I watched the Ted Talk about serial killers by Jim Fallon. What drew me to it is the idea that serial killers structurally have a different brain that normal people do. This is interesting to me because they’re just another person, but their brain structure causes them to act differently.
This talk told me about how serial killers have different brains based off of brain damage, genetics, and their environment. It talks about how these things need to development at a certain time in order for the outcome of a serial killer to be present.
The most interesting thing about the talk was the idea that the timing of when the brain damage occurs affects whether or not someone will be a psychopath. I find this interesting because if someone does have brain damage, it could’ve been a matter of a few weeks difference that lends them to being a psychopath or a normal person.
I find the information presented fairly trustworthy. Ted Talks do not just invite anybody who is a self-proclaimed expert on a topic onto the show. They do their background research and see how reliable this source of information actually is before inviting them onto the show. Additionally, the information presented by the speaker was done in a very professional manner, along with photos that were specifically designated to help understand what is going on. Many people can access these photos with a quick google search, but the speaker explained what was going on in the pictures, and if he wasn’t reliable, he did a very good job telling everyone about the brains of psychopaths.
A research idea that could be interesting to investigate would be if neuron development is affected by brain damage. To conduct this experiment, you could take some individuals and determine an estimate of how many functioning neurons are in their body, and then you could take a brain damaged individual and determine the same. Compare the results to see if neuron quantity or at least functioning neuron quantity is significantly different.
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