Kevin Dutton Article Take Two

Part two...

Let’s do this, I guess.

In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.

Yes, I agree with this statement, but I don’t know how it folds into the previous parts of this article. It seems like an odd transition to me.

Individuals like my old friend Andy McNab.

Ah, I see, we had to find a reason to bring good old Andy into this. Got it.

McNab was arguably the most famous British soldier to have served in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces until Prince Harry hung up his polo mallet at Eton. During the first Gulf War, Andy commanded Bravo Two Zero, an eight-man Special Forces patrol that was assigned the task of gathering intelligence on underground communication links between Baghdad and northwest Iraq, and tracking and destroying Scud missile launchers along the Iraqi main supply route in the area. But soon the boys had other fish to fry. A couple of days after insertion, the patrol was compromised by a goatherd. And, in time honored fashion, they beat it: 185 miles, across the desert, toward the Syrian border.

Only one of them made it. Three were killed, and the other four, including Andy, were picked up at various points along the way by the Iraqis. Suffice it to say that none of their captors were ever going to have their own talk shows … or make their mark in the annals of cosmetic surgery. It’s generally accepted that there are better ways of putting a person at ease than by stubbing your cigarette out on his neck. And better ways of breaking and remodeling their jawline than with the sun-baked butt of an AK-47. Thanks to more advanced techniques back home in Britain, Andy’s mouth now packs more porcelain than all the bathrooms in Buckingham Palace put together. He should know. In 1991 he went there to collect the Distinguished Service Medal from the queen.

Well, that certainly sucked for Andy. That is quite unfortunate. Also, cool for the reward. Good on him.

Such mental toughness isn’t the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There’s also fearlessness. A couple of years ago, on a beautiful spring morning 12,000 feet above Sydney’s Bondi Beach, I performed my first free-fall skydive. The night before, somewhat the worse for wear in one of the city’s waterfront bars, I texted Andy for some last-minute advice.

“Keep your eyes open. And your arse shut,” came the reply. I did. Just.

Ooo… sounds fun! But, why did you need advice? Just jump.

But performing the same feat at night, in the theater of war, over a raging ocean from twice the altitude and carrying 200 pounds of equipment, is a completely different ballgame. And if that’s not enough, “We used to have a laugh,” Andy recalls. “Mess about. You know, we’d throw the equipment out ahead of us and see if we could catch up with it. Or on the way down, we’d grab each other from behind in a bear hug and play chicken—see who’d be the first to peel off and pull the cord. It was all good fun.”

Andy is right. That sounds even more fun.

Er, right. If you say so, Andy. But what wasn’t much fun was the killing. I ask Andy whether he ever felt any regret over anything he’d done. Over the lives he’d taken on his numerous secret missions around the world. “No,” he replies matter-of-factly, his arctic-blue eyes showing not the slightest trace of emotion. “You seriously don’t think twice about it. When you’re in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you’ve done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16.”

Yeah, I don’t get the recoiling over killing thing, either. There are plenty of occasions that might arise requiring you to kill someone, so just do it. I don’t understand why people get so squeamish about it. It isn’t like I am seeking out situations in which to do so, but should one come about, why hesitate?

“The regiment’s motto is ‘Who Dares Wins.’ But sometimes it can be shortened to ‘F— It.’ ”

It really isn’t daring, it’s just doing what needs doing. Danger doesn’t really cross into the equation.

Andy’s on a weeklong spree in the desert, roaring around Nevada on a Harley V-Rod Muscle, when I call. “No helmets!” he booms. “Hey, Andy,” I say. “You up for a little challenge when you get back?” “Course!” he yells. “What is it?” “How about you and me go head-to-head in a test of cool in the lab? And I come out on top?” Manic laughter. “Love it,” he says. “You’re on! How the hell do you think you’re going to pull that off?” I hang up. What I’m planning is a psychopath makeover, to find out firsthand, for better and for worse, what it’s like to see the world through devil-may-care eyes. And there’s nothing like a bit of competition.

Ahhh… this is going into the TMS experiment that Dutton did. All right, it is interesting, but I feel like it is something that I have touched on. Perhaps only over on Quora, so I will do so again here. Again, I am not sure how this connects to the first part of the article, where we were talking about society, and where the hell did Hare go, also? He was in the article for like fifteen seconds, then gone. A bit disjointed, is all I’m saying.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (or TMS) was developed by Anthony Barker and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield in 1985.

The basic premise of TMS is that the brain operates using electrical signals, and that, as with any such system, it’s possible to modify the way it works by altering its electrical environment. Standard equipment consists of a powerful electromagnet, placed on the scalp, that generates steady magnetic-field pulses at specific frequencies, and a plastic-enclosed coil to focus those magnetic pulses down through the surface of the skull onto discrete brain regions, thus stimulating the underlying cortex.

Now, one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren’t wired up in quite the same way as the rest of ours are—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-size structure located right at the center of the circuit board. The amygdala is the brain’s emotion-control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.

Yup, agreed.

In the light-switch analogy, TMS may be thought of as a dimmer switch. As we process information, our brains generate small electrical signals. These signals not only pass through our nerves to work our muscles but also meander deep within our brains as ephemeral electrical data shoals, creating our thoughts, memories, and feelings. TMS can alter the strength of those signals. By passing an electromagnetic current through precisely targeted areas of the cortex, we can turn the signals either up or down.

Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and you’re well on the way to giving someone a psychopath makeover. Indeed, Liane Young and her team in Boston have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a neural ZIP code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability but also on moral-reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others’ actions.

Everyone feel versed in TMS, now? Excellent, moving on.

Andy rocks up to the Centre for Brain Science at the University of Essex one bitterly cold December morning, and we’re met at the door by the man who, for the next couple of hours or so, is going to be our tormentor. Nick Cooper, one of the world’s leading exponents of TMS, ushers us into the lab, shows us over to two high-backed leather chairs, and straps us in. He wires us up to heart-rate monitors, EEG recording equipment, and galvanic-skin-response (GSR) measures, which assess stress levels as a function of electrodermal activity. By the time he’s finished, the pair of us look like we’re trapped inside a giant telecom junction box. The gel for the electrodes feels cold against my scalp.

Directly in front of us, about 10 feet away on the wall, is a large video screen. Nick flips a switch, which makes it crackle to life. Then he goes into white-coat mode. Ambient music wafts around the room. A silky, twilit lake ripples in front of our eyes.

“Bloody hell,” says Andy. “It’s like an ad for incontinence pads!” “OK,” says Nick. “Listen up. Right now, on the screen in front of you, you can see a tranquil, restful scene, which is presently being accompanied by quiet, relaxing music. This is to establish baseline physiological readings from which we can measure subsequent arousal levels. “But at an undisclosed moment sometime within the next 60 seconds, the image you see at the present time will change, and images of a different nature will appear on the screen. These images will be violent. And nauseating. And of a graphic and disturbing nature. “As you view these images, changes in your heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG activity will be monitored and compared with the resting levels that are currently being recorded. Any questions?” Andy and I shake our heads. “Happy?” We nod. “OK,” says Nick. “Let’s get the show on the road.”

This is kind of like what they do with an fMRI. They show you different things, images and words, that are either peaceful or not so much. They want to see where your brain lights up, and where it doesn't. Psychopaths don’t light up regardless of the imaging. It’s all the same to me.

He disappears behind us, leaving Andy and me merrily soaking up the incontinence ad. Results reveal later that, at this point, as we wait for something to happen, our physiological output readings are actually pretty similar. Our pulse rates are significantly higher than our normal resting levels, in anticipation of what’s to come.

What kind of incontinence ads do they have in Britain? Usually it isn’t just sounds and ripples. I am not sure how that gets anyone to buy anything. Weird.

But with the change of scene, an override switch flips somewhere in Andy’s brain. And the ice-cold Special Forces soldier suddenly swings into action.

All right, no. If he is a psychopath, which Dutton says he is, he diagnosed him, himself., this isn’t a switch flip. This is just how he’s wired. Sooo…. no.

As vivid, florid images of dismemberment, mutilation, torture, and execution flash up on the screen in front of us (so vivid, in fact, that Andy later confesses to actually being able to “smell” the blood: a “kind of sickly sweet smell that you never, ever forget”), accompanied not by the ambient spa music of before but by blaring sirens and hissing white noise, his physiological readings start slipping into reverse. His pulse rate begins to slow. His GSR begins to drop, his EEG to quickly and dramatically attenuate. In fact, by the time the show is over, all three of Andy’s physiological output measures are pooling below his baseline.

True, I have smelled a fair amount of blood mixed with gasoline, and it is something that I can pick out from afar. I can usually say, oh, car accident. I intentionally coded that smell to be able to recognize it at other times. He likely did the same.

As for the adjustment, I have noticed that a lot of doctors ignore movement physical stress, and by that I mean that you arrive at a medical appointment, and the second you sit down they want to take your blood pressure. Then they have the temerity to be surprised that it’s high and want to give you blood pressure medication. Dude, chill. Take it after the patient has been sitting for ten minutes. It changes everything. The same can be said here. Your brain was active from walking, talking, getting wired in, getting talked to, etc. Give them a second to settle.

I imagine that is actually what is being seen on the screen, because I experience this all the time when going in for various scans. Maybe this functions differently in neurotypicals, which is why they made the comment that they did, but in reality, it’s just the difference between activity and rest, and the abrupt change that happens in a psychopath’s brain between them.

Nick has seen nothing like it. “It’s almost as if he was gearing himself up for the challenge,” he says. “And then, when the challenge eventually presented itself, his brain suddenly responded by injecting liquid nitrogen into his veins. Suddenly implemented a blanket neural cull of all surplus feral emotion. Suddenly locked down into a hypnotically deep code red of extreme and ruthless focus.” He shakes his head, nonplused. “If I hadn’t recorded those readings myself, I’m not sure I would have believed them,” he continues. “OK, I’ve never tested Special Forces before. And maybe you’d expect a slight attenuation in response. But this guy was in total and utter control of the situation. So tuned in, it looked like he’d completely tuned out.”

How do you ascribe “ruthlessness” to focus? That seems like a weird way to describe it. Maybe this has to do with his training, I don’t know, but it sounds to me more like they are overly accrediting the systematic focus that Andy’s brain undergoes. Ruthless focus… okay, whatever.

My physiological output readings, in contrast, went through the roof. Exactly like Andy’s, they were well above baseline as I’d waited for the carnage to commence. But that’s where the similarity ended. Rather than go down in the heat of battle, in the midst of the blood and guts, mine had appreciated exponentially.

Right, this is exactly why some people seek out gore. It provides them a psychological high that other things don’t. Psychopaths don’t care, and find it all mundane, neurotypicals get a spike of all the chemicals.

“At least it shows that the equipment is working properly,” comments Nick. “And that you’re a normal human being.” We look across at Andy, who’s chatting up a bunch of Nick’s Ph.D. students over by a bank of monitors. God knows what they make of him. They’ve just analyzed his data, and the electrode gel has done such a number on his hair that he looks like Don King in a wind tunnel.

All right, can we all agree that places that do this sort of testing needs to have a shower for the patient to use afterward? I have had tests like this, and the techs think it’s perfectly fine to send them out of the office or lab looking like they got licked by Jabba the Hutt. It’s not cool, man.

All done, Andy is off to a luxury hotel in the country, where I’ll be joining him later for a debrief. But that’s only after I’ve run the gantlet again, in Phase II of the experiment. In which, with the aid of a psychopath makeover, I’ll have another go at the experiment, only this time with a completely different head on—thanks to a dose of TMS.

Baseline is done, and Andy has no part in the next part. TMS works on neurotypicals because it tones down what they have naturally, therefore mimicking psychopathy. Psychopaths lack the wiring that is necessary to mimic neurotypicality. Nuts to us.

The effects of the treatment should wear off within half an hour,” Nick says, steering me over to a specially calibrated dentist’s chair, complete with headrest, chin rest, and face straps. “Think of TMS as an electromagnetic comb, and brain cells—neurons—as hairs. All TMS does is comb those hairs in a particular direction, creating a temporary neural hairstyle. Which, like any new hairstyle, if you don’t maintain it, quickly goes back to normal of its own accord.” Nick sits me down in the sinister-looking chair and pats me, a little too reassuringly for my liking, on the shoulder. By the time he’s finished strapping and bolting me in, I look like Hannibal Lecter at LensCrafters. He positions the TMS coils, which resemble the handle part of a giant pair of scissors, over the middle section of my skull, and turns on the machine.

This sounds like a lot to experience psychopathy, but you do you, Dr. Dutton.

Instantly it feels as if there’s a geeky homunculus miner buried deep inside my head, tapping away with a rock hammer. “That’s the electromagnetic induction passing down your trigeminal nerve,” Nick explains. “It’s one of the nerves responsible for sensation in the face, and for certain motor functions like biting, chewing, and swallowing. You can probably feel it going through your back teeth, right?”

I nod.

Okay, I may not be able to do the neurotypical experience, but that feeling sounds interesting. Sounds like fun.

“What I’m actually trying to find,” he continues, “is the specific part of your motor cortex responsible for the movement of the little finger of your right hand. Once we’ve pinpointed that, I can then use it as a kind of base camp, if you like, from which to plot the coordinates of the brain regions we’re really interested in: your amygdala and your moral-reasoning area.” “Well, you’d better get on with it,” I mutter. “Because much more of this, and I’m going to end up strangling you.” Nick smiles. “Blimey,” he says. “It must be working already.”

Kevin has stated that he scores pretty high on psychopathy tests, so that it worked quickly on him, does not surprise me.

Sure enough, after about 20 seconds, I feel an involuntary twitch exactly where Nick has predicted. Weak, at first. Then gradually getting stronger. Pretty soon my right pinkie is really ripping it up. It’s not the most comfortable feeling in the world—sitting strapped in a chair, in a dimly lit chamber, knowing that you don’t have any control over the actions your body is performing. It’s creepy. Demeaning. Disorienting … and kind of puts a downer on the whole free-will thing. My only hope is that Nick isn’t in the mood to start clowning around. With the piece of gear he’s waving about, he could have me doing cartwheels round the lab.

Kevin Dutton becomes a cyborg. How fun.

“OK,” he says. “We now know the location of the areas we need to target. So let’s get started.” My little finger stops moving as he repositions his spooky neurological wand in the force field above my head. It’s then just a matter of sitting there for a while as my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right temporoparietal junction get an electromagnetic comb-over. TMS can’t penetrate far enough into the brain to reach the emotion and moral-reasoning precincts directly. But by damping down or turning up the regions of the cerebral cortex that have links with such areas, it can simulate the effects of deeper, more incursive influence.

It isn’t long before I start to notice a fuzzier, more pervasive, more existential difference. Before the experiment, I’d been curious about the time scale: how long it would take me to begin to feel the rush. Now I had the answer: about 10 to 15 minutes. The same amount of time, I guess, that it would take most people to get a buzz out of a beer or a glass of wine.

This is a pretty good description, in my estimation, watching people when they drink. They drop a lot of the barriers that they have in place that keeps their internal thoughts and desires quiet. When they drink, and this isn’t everyone, of course, but there are several that this appears to be the case.

The effects aren’t entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s—, anyway?

Our constant question for you all, really. Why do you care?

There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That’s the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness.

Is that how drinking feels for you? It never makes me sluggish at all. It doesn’t really do anything except, if I drink enough, it messes with my motor functioning and speech. That’s it though.

Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it’s on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel’s. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it’s been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher. So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.

No longer? Try, never bothered us. We don’t have it, so the idea that it does bother you is totally bizarre to us.

I suddenly get a flash of insight. We talk about gender. We talk about class. We talk about color. And intelligence. And creed. But the most fundamental difference between one individual and another must surely be that of the presence, or absence, of conscience.

I mean… maybe, if that sort of thing matters to you. It doesn’t to me, and in fact, I think it is highly overrated. People depend on their so-called conscience, and still justify doing ridiculously evil things. If that’s your standard, I don’t know what to tell you. Depending on a conscience is just allowing yourself permission to do whatever if it can be forced into your worldview. It’s weakness in my opinion.

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good. But what if it’s as tough as old boots? What if one’s conscience has an infinite, unlimited pain threshold and doesn’t bat an eye when others are screaming in agony?

Dehumanize those people, and the same people that should feel hurt at their agony feel satisfaction. Again, this is not a good arbiter of good behavior. You have to decide your principles and then stick by them, regardless of your feelings. Anyone can manipulate your feelings, and help you become a monster.

Back in the chair, wired up to the counters and bleepers, I sit through the horror show again: the images modified, so as to avoid habituation. This time, however, it’s a different story. “I know the guy before me found these images nauseating,” I hear myself saying. “But actually, to be honest, this time round I’m finding it hard to suppress a smile.”

Yeah, I get that. There are plenty of times that I find awful things amusing. People associate this with sadism, but in reality, when you lack the emotions that fire up when you see stuff like that, it just becomes an event, and in all things there are parts that are amusing. They simply stand out more to me, and I laugh at them. I don’t care about the suffering, it doesn’t even register. You can’t smile, though, Kevin. People get real judgy when you smile.

The lines and squiggles corroborate my confession. Whereas previously, such was my level of arousal that it was pretty much a minor miracle that the state-of-the-art EEG printer hadn’t blown up and burst into flames, my brain activity after the psychopath makeover is significantly reduced. Perhaps not quite as genteelly undulating as Andy’s. But getting there, certainly. It’s a similar story when it comes to heart rate and skin conductance. In fact, in the case of the latter, I actually eclipse Andy’s reading.

Nice.

“Does that mean it’s official?” I ask Nick, as we scrutinize the “gures. “Can I legitimately claim to be cooler than Andy McNab?” He shrugs. “I suppose,” he says. “For now, anyway. But you’d better make the most of it while you can. You’ve got a quarter of an hour. Max.”

Fifteen minutes, Kevin. Make it count.

I shake my head. Already I sense the magic wearing off. The electromagnetic sorcery starting to wane. I feel, for instance, considerably more married than I did a bit earlier—and considerably less inclined to go up to Nick’s research assistant and ask her out for a drink. Instead I go with Nick—to the student bar—and bury my previous best on the Gran Turismo car-racing video game. I floor it all the way round. But so what—it’s only a game, isn’t it?

A psychopath will do that for real. I behave myself better now, but my driving has caused me some trouble in the past.

“I wouldn’t want to be with you in a real car at the moment,” says Nick. “You’re definitely still a bit ballsy.” I feel great. Not quite as good as before, perhaps, when we were in the lab. Not quite as … I don’t know … impregnable. But up there, for sure. Life seems full of possibility, my psychological horizons much broader. Why shouldn’t I piss off to Glasgow this weekend for my buddy’s stag party, instead of dragging myself over to Dublin to help my wife put her mother in a nursing home? I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? This time next year, this time next week even, it would all be forgotten. Who Dares Wins, right?

Oh come on, Nick. You used to be fun. What happened to you? Now, where are your keys?

I take a couple of quid from the table next to ours—left as a tip, but who’s going to know?—and try my luck on another couple of machines. I get to $100,000 on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” but crash and burn because I refuse to go 50-50. Soon things start to change. Gran Turismo the second time round is a disappointment. I’m suddenly more cautious, and finish way down the field. Not only that, I notice a security camera in the corner and think about the tip I’ve just pocketed. To be on the safe side, I decide to pay it back.

I get it, Kevin, you want to test your psychopathy levels, or whatever, but don’t steal from the staff. This is why I think neurotypicals are wildly lacking in cognitive empathy. The second you don’t feel bad about doing something, you’re like, I can steal that person’s tips. What are they going to do about it? Do you need that money? No. Now put it back and behave like a human that lives with other humans. At least he paid it back, but only, it seems, because he didn’t want to be caught, not because he thought about the action and knew it was against a code of conduct that he polices despite his feelings. Do better.

I smile and swig my beer. Psychopaths. They never stick around for long. As soon as the party’s over, they’re moving on to the next one, with scant regard for the future and even less for the past. And this psychopath—the one, I guess, that was me for 20 minutes—was no exception. He’d had his fun. And got a free drink out of it. But now that the experiment was history, he was suddenly on his way, hitting the road and heading out of town. Hopefully quite some distance away

Actually, we aren’t exactly nomads. We tend to just do our own thing, and when there’s fun to be had, we might show up. When there isn’t, we find other stuff to do. We aren’t moving countries every five seconds. Some of us might, but that requires a whole new establishment of connections, and that can be a pain. We will move with the mood shifts us, but we aren’t constantly on the move.

I certainly didn’t want him showing up in the hotel bar later, where I was meeting Andy. They’d either get on great. Or wouldn’t get on at all. To be honest, I didn’t know which would be scarier.

Well, the waitstaff certainly wouldn’t appreciate it, Kevin. Don’t steal tips.

That’s it, that’s the twenty or thirty minutes that Dutton turned himself into a psychopath. I thought, for a good while, how fun it would be to have a TMS machine and sell the “psychopathic experience”, but I thought about this later, and outside of the logistical nightmare that would be, and the cost, there is a good chance this would create addicts. Also, I don’t know what the outcome would be for repeat treatments, and I have no real interest in messing with the human mind in that way. In other ways, sure. I still want to see if I can convince someone that they committed murder, but apparently that violates “ethics” or whatever, so I can’t.

For the time being, I am pretty sure the only way to get the “psychopathic experience” is to be a tenured professor at a university that has this sort of research department, and call your friend that runs it. Everyone else, out of luck.

Psychopathy’s Double Edge