like I said, prior work showed that there was reduced temporal pole gray matter

that was related to psychopathic traits. But the interesting thing in this particular study is that the homicide group and the non homicides subsample did not differ in psychopathic traits per the scores that they took on that test there that I mentioned earlier, the psychopathy, the hair psychopathy youth version. So they, the authors of the studies say there is no observation that can be made that psychopathy is involved here. Right,

We can't we can't say that. What we can say is that juveniles who commit murder have less of the gray matter. Okay, so yeah, it becomes the increasingly more difficult to try and say this, this is the brain of a homicidal young offender. This it's far more complicated than me. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, uh And but here's the good news. Other research has shown that our gray matter is malleable. Right, So one study shows that fifteen minutes of daily mirror reading for two weeks can increase the

dorsolateral occipital gray matter. That's fascinating to me that just by doing that you can change the shape of your brain or the volume of Yeah. So it's possible that through cognitive training like this or possibly you know, uh, pharmaceutical interventions or therapy or other types of behavior modification, that you can help these kids to develop out of these behaviors that could potentially lead to them killing someone. Now, there does seem to be a link between low levels

of cortisol and below normal function of the amygdala. That's the part of our brains the processes fear and shame. So usually we want to avoid these sensations, and that plays a big role in our behavioral motivation. So it gets down at route to just how our brains function uh in the in the face of fear and shame, and how how much of our behavior is aimed at avoiding those sensations. So when researchers have looked specifically at areas of the brain that are associated with fear and empathy,

they found a couple of things. Sheila Hodgkins or Hodgens, she's a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal. She conducted experiments. You know, a lot of this comes down to basically m r I scans uh. And in this case, she did MRI I scans on adult psychopaths. I don't believe that they are homicidal offenders. Uh, And she found that even if they're non violent, their brains are different. UH. They have abnormal connections between their posterior

singulate and the insular cortex. Similar structures were found in preteon preteen boys with callous unemotional dates. So I believe that that's referring to those other studies before, the one looking specifically at juvenile homicidal offenders. Um. But these brains are, like we said, they're malleable, they're highly plastic. Uh, kids can grow out of these Remember what we were talking about earlier. I mean, we're our brains are developing until

we're twenty five years old. Like, this is something we we can take action. Yeah, it's it's worth remembering that in a Clockwork Orange, Alex essentially grows out of his behavior in the Yeah, I think they left that last chapter out of the movie. But getting so, okay, we're talking a lot about the brain part here, right, but let's remember that there's the nurture part as well. So. Uh, young brains, especially those from zero to three years old,

are especially vulnerable to hurt. Right, And that's you know, probably part of why culturally we're so averse to the idea of anybody hurting Uh an infant or a toddler, right. Uh, So children who suffer physical abuse, stress, neglect, or terror can absolutely have changes in their brains. From this, the flood of stress chemicals resets how the brain is triggered during fight or flight situations. Right, So in some cases they'll be triggered too much, in some cases they won't

be triggered at all. Uh, it can lead to impulsive aggression. So yeah, not abusive parents can lead to youth violence. That makes sense, right, especially given like I guess, our world experience. But also remember it's not just abusive parents doing this. It's also that there's there's something going on

with the brain ahead of time that contributes. And it's also worth noting that the conditions that we mentioned there can often line up, unfortunately with institutionalized care in the form of orphanages, So that's also a factor to take into account here. And so you know, on the other end of that, it could lead to antisocial personalities when the brain system of stress has just become totally unresponsive. So typically these kind of kids, and I think this is the uh c U type kids, they have low

heart rates, uh, they have impaired emotional sensitivity. Right. In fact, Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans, has studied the risk factors for psychopathy and children for twenty years. And he described one boy who used a knife to cut off the tail of their family cat, bit by bit over a period of weeks. This is from that New York Times article. In fact, the parents didn't even notice. It took them quite a long time

because it was so small. I don't think the cat was like, uh, in pain and letting them know, or bleeding or something like that. Um. But this gets back to kind of what we insinuated earlier, is that a common symptom in these traits of see you kids is

that they will abuse animals. Yeah, and of course it's important to note to that some level of like if your child hits the cat or steps on a bug, a certain level of this is just a natural way in which a child figures out how pain works, how the limits of its body and its powers to impact it's in environmental surroundings, how all of that functions. So, so don't freak out if you listen to this and then you you catch a child slapping at the cat. You know out there you can make judgments about a

childhood me. Uh, but I believe I was like maybe three or four years old, and I took the family cat and put him inside my toy chest and just closed him in there. I mean it was a big chest. It wasn't like a tiny thing. But I didn't understand. I was just like, oh, he goes in here now with the toys, and uh my, my parents are like, where's the cat, and they find the cat in there, you know, and uh, I just didn't. I didn't get it,

you know. I I would hesitate to say that at any point I've been callous or unemotional in my life. That's probably the opposite. Uh See, we've curved a lot of that by just having a largely callous in an emotional cat. So oh yeah, that's perfect. So she lashes out against our sign and then just bats him occasionally. Yeah yeah, that's how my cat treats my dog. But so okay, to be serious about this, Without unconditional love, children can fail to develop the right neural circuits that

control their capability to feel or form healthy relationships. Uh. And in particular, this makes them especially hyper sensitive to perceived injustice uh and also often accompanied by when they're feeling powerless as well. So we saw that in the New York Times article. There was a lot of examples of this with the child Michael that was the case study in which he perceived an injustice against himself and he perceived powerlessness, and so he would lash out against

his siblings or he'd lash out against his parents. Are other kids in the program that he was in. Now, there's some other brain pathologies that can lead to violence as well. Lesions of the frontal lobe can induce apathy and distort judgment and emotion. The singulate gyrus that curves through the center of the brain is hyperactive in murders and it just shifts from one thought to another. When it becomes impaired, people get stuck on one thought comes

in the obsession. The prefrontal cortex is sluggish in murderers as well, and these damages to the brain can result from head trauma as well as exposure to toxic substances like like alcohol, even during the gestation. Okay, so I think that what we've established up to this point is that there's a lot of evidence that damage to the brain, however it occurs, can contribute to this, but that also experiences in childhood can also contribute not only to your behaviors,

but how your brain is formed. Yeah, the the human mind is a nature nurture cocktail and a rather complicated recipe at that there are a number of things that can throw it off whack. And even if it's off whack, even if the drink recipe is a little different, it doesn't mean it's not drinkable. That doesn't mean it can fully function within society. So now let's let's get to the third part of the question that I wanted to answer when we started out on this, which is how

likely is juvenile homicide recidivism? Right? Remember we were talking at the beginning about that girl uh In in Britain who had committed murder as a young child in sixties and then was released and was anonymous Mary Bell and had a child. In fact, I think she's a grandmother. Now, um, how how likely is it? You know, in her case she didn't recede, But what about other children? Well, unfortunately,

this is really hard to predict. In fact, the fourteen national report from the National Center for Juvenile Justice in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention says that there is no national recipivism rate for juveniles. The reason why is that each state has a very different juvenile justice system that differs in organization, administration, and data capacity, So we can't pull all this data together and make

national judgments on it, is essentially what they're saying. UH. And in fact, eleven states in the United States don't even report data on juvenile offenders, so it's really difficult to make any kind of you know, judgment call in the United States. But what about other countries. Well, there is a study out of the Netherlands that indicated that male juvenile homicidal offenders and those in particular that maintain relationships with delinquents are at a greater risk for reoffending.

So it is possible. Uh, that is a very different subsample that's just in the Netherlands, but in that particular study, they did find that they're at a high rate for recidivism. So another thing that came out of this New York Times study was a really interesting UH look into a researcher named Lee Robbins. He was a psychiatry researcher, and he conducted a series of studies on children who had behavioral problems and followed them into adulthood. UH, and his

studies revealed two things. The first was that nearly every psychopathic a alt was deeply antisocial as a child. The second was that almost fifty percent of the children who scored high on measures of antisocial qualities did not go on to become psychopathic adults. So, in other words, they were necessary, but not sufficient in predicting who ultimately would

become a violent criminal. So that's good to know. So these tests don't necessarily indicate if your child and you score high on them, that you're going to grow up and become a violent criminal, right, because growing up is key. There's still so much growing up, so much development to come. This is not the finished product, all the experiences. Yeah, and even again, like I keep coming back to that we're maturing. Our brain is maturing until we're twenty five

years old. That you know, in my experience, that's you get seven years out of high school where your brain is still maturing based on whatever experiences you have there. Yeah, totally. I mean, just it forces you certainly to to reevaluate your own life up till and maybe make you a little more compassionate towards the the teenagers in your midst. Now, I think I understand why in America you have to

be twenty five before you can rent a car. Oh, yeah, that would make sense giving only full form your organisms. So one of the big questions of course here is yet what extent is it treatable? So the big hope here, and there's some good evidence to back this up, is that there's still a capacity for empathy uh and it controlled by specific parts of the brain. Is still exist in a weakened state, and then they can be strengthened, especially if we act early enough to we rewire the

developing brain. And this UM, this brings to mind a couple of studies that I've I've looked at in the past. There's a two thousand thirteen both were two thousand thirteen studies. Actually one was published in Frontiers and Human Neuroscience and the O there's a study from the Social Brain Lab and of the University Medical Center in uh Growningen uh and these looked at psychopathic inmates adults, UH and it

looked a treatment opportunity. So the one NUTS and front Ears and Human Neuroscience that I mentioned, they used f m r I scans the brains add twenty one medium security prison inmates during the viewing of painful visual stimuli stub toes, smashed fingers, that sort of thing, you know, the kind of stuff that makes you go out. The researchers then asked the stubdies to imagine the pain happening to themselves as well as to others. The results will.

When highly psychopathic subjects imagine the pain happening to themselves, brain regions involved in empathy for pain lit up like normal in their minds. But when they but when they imagine the pain inflicted on others, the same regions failed to activate. And this lines up with that with that two thirteen study from the Social Brain Lab that they're finding suggested that to pay the psychopaths, empathic abilities didn't kick in automatically, but could be turned on by conscious will,

by exercise, by repetition. So both of these studies, it's essentially, Yeah, it's like it's like a muscle. Think of it is a muscle that needs to be strengthened as a default setting that is off rather than on, and there has to be a little more conscious will and just requires

a little training and moments. Yeah. Yeah, they seem to suggest that these sort of treatments, these mirror treatments, these empathy treatments UH are going to show a lot of promise with the individuals of varying ages the equipment there, it's just a matter of making sure that it's turning on. So all right, let's go back to where we started here. We had three questions. The first was how likely our juvenile homicidal offenders? How likely is it that there's that

children will kill people? And the answer is not very Yeah, it's pretty pretty slim. They're blown out in the media and in our sort of cultural mythology, but realistically speaking, slim chance. Yeah. And then the second question would be, well, why is this happening? Why do they do this? And the answer is that it's a very complicated mixture of nature and nurture, right, brain act of it, as well as their experiences and their interaction with their families and peers. Right.

And then the third question was, well, how likely is it that the very small amount of them UH that do commit these crimes will recede if they're released from jail, And the answer is that we don't know, Like maybe the Netherlands, it seems to be the case that they might, but u S data is all over the place, So as of right, now, it's it's really hard to pinpoint an answer on that one. They're just so many factors involved, and with each individual, it's not like the psychopath is

like a one clone of another. They're just oh, those are psychopathic organisms. There. No, it's it's it's it's a far more complex neurological condition. But so the good news though, is, like what we were talking about just now and earlier, the brain is malleable, that our behaviors can be formed and we can learn to better interact with other human beings. You know, it's a it's a taught thing, and and and and the actual activity of doing that sort of

rewires and reshapes things so that it's easier to do. Alright. So there you have it, Um, the psychopathic child, the the homicidal child, the callous and emotional child, uh, A reasonably deep dive into what's going on inside their minds as far as we can tell, um, and what can be done to to cope with it. So I guess the answer to my initial question is of is Michael Myers possible? Is yes, but not likely. Yeah, sure it

could happen, but it's very unlikely. Now I know, we have a lot of listeners out there with something to share about this. We've all had childhood's the number of people out there have children as well in their life. Uh so then we may even have some some listeners who themselves have caluson emotional traits or have children with cawuson emotional traits. And we would love to hear from you.

And certainly if you want your name to remain anonymous, just make a note of that and absolutely always respect with that. Uh. How to get in touch with us, well, you can always go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all of the podcast episodes. That's where you'll find blog post videos. Most important like links out to our social media accounts such as Facebook where We'll blow the Mind. Twitter, We'll blow the mind there as well Tumbler We're stuff to Blow your Mind.

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