The Wisdom of Psychopaths (23 page)

White noise. Sleep deprivation. Sensory deprivation. Water. Stress positions. The lot. We threw everything at him. Finally, after forty-eight hours, I removed the blindfold, put my face within a few inches of his, and yelled:

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

To my surprise, and I’ve got to say, disappointment—like I said, this guy was as hard as nails, and by this stage we were actually willing him to pass—he said yes. There was something he wanted to say.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You want to cut down on the garlic, dude,” he said.

It was the only time, in fifteen years as an instructor, that I let my guard slip. Just for a second, a split second, I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I actually admired this guy. And you know what? Even in the disgusting, fucked-up state he was in, the son of a bitch saw it. He saw it! He called me back closer to him. And there was a look of sheer, I don’t know, defiance—who knows what it was?—in his eyes.

“Game over,” he whispered in my ear. “You’ve failed.”

What? I was meant to be saying that to him! It was then that we realized he was one of what we call the “unbreakables.” The toughest of the tough …

But he was a ruthless fucking bastard. And if he DID have a conscience I never saw it. He was cold as ice. At either end of a weapon. Which actually, in this line of work, isn’t always a bad thing.

True to his word, 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. Dr. Nick Cooper is one of the world’s
leading exponents of TMS. And, from the look of him this morning, you could be forgiven for thinking he’s done most of the work on himself.

Nick ushers us into the lab. The first things we notice are two high-backed leather chairs, side by side. And, next to them, the world’s biggest roll of industrial paper toweling. I know what the toweling is for: it’s to mop up the excess conductance gel that helps the EEG electrodes, which Nick is going to attach in a minute, pick up the signals from deep within our brains. Andy, on the other hand, has just his imagination to go on.

“Christ,” he says, pointing at the stack. “If that’s the size of the toilet paper, then I’m out of here!”

Nick shows us over to the 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. But Andy isn’t complaining. He’s finally figured out what the king-sized TP roll is for.

Directly in front of us, about ten feet away on the wall, is a massive video screen. Nick flips a switch, which makes it crackle into 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!”

“Okay,” 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 sixty 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.

“Okay,” says Nick. “Let’s get the show on the road.”

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. Both my and Andy’s pulse rates are significantly higher than our normal resting levels in anticipation of what’s to come.

But when Nick pulls the lever, or whatever it is that initiates the change of scene, an override switch flips somewhere in Andy’s brain. And the ice-cold SAS soldier suddenly swings into action. 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. And 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.

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, nonplussed. “If I hadn’t recorded those readings myself, I’m not sure I would have believed them,” he continues. “Okay, 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.”

Just as Bob Hare had found: the data was so freakish you really had to wonder who it came from.

Back at the ranch, and the news, needless to say, isn’t nearly as cool. My physiological output readings have gone through the roof. Exactly like Andy’s, they’d weighed in well above baseline as I’d waited for the carnage to commence. But that’s where the similarity had ended. Rather than go down in the heat of battle, in the midst of the blood and guts mine had appreciated exponentially.

“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 he looks like Don King in a wind tunnel.

I, on the other hand, am still getting over the shock of some of the images. I feel sick. And jittery. And a little unsteady on my feet. I might, as Nick had pointed out, have shown up on the radar screens as normal. The needles and dials may well have vouched for my sanity. But I certainly don’t feel normal as I cower in the corner of a beeping, flickering cubicle, poring over the data on a computer screen.

The difference in profiles is embarrassing. Whereas my EEG reading is a fair approximation of the New York skyline—a histographical cityscape of sheer, sharp, mathematical loft apartments—Andy’s is like a top-end, low-rise golfing resort on one of those beautifully manicured islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Uniform. And compact. And insanely, uncannily symmetrical.

“Does make you wonder, doesn’t it?” I turn to Nick. “What normal really is?”

He shrugs and resets the computer.

“Maybe you’re about to find out,” he says.

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 gauntlet again, in phase II of the experiment. In which, with the aid of a “psychopath makeover,” I’ll have another crack of the whip. Another bash at the mayhem, carnage, and gore. Only this time, quite literally, with a completely different head on—thanks to the same kind of treatment that Ahmed Karim and Liane Young dished out in their moral processing experiments: a dose of TMS.

“The makeover does wear off, doesn’t it?” Andy laughs. “ ‘Cuz the hotel won’t want two psychos propping up the bar.”

“The effects of the treatment should wear off within half an hour,” Nick elucidates, 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.”

Andy’s face is a picture. What the hell is this? A lab or a salon?

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.

Instantly, it feels as if there’s a geeky homunculus miner buried deep inside my head, tapping away with a rock hammer. I wouldn’t say it was painful, but you wouldn’t want him to be just clocking on—to be just at the start of his neuro-minerological shift.

“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?”

“Right.” I nod.

“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.”

Sure enough, after about twenty 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, just a tad. 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.

“Okay,” 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. Prior to the experiment, I’d been curious about the timescale: how long it would take me to begin to feel the rush.
Now I had the answer: about ten to fifteen 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.

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 shit, anyway?

There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. The lack of attendant sluggishness. The perseveration—in fact, I’d even say enhancement—of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it’s been spiked with moral Rohypnol, 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 like 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 see through Gary Gilmore’s eyes. 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.

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. 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?

Ahem. Even more important: will my prosthetic psychopath implants make me cooler than Andy McNab?

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 completely 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.”

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. Not a New York skyscraper in sight.