Paula G. (Paulathegreat) reviewed on 1/29/2018 + 146 more book reviews

Before I read this book I knew a little about psychopaths. In fact, I have worked with some. Not just the kids in the tough love school where I spent too many years, but also the adults who worked with them and a lot of seemingly normal people walking around like the rest of us.

This is what I know about psychopaths. Psychopathy seems to be a neurological problem. The visible symptoms are a lack of empathy, a lack of conscience, an inability to anticipate effect from cause which results in being unable to learn from mistakes. Psychopaths tend to be self involved to the point of monomania. This, of course, makes them boringâsomething I should have remembered when I picked up this book.

The psychopath inside is the story of a man, Jim Fallon, who is a neuropsychological researcher. He took his own brain scans as a control in a contemporary study on alzheimer's and discovered that his scan looked a lot like the scans of psychopaths in a study he had done on psychopathic killers.

This book is incredibly technical. One can not expect, or shouldn't, a psychopath to write about depth of feeling for the same reason one can not expect a Down Syndrome child to explain the genetic and environmental factors of their success or failure. So Jim talks about his work, and his observations. The only insight we get into the reality of being a psychopath is when he tells us he could change, but he doesn't care enough to tryâexcept in a clinical study.

Long story short: this book is a good technical introduction to psychopathy, but it doesn't make any effort to be comprehensible for the lay reader, nor does it have any deep insight. This is, of course, the reality of life as (or with) a psychopath. It is a not a pathetic existence, if only because of the lack of awareness of pathos.

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