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Thread: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Quote Posted by norman (here)
    Yea Soros calling Trump evil .........
    Well - dang - perhaps we should listen to Soros on this - after all - he is a subject matter expert on the topic of evil </sarcasm>.
    My quite dormant website: pauljackson.us

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Brainscans and prisoners:

    Study shows psychopathic brains are wired in a way that can lead to dangerous and violent actions
    Quote Josh Buckholtz wants to change the way you think about psychopaths - and he's willing to go to prison to do it.

    An Associate Professor of Psychology, Buckholtz is the senior author of a study that relies on brain scans of nearly 50 prison inmates to help explain why psychopaths make poor decisions that often lead to violence or other anti-social behavior.

    What they found, he said, is psychopath's brains are wired in a way that leads them to over-value immediate rewards and neglect the future consequences of potentially dangerous or immoral actions. The study is described in a July 5 paper in Neuron.

    "For years, we have been focused on the idea that psychopaths are people who cannot generate emotion and that's why they do all these terrible things," Buckholtz said. "But what what we care about with psychopaths is not the feelings they have or don't have, it's the choices they make. Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims and astronomically costly to society as a whole.

    "And even though psychopaths are often portrayed as cold-blooded, almost alien predators, we have been showing that their emotional deficits may not actually be the primary driver of these bad choices. Because it's the choices of psychopaths that cause so much trouble, we've been trying to understand what goes on in their brains when the make decisions that involve trade-offs between the costs and benefits of action.," he continued. "In this most recent paper...we are able to look at brain-based measures of reward and value and the communication between different brain regions that are involved in decision making."

    Obtaining the scans used in the study, however, was no easy feat - where most studies face an uphill battle in bringing subjects into the lab, Buckholtz's challenge was in bringing the scanner to his subjects.

    The solution came in form of a "mobile" scanner - typically used for cancer screenings in rural areas - that came packed in the trailer of a tractor trailer. After trucking the equipment to a two medium-security prisons in Wisconsin, the team - which included collaborators at the University of Wisconin-Madison and University of New Mexico - would spend days calibrating the scanner, and then work to scan as many volunteers as possible as quickly as possible.
    ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

    The effect was so pronounced, Buckholtz said, that researchers were able to use the degree of connection between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex to accurately predict how many times inmates had been convicted of crimes.

    Ultimately, Buckholtz said, his goal is to erase the popular image of psychopaths as incomprehensible, cold-blooded monsters and see them for what they are - everyday humans whose brains are simply wired differently.

    "They're not aliens, they're people who make bad decisions," he said. "The same kind of short-sighted, impulsive decision-making that we see in psychopathic individuals has also been noted in compulsive over-eaters and substance abusers. If we can put this back into the domain of rigorous scientific analysis, we can see psychopaths aren't inhuman, they're exactly what you would expect from humans who have this particular kind of brain wiring dysfunction."
    Last edited by Carmody; 5th July 2017 at 18:22.
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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    I have been listening to quite a few of the Corbett reports, and I found this guy quite good usually. I do not know why we do not put emphasis a little on his reports.

    There is 2 videos on psychopaths and psychopathy traits in societies, full of statistics and comparative, quite interesting, the first video being the most interesting socially, the second for detection of psychopathy



    How to let the desire of your mind become the desire of your heart - Gurdjieff

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Maybe we could write about psychopathy and sociopathy expériences we had in our life, encountering them in our daily life.

    Once, I was at a business meeting and a person was sitting beside me, on my left, while looking at a screen, others were on my right and in front of me. I was not comfortable with the person on my left, but that was alright for the job.

    Right after the meeting, I had an appointment Schedule for an energetic Healing and hypnotherapy for past lifes or other stuff that would come up.

    I got onto the table, and the healer who feels/see the energy fields told me "put yourself straight on the table, you are crooked", to which I answered "true, I feel crooked, to much on the right of my body, but my body is straight on the table" and then I asked "why?" and suddenly it came to me, i had pushed energetic self (not my body) away from the person on my left during the meeting and I remained outside my body, on my right energetically.

    As soon as I told that to the healer, I reintegrated my body fully, energically speaking and she could proceed.

    Then I went few weeks later to someone else, a wisdom master, and told him the story. He look into the situation and the person who had me push myself out of my body because I was uncomfortable with her around, and he said "my gosh, that person has no heart", meaning the energetic loving heart.

    Then he asked me "where is that person from, who are her family" to which I answered that this person is from a very very wealthy family, probably from the bloodline. He answered "oh, I see, sad but it seems that we need those on the planet - with a kind of discontempt sye- which he usually never does". Then I asked what should i do if this happens again and he answered "I go away from these people, I remain far".

    That person would pass for a normal person, has a normal family, lives a normal life, yet, those with developed seeing abilities can see the lack of heart, genetically passed on. Those ^people are bred to have no heart.
    How to let the desire of your mind become the desire of your heart - Gurdjieff

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    I think there's something DNA related for sure! I came across someone who found a physical correlation but I can't back that up. That's shaky ground anyway

    You know what I'd like? A "heart scan". To "see inside people's heart" and know their true motivations.
    Last edited by petra; 8th November 2017 at 23:01.

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Scientists can predict intelligence from brain scans



    Quote If you've ever lied about your IQ to seem more intelligent, it's time to fess up. Scientists can now tell how smart you are just by looking at a scan of your brain.

    Actually, to be more precise, the scientists themselves aren't looking at your brain scan; a machine-learning algorithm they've developed is.

    In a new study, researchers from Caltech, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and the University of Salerno show that their new computing tool can predict a person's intelligence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their resting state brain activity. Functional MRI develops a map of brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow to specific brain regions. In other words, an individual's intelligence can be gleaned from patterns of activity in their brain when they're not doing or thinking anything in particular—no math problems, no vocabulary quizzes, no puzzles.

    "We found if we just have people lie in the scanner and do nothing while we measure the pattern of activity in their brain, we can use the data to predict their intelligence," says Ralph Adolphs (Ph.D. '92), Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology, and director and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center.

    To train their algorithm on the complex patterns of activity in the human brain, Adolphs and his team used data collected by the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a scientific endeavor funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that seeks to improve understanding of the many connections in the human brain. Adolphs and his colleagues downloaded the brain scans and intelligence scores from almost 900 individuals who had participated in the HCP, fed these into their algorithm, and set it to work.

    After processing the data, the team's algorithm was able to predict intelligence at statistically significant levels across these 900 subjects, says Julien Dubois (Ph.D. '13), a postdoctoral fellow at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. But there is a lot of room for improvement, he adds. The scans are coarse and noisy measures of what is actually happening in the brain, and a lot of potentially useful information is still being discarded.
    Getting closer.......
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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Further on in the same (above) article is this:

    Quote The researchers also conducted a parallel study, using the same test population and approach, that attempted to predict personality traits from fMRI brain scans. An individual's personality, Adolphs says, is at least as stable as intelligence over a long period of time. The personality test they used divides personality into five scales:

    Openness to experience: Preference for new experiences and ideas vs. preference for routine and predictability
    Conscientiousness: Self-discipline and thoughtfulness vs. spontaneity and flexibility
    Extraversion: Sociability and talkativeness vs. shyness and reservation
    Agreeableness: Friendliness and helpfulness vs. antagonism and argumentativeness
    Neuroticism: Confidence and predisposition to positive emotions vs. nervousness and predisposition to negative emotions

    However, it has turned out to be much more difficult to predict personality using the method the team used for predicting intelligence. But this is not surprising, says Dubois.

    "The personality scores in the database are just from short, self-report questionnaires," he says. "That's not going to be a very accurate measure of personality to begin with, so it is no wonder we cannot predict it well from the MRI data."

    Adolphs and Dubois say they are now teaming up with colleagues from different fields, including Caltech philosophy professor Frederick Eberhardt, to follow up on their findings.

    Papers describing the two studies, titled "Resting-state functional brain connectivity best predicts the personality dimension of openness to experience," and "A distributed brain network predicts general intelligence from resting-state human neuroimaging data," are available online through bioRχiv; their publication in, respectively, Personality Neuroscience and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, is pending.
    What I'm trying to say, is that we're probably one or two wide ranging test sequences away from getting the actual brain scan end of it together and in the public sphere.

    Then on to the testing of politicians, governmental civil service department heads, judicial heads, military heads, and corporate heads. And others.

    those in positions of responsibility and power...are to be required to submit to testing regimens that show their fitness for the office, in those ways that were previously hidden and in the shadows.

    And finally have the public's attention on this psychopath and sociopath problem in so called 'leadership'.

    The idea being 'that which is a fundamental component but invisible' now becomes visible, known, shown and openly quantifiable.

    This does not mean the tool or the method is perfect, not a chance of that... but it is a change. a big one.

    We rapidly approach another level of the 'who watches the watchers? problem.

    The point of the thread is to do it openly, in control, and in knowing ---of what is about to happen.

    As.. it is going to happen. That's a given.
    Last edited by Carmody; 1st July 2018 at 12:52.
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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    This puts a little more reality meat on the bones of what is going on. It illustrates a real example of what we are up against. The kind of psychopaths and how far they will go to keep what they've got and never stop being parasites. At Any Price.

    Read carefully, and multiply these individuals by the thousands. We're talking bout the kind of people who, rather than be humane, would rather try and find a way to put explosive death collars on their own security people. To treat their security people as prisoners and animated meat of the most undesirable and untrustworthy kind. So determined to stay on top, they are psychopathic enough to think and be this way. The mirror of who they are, is all they see.

    And this mess is running this world. No wonder it's going bad. It can't expand anymore, so it turns in on itself and eats the people first.


    Survival of the richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

    Quote Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

    I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

    After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

    They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

    Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

    The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

    This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

    That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

    There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

    It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

    Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

    This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

    So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

    Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

    "The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."

    But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

    Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

    This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

    The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

    Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

    Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

    The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

    Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

    When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

    They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

    Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

    Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
    Last edited by Carmody; 15th July 2018 at 00:57.
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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Quote Posted by Carmody (here)


    They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves
    Sad, stupid and obviously how we got here in the first place.
    ..................................................my first language is TYPO..............................................

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    One of the slides from my upcoming film on the new age religion:

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Interdimensional Civil Servant

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Starting at minute 35, the video describes what is found in the brain of psychopath that may help in diagnosis

    Ongoing research

    At minute 44, microchipping psychopaths (my opinion, if this is controlled by corporate psychopaths, we are doomed)

    How to let the desire of your mind become the desire of your heart - Gurdjieff

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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    It is becoming more common. More people are beginning to understand what they are ruled by and how to root it out. If you read closely enough, you will see that my thread opening remarks are pretty well echoed below.


    The Evolutionary Role of Narcissistic Sociopaths


    Co-authored by Nathan Lents, Ph.D., and Robert Trivers, Ph.D.

    There is no shortage of published psychological profiles of Donald J. Trump that attempt to diagnose him, from a distance, as either a psychopath or a narcissistic sociopath (examples here, here, and here). These profiles, of course, are fatally hindered by the lack of access to Mr. Trump for personal examination and completion of personality inventories. There is a raging debate in the psychology community on the propriety of all of this. (Other kinds of diagnoses and analyses, here and here, and an important essay from Psychology Today.)

    However, exploration of the evolutionary features of these very peculiar personality types does not require a personal examination and may provide insight into this important question.


    Psychopaths are indeed an evolutionary conundrum because their particular behaviors are not an obvious path toward evolutionary success. For example, the majority of serial killers are childless when they are killed or apprehended. Narcissistic sociopaths, however, invariably have families and children whom they support energetically, and many of the traits specific to this phenotype can fairly be called adaptive. This raises the important issue of the evolutionary niche of a narcissistic sociopath within the societies in which they exist.

    [A note on terminology: We employ “narcissistic sociopath” as an umbrella term inclusive of Machiavellianism and narcissistic/antisocial personality disorder but exclusive of sadistic psychopathology, as explained below. Terminology in this area is inconsistent in both the scientific literature and even more so in popular media, in part because these various personality types/disorders exist on a multidimensional spectrum with both common and distinct characteristics. Importantly, our analysis is from the perspective of evolutionary biology, not psychology.]

    Narcissistic sociopaths share many features with psychopaths including above average intelligence, considerable social savvy, adaptability, likability, and natural skills in (Machiavellian) manipulation. They are charming, outgoing, feign interest in people and subjects, and can convincingly fake both sympathy and conscience. If they engage in charitable acts at all, they are only in pursuit of ancillary selfish benefits. They learn from experience and show no dedication to a set of moral values, religious beliefs, truth, or transparency. If they admire anyone, it is other psychopaths and sociopaths that they wish to emulate. Finally, they are effective liars and show a chilling unconcern for the welfare of others.

    There is one particular skill that is common to both psychopaths and narcissistic sociopaths and is absolutely essential to their nature: cognitive empathy. This is different from emotional (or affective) empathy, sometimes called emotional contagion, which is regarded as the ability and tendency to closely identify with the emotional experience of others.


    Cognitive empathy is a mental skill involving the close observation of others in order to understand and predict their behavior. It is morally neutral and common in high-functioning individuals across the moral and ethical spectrum. While social workers and therapists use cognitive empathy to help individuals improve their lives, psychopaths and sociopaths use this skill to manipulate, coerce, and deceive others in orders. While emotional empathy is an innate cognitive feature we share with other social mammals, cognitive empathy is a skill that can be developed and refined, and doing so is key to the behaviors of both psychopaths and sociopaths.

    However, the ways in which sociopaths differ from psychopaths is key to understanding their evolutionary utility. For example, psychopaths are more likely than the general public to be violent and to end up incarcerated. Narcissistic sociopaths, on the other hand, are usually nonviolent and can work within a system of laws and norms, insofar as it suits their goals, because, while they do not hesitate to harm others, especially when insulted or humiliated, it isn’t a specific aim. Instead, they are highly motivated toward the accumulation of riches and influence; whereas psychopaths are often more focused on sadistic self-gratification and generally do not seek positions of power and wealth per se. (There is some crossover between these phenotypes; sociopaths who do find gratification in inflicting pain can be labeled malignant narcissists.)

    Finally, narcissistic sociopaths always seek reproductive success through procreation and aggressive nepotism, which is usually accompanied by extreme in-group identification, e.g., racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, while psychopaths show no allegiance to family, community, or country.

    Therefore, the phenotype of the narcissistic sociopath is not a bizarre combination of traits, but rather a set of highly attuned social skills and behaviors aimed at increasing long-term biological fitness through wealth, status, power, and the future success of progeny. In order words, sociopaths are highly adapted (key literature here, here, here, and references therein).

    The evolutionary puzzle of narcissistic sociopaths is not found in the phenotype itself but rather in the interaction of sociopaths with the society in which they exist. Social groups can detect dishonest and manipulative behaviors and act to punish the actors in order to either correct the antisocial behavior or remove them from the group. Dozens of mammal species have shown this very sophisticated and elastic social behavior, but humans and our close relatives are especially apt at detecting and punishing cheaters, freeloaders, and liars.

    This sets up both a short-term conflict and long-term evolutionary battle between manipulative narcissistic sociopaths and the rest of society, that is, those who do not wish to be manipulated. Most individuals in a society share a vested interest in maintaining fairness and social order. The equilibrium point is reached through a concept called frequency-dependent selection, the essence of which is that phenotypes can sometimes have distinct advantages precisely because they are rare. Under this paradigm, the infrequency of sociopaths in a population is essential to their success.

    Current estimates place the prevalence of narcissistic sociopathy at 1–2 percent, making it a candidate phenotype for frequency-dependent selection, especially given how successful they often are. The rarity of narcissistic sociopaths in the population, along with their considerable skill in hiding their true motivations, makes them very difficult to detect. If they were more numerous, however, members of society would become familiar with this particular pattern of social deviance and quickly learn to neutralize it. Furthermore, when narcissists encounter one another, while they may be willing to cooperate with each other in fickle and short-lived alliances, ultimately their goals will collide and the relationship deteriorates into mutually self-defeating conflicts. This, too, acts as negative selection and maintains the low frequency of this peculiar phenotype.

    On the other side of the conflict is the selective pressure on the rest of society. Because sociopaths are rare, the intensity of the pressure on society to detect and neutralize them is correspondingly weak. Weak pressure leads to poor adaptation, while sociopaths experience strong pressure and become highly adapted. However, as the sociopath phenotype finds evolutionary success, the pressure flips back the other direction as the rest of society experiences increasing pressure, adapts, and then pushes the frequency of the sociopaths back down to the basal level. In human culture, this pendulum swings in both the long timescales of genetic evolution and the short timescales of cultural evolution. In both contexts, the conflict is cyclical.

    With this evolutionary framework in mind, we can now return to the question of President Trump. Clearly, he attracts devoted supporters. He can be affable, charming, and flattering. He reads people well and can maneuver through his relationships in order to obtain the best “deal” for himself. While many question his capacity for emotional empathy, his skills in cognitive empathy are undeniable.

    However, he also has maintained an unwavering pursuit of wealth, influence, and power, by his own admission. He has never participated in regular religious observance, is not outwardly pious, and shows no allegiance to a political party. It is well documented that his views have shifted, sometimes repeatedly, on the most central political questions of the day such as abortion, government involvement in healthcare, military interventionism, federal drug policy, and LGBTQ rights. While only his critics view him as racist and xenophobic, even his supporters see him as fiercely nationalistic and his own campaign slogan of “America First” underscores this. And finally, he aggressively pursues his own biological fitness through the placement of his children in top positions in both his business enterprises and his presidential administration. Thus, an evolutionary analysis reveals that he is clearly not a psychopath.

    Whether or not he is a narcissistic sociopath, then, depends on the answers to questions about his conscience or lack thereof, commitment to truth and transparency, sincerity in his professed religious beliefs, fidelity to political ideals, and tendency to cheat, deceive, and coerce. These questions are more like Rorschach tests in which his supporters and detractors come to opposite conclusions. However, for the most part, the answers to these questions do not require a psychological analysis of the president. There is abundant evidence in the public record.

    [This essay first appeared in Arc Digital and was co-authored by Nathan H. Lents and Robert L. Trivers. Credit for the thesis and most of the evolutionary analysis belongs to Trivers.]
    Last edited by Carmody; 13th December 2018 at 18:49.
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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    A lot of other things have kept this tick tick tick..moving forward. What I mean by that, is quite a few other articles on emergent tech and methods -than this one which I'm listing..

    The point is..if this can out psychosis, it can then very likely be fine tuned to out psychopaths and sociopaths...or at least serve as an adjunct in such support.

    So it looks like the nastier ones are going to have fewer places, or ways... to hide...which is the point of the thread. Where emergent technology needs to be recognized as a tool of outing sociopaths and psychopaths, and not be used by them to control the populace. To get the idea of this into the general mind of humanity in the right way...not just exclusively the wrong/nasty way. This sort of thing is coming forth regardless, so make sure the public knows it can be an excellent tool for outing the virulence of controllers and associated vassals - who would prefer to remain hidden.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    The whisper of schizophrenia: Machine learning finds 'sound' words predict psychosis


    A machine-learning method discovered a hidden clue in people's language predictive of the later emergence of psychosis—the frequent use of words associated with sound. A paper published by the journal npj Schizophrenia published the findings by scientists at Emory University and Harvard University.

    The researchers also developed a new machine-learning method to more precisely quantify the semantic richness of people's conversational language, a known indicator for psychosis.

    Their results show that automated analysis of the two language variables—more frequent use of words associated with sound and speaking with low semantic density, or vagueness—can predict whether an at-risk person will later develop psychosis with 93 percent accuracy.

    Even trained clinicians had not noticed how people at risk for psychosis use more words associated with sound than the average, although abnormal auditory perception is a pre-clinical symptom.

    "Trying to hear these subtleties in conversations with people is like trying to see microscopic germs with your eyes," says Neguine Rezaii, first author of the paper. "The automated technique we've developed is a really sensitive tool to detect these hidden patterns. It's like a microscope for warning signs of psychosis."

    Rezaii began work on the paper while she was a resident at Emory School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She is now at fellow in Harvard Medical School's Department of Neurology.

    "It was previously known that subtle features of future psychosis are present in people's language, but we've used machine learning to actually uncover hidden details about those features," says senior author Phillip Wolff, a professor of psychology at Emory. Wolff's lab focuses on language semantics and machine learning to predict decision-making and mental health.

    "Our finding is novel and adds to the evidence showing the potential for using machine learning to identify linguistic abnormalities associated with mental illness," says co-author Elaine Walker, an Emory professor of psychology and neuroscience who researches how schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders develop.

    The onset of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders typically occurs in the early 20s, with warning signs—known as prodromal syndrome—beginning around age 17. About 25 to 30 percent of youth who meet criteria for a prodromal syndrome will develop schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder.

    Using structured interviews and cognitive tests, trained clinicians can predict psychosis with about 80 percent accuracy in those with a prodromal syndrome. Machine-learning research is among the many ongoing efforts to streamline diagnostic methods, identify new variables, and improve the accuracy of predictions.

    Currently, there is no cure for psychosis.

    "If we can identify individuals who are at risk earlier and use preventive interventions, we might be able to reverse the deficits," Walker says. "There are good data showing that treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy can delay onset, and perhaps even reduce the occurrence of psychosis."

    For the current paper, the researchers first used machine learning to establish "norms" for conversational language. They fed a computer software program the online conversations of 30,000 users of Reddit, a social media platform where people have informal discussions about a range of topics. The software program, known as Word2Vec, uses an algorithm to change individual words to vectors, assigning each one a location in a semantic space based on its meaning. Those with similar meanings are positioned closer together than those with far different meanings.

    The Wolff lab also developed a computer program to perform what the researchers dubbed "vector unpacking," or analysis of the semantic density of word usage. Previous work has measured semantic coherence between sentences. Vector unpacking allowed the researchers to quantify how much information was packed into each sentence.

    After generating a baseline of "normal" data, the researchers applied the same techniques to diagnostic interviews of 40 participants that had been conducted by trained clinicians, as part of the multi-site North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study (NAPLS), funded by the National Institutes of Health. NAPLS is focused on young people at clinical high risk for psychosis. Walker is the principal investigator for NAPLS at Emory, one of nine universities involved in the 14-year project.

    The automated analyses of the participant samples were then compared to the normal baseline sample and the longitudinal data on whether the participants converted to psychosis.

    The results showed that higher than normal usage of words related to sound, combined with a higher rate of using words with similar meaning, meant that psychosis was likely on the horizon.

    Strengths of the study include the simplicity of using just two variables—both of which have a strong theoretical foundation—the replication of the results in a holdout dataset, and the high accuracy of its predictions, at above 90 percent.

    "In the clinical realm, we often lack precision," Rezaii says. "We need more quantified, objective ways to measure subtle variables, such as those hidden within language usage."

    Rezaii and Wolff are now gathering larger data sets and testing the application of their methods on a variety of neuropsychiatric diseases, including dementia.

    "This research is interesting not just for its potential to reveal more about mental illness, but for understanding how the mind works—how it puts ideas together," Wolff says. "Machine learning technology is advancing so rapidly that it's giving us tools to data mine the human mind."
    Last edited by Carmody; 16th June 2019 at 01:06.
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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    DeepEyedentification: identifying people based on micro eye movements

    There is no doubt that if this can be tuned to recognize individuals, via their eye micro motion patterns..then there is very high probability it can be used to detect psychopaths and sociopaths.

    Basically, another tool in the box to zero in on these particular neural wiring patterns.

    It is going to be used against us (the general public --in an Orwellian context), lets make sure those who attempt to use it against us, can be targeted as the primary focus of the methodology, right from the get-go.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~




    Past cognitive psychology research suggests that eye movements can differ substantially from one individual to another. Interestingly, these individual characteristics in eye movements have been found to be relatively stable over time and largely independent of what one is looking at. In other words, people present different patterns in the way they move their eyes and these unique 'eye movements' could be used as a means for identification.

    Fascinated by these observations, researchers at the University of Potsdam, in Germany, have recently developed a new biometric identification method that works by processing micro-movements of the eye. In their study, pre-published on arXiv, they carried out a thorough investigation of people's involuntary eye movements and used their findings to develop DeepEyedentification, a deep learning architecture that can identify people by analyzing eye-tracking signals.

    The idea of identifying individuals based on their eye movements has been around for more than a decade, yet the methods proposed so far come with significant limitations. For instance, most of these methods are not very accurate or take too long to reach a conclusion (i.e. require long eye movement recordings of around one minute), which makes them fairly impractical for real-world applications.

    "In psychological research, it is standard to preprocess the eye movement data into different types of eye movement," Lena Jäger, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "Previous biometric methods have adopted this practice at the cost of a great loss of information that is present in the raw eye movement data such as a high-frequency tremor of the eye. Our key idea was to make use of these high-frequency characteristics and not pre-process data, but rather train a deep convolutional network in an end-to-end fashion using the raw samples collected at 1000 frames per second as input."
    A representation of the horizontal (blue line) and vertical (orange line) movement of the eye gaze during reading. The large ‘steps’ represent saccades, i.e., fast relocation movements of the eye; in most cases these saccades are in the horizontal direction only – this is because the script is horizontal: the user is moving his gaze to an upcoming word or is regressing to a previous word. At approx. 200ms and 400ms, there are saccades that also have a vertical component --- the user is jumping to the next line, fixates one word and jumps back to the previous line. The intervals between saccades are fixation during which one can observe a very small high frequency movement (tremor) and a slow drift movement superimposed by measurement noise. Previous approaches have filtered these fixational micro-movements out in their preprocessing of the data, yet it appears to be very informative with respect to the identification of individuals. Credit: Jäger et al.

    In their study, Jäger and her colleagues showed that non-preprocessed eye tracking data leads to far higher accuracy than that achieved by existing approaches, while also requiring shorter video feeds. The error rate of the DeepEyedentication network is lower by one order of magnitude and identification is faster by two orders of magnitude than the previously best-performing method.

    After recording only one second of eye movement data, the model had already achieved the same accuracy attained by the previously best performing model after 100 seconds of recording. Moreover, after five seconds of eye movement recording, the error rate was 10 times smaller. The researchers trained their network on two different data sets, one that they collected in a previous study where users read various texts, and another one collected as participants watched a dot randomly jumping on the computer screen.

    "While viewing some stimulus on a computer screen (in our data sets a text or a jumping dot) a camera-based eyetracking device measures where the user is looking," Jäger explained. "This data was fed to a deep neural network that transforms it into an idiosyncratic representation of the user's eye movement behavior, which is independent of the specific stimulus on the screen."
    The model architecture presented in the paper. Credit: Jäger et al.

    Essentially, Jäger and her colleagues trained their model to identify features of eye movement data that are particularly useful for distinguishing between different individuals. Their model uses this idiosyncratic representation of the input data fed to it, along with other user data stored in the system, to either identify a user or reject him/her.

    "We show that biometric identification based on eye movements has the potential to become a serious competitor for other widely used biometric identification methods, such as finger print, iris scan or face recognition or complement these techniques," Jäger said. "Crucially, biometric identification from eye movements is intrinsically less vulnerable to spoofing attacks. While iris scans, face recognition and fingerprints can be spoofed by 2-D or 3-D replicas (e.g. images, printed contact lenses, or 3-D replicas such as an artificial eye, a face mask or a fake fingerprint), spoofing eye movements would require a device that is able to display a video sequence in the infrared spectrum at a rate of 1,000 frames per second."

    So far, the new biometric identification method developed by Jäger and her colleagues has achieved very promising results. In the future, it could help to increase the security of a vast array of devices, including smartphones, laptops and tablets. As this new approach works independently of what a user is looking at, the researchers could easily add a so-called 'liveliness detection module,' which would further increase its security. Such a module would automatically check whether a user's eye movements match a visual stimulus presented on the screen, which would not be the case if someone was trying to spoof the system using a pre-recorded video.

    "We are currently working with high-resolution and high sampling frequency eye trackers under laboratory conditions," Jäger said. "Our next step is to develop an algorithm that can also deal with noisier data and lower sample rates under realistic conditions. This is necessary to make biometric identification from eye movements affordable and applicable to a wide range of real-world applications."
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    Default Re: Brainscans and prisoners: Outing the sociopaths and the domino effect

    Terrorists Are Still Among Us. Can Brain Scans Expose Them?

    This belongs on the potential misuse side. The casus belli end of the pool.

    Quote What makes terrorists tick? This is the Holy Grail of terrorism studies, as well as the animating conundrum in virtually every news story about all those ever so “normal” terrorists next door, whether jihadi or white supremacist.

    In this new age of vanished normalcy, where a deadly virus has killed over 50,000 and resulted in lockdowns across the globe, the concerns of terrorism scholars might seem antiquated, but on Saturday a remnant from the old world returned with a vengeance. In a small town in Southeast France a Sudanese man went on a stabbing rampage in a tobacconist and outside a bakery, killing two and wounding five.

    Once again we ask, with renewed urgency and perplexity: What makes such men tick? Why would someone want to kill and die in defense of a holy cause? (The attacker, named as Abdallah A.O., reportedly implored the police to kill him when they arrived on the scene.)

    Nafees Hamid, a cognitive scientist, thinks he has the answer. In a recent op-ed documentary for The New York Times, Hamid reported that the research he and his colleagues have carried out revealed “clues to what makes people willing to fight and die for their beliefs,” and that these clues were gleaned from looking at neuroimaging of the brains of over 70 radicalized Muslim men between the ages of 18 and 40, as well as probing the same men about their “sacred values” (i.e. the ends or principles to which they have a deep and uncompromising commitment).

    This research tells us far more about the folk wisdom of its progenitors than it does about the real world of terrorism and political violence.

    At the very core of this wisdom is the ancient theological notion that evil leaves a human stain which can be mapped and, with the right intervention, exorcised from the world.

    Scanning the brains of would-be terrorists is also testament to the lingering appeal of the long debunked myths of criminal phrenology, as exemplified in the work of Cesare Lombroso. In The Criminal Man, published in 1876, Lombroso confidently declared that he had found the root causes of crime after studying “the skull of a brigand,” finding in it “a very long series of atavistic abnormalities.”

    Against the prevailing religious consensus at the time, Lombroso concluded that the “criminal man” was not immoral, but abnormal: A genetic throwback to an earlier, less advanced, stage of human evolution, proof of which could be found in his beastly appearance (“crooked noses, sloping foreheads, large ears, protruding jaws, dark eyes”).

    Lombroso’s work played into egregious, often racist stereotypes about physiognomy. Its focus on the “abnormal” brain would become a staple of horror films in the early 20th century, and even be parodied in Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy, Young Frankenstein.

    At a deeper level, despite Lombroso’s scientific rhetoric and veneer, his book was just another iteration of the essentially religious view that evil lies “within” and can be banished through curative treatment.

    While the research of Hamid and his colleagues is clearly an advance on that of Lombroso and the phrenologists, it nonetheless perpetuates the simplistic view that radicalization is an ominous shadow that shows up in a brain scan. This is not a helpful way to think about the complex process by which individuals and groups become convinced that killing innocents for political purposes is a good and necessary thing to do.

    Hamid’s starting premise is a convincing one, which is that for people to fight and die for their beliefs, the beliefs in question must be of a “sacred” kind: that is, the beliefs must be so core to who they are and what they value that they are prepared to sacrifice their lives and those of others in defense of them.

    For jihadists, these sacred beliefs include the establishment of the caliphate, the honor of the Prophet Muhammad and the purity of Muslim womanhood, whereas for white supremacists these sacred values include the establishment of a white-only state, the honor of heroic forebears, and the upholding of white female purity.

    Less convincing, however, are Hamid’s methods and recommendations for dealing with terrorists.

    The core problem lies in the radical disconnect between scanning brains and understanding the roots and dynamics of political violence.

    Hamid explains that when his respondents were asked about their sacred values, the left inferior frontal gyrus in the brain fired up. Now, even if we grant that certain areas of the brain are activated when people are asked about sacred values, this tells us nothing about the circumstances under which people in the real world, outside of the setting of an experiment with a MRI machine, are willing to kill themselves and others in defense of them. It casts no light on how and why people join a violent political movement. It has nothing to say about how or why some sacred values are seemingly more propulsive than others.

    A nagging complaint of far-right violent activists is that, unlike their jihadi enemies, so few among their number seem willing to die for the cause—a sort of martyrdom envy.

    It tells us nothing about why some members of violent political groups remain peripherally involved in violence, while others positively embrace the chance to participate in violent acts. And it can’t explain why even the most hardcore jihadis lose their nerve and bottle it on the battlefield.

    Another fundamental problem relates to the artificiality of the experiments Hamid and his colleagues carried out. They didn’t interview actual terrorists or people who had done acts of terrorism. Rather, they interviewed a relatively small sample of radicalized men about their value commitments and how far they would go in defense of them.

    Fair enough; there are enormous constraints around interviewing terrorists. But it’s quite a stretch to think that what people tell you about their core values in an experimental situation has a bearing on what they do outside of it. Many of us would like to imagine ourselves bravely and unselfishly risking our lives in defense of our sacred values, but few of us are actually willing, still less eager, to do so when the crunch comes.

    The weakest part of Hamid’s analysis in the Times video lies in his prescription that we should all be kinder and more careful in our everyday discourse. By way of illustration, he cites a tweet by the left-leaning public intellectual Reza Aslan, who, in the aftermath of the El Paso attack in 2019, suggested that supporting Trump is tantamount to supporting terrorists.

    Hamid thinks that such a demonizing discourse “risks making someone out there feel more excluded and, if they’re at the early stages of radicalization, it could push them closer to violence.” We should refrain from doing it, he cautions.
    The analysis of the experiment and the retort that is the article itself, is not up to date on the overall complex matter, with regard to how it has played out, in the past decade or more. How these things can be triangulated well enough (read the earlier parts of the thread) that certain groups can begin or have begun the process of integrating this sort of stuff into the lexicon of knowledge. whether their work be fictional or correct, the move to establish it with a history and to be a norm, is well on and getting deeper in depth of record and use, every day.

    The push to a cashless society (coronavirus 2020), is when this sort of analysis will be come to be a norm, as a known method, or crowbar, for removing those with independent mindedness.
    Last edited by Carmody; 7th April 2020 at 12:30.
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