A peek inside the minds behind true crime #TEDTalks

One of my colleagues asked me to analyze a bunch of brains of psychopathic killers. Some of the brains that I've studied are people you know about. When I get the brains, I don't know what I'm looking at. You know, it's a blind experiment. They give me normal people and everything. So, I've looked at about

70 of these and came up and saw a number of pieces of data. So, we look at these sorts of things theoretically on the basis of genetics and brain damage and the interaction with environment and exactly how that machine works. So we're interested in exactly where in the brain and what's the most important part of

the brain. So how you end up with a psychopath and a killer depends on exactly when the damage occurs. Every one of them I looked at who was a murderer and was a serial killer had damage to their orbital cortex which is right above the eyes the orbits and also the anterior part of the temple. So

there's this pattern that every one of them had but they all were a little different too. They had other sorts of brain damage. The key thing is that the major violence genes is called the MA gene. And there's a variant of this gene that is in the normal population. Some of you have this. And it's sex length.

It's on the X chromosome. And so in this way, you can only get it from your mother. And in fact, this is probably why mostly men, boys are psychopathic killers are very aggressive because, you know, the daughter can get one X from the father, one X from the mother. kind of diluted out. But for a son could only get the X

chromosome from his mother.