The Wisdom of Psychopaths Read Online Free Page A

you are a brilliant neurosurgeon, ruthlessly cool and focused under pressure, you might, like the man I’ll call Dr. Geraghty, try your luck on a completely different playing field: at the remote outposts of twenty-first-century medicine, where risk blows in on hundred-mile-an-hour winds and the oxygen of deliberation is thin:
    “I have no compassion for those whom I operate on,” he told me. “That is a luxury I simply cannot afford. In the theater I am reborn: as a cold, heartless machine, totally at one with scalpel, drill and saw. When you’re cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren’t fit for purpose. Emotion is entropy, and seriously bad for business. I’ve hunted it down to extinction over the years.”
    Geraghty is one of the U.K.’s top neurosurgeons—and though on one level his words send a chill down the spine, on another they make perfect sense. Deep in the ghettos of some of the brain’s most dangerous neighborhoods, the psychopath is glimpsed as a lone and ruthless predator, a solitary species of transient, deadly allure. No sooner is the word out than images of serial killers, rapists, and mad, reclusive bombers come stalking down the sidewalks of our minds.
    But what if I was to paint you a different picture? What if I was to tell you that the arsonist who burns your house down might also, in a parallel universe, be the hero most likely to brave the flaming timbers of a crumbling, blazing building to seek out, and drag out, your loved ones? Or that the kid with a knife in the shadows at theback of the movie theater might well, in years to come, be wielding a rather different kind of knife at the back of a rather different kind of theater?
    Claims like these are admittedly hard to believe. But they’re true. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused. Yet contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily violent. And if that sounds good, well, it is. Or rather, it can be. It depends, as we’ve just seen, on what else you’ve got lurking on the shelves of your personality cupboard. Far from its being an open-and-shut case—you’re either a psychopath or you’re not—there are, instead, inner and outer zones of the disorder, a bit like the fare zones on a subway map. As we shall see in chapter 2 , there is a spectrum of psychopathy along which each of us has our place, with only a small minority of A-listers resident in the “inner city.”
    One individual, for example, may be ice-cold under pressure, and display about as much empathy as an avalanche (we’ll be meeting some like this on the trading floor later), and yet at the same time act neither violently, nor antisocially, nor without conscience. Scoring high on two psychopathic attributes, such an individual may rightly be considered further along the psychopathic spectrum than someone scoring lower on that dyad of traits, yet still not be anywhere near the Chianti-swilling danger zone of a person scoring high on all of them.
    Just as there’s no official dividing line between someone who plays recreational golf on the weekends and, say, Tiger Woods, so the boundary between a world-class, “hole-in-one” superpsychopath and one who merely “psychopathizes” is similarly blurred. Think of psychopathic traits as the dials and sliders on a studio mixing desk. If you push all of them to max, you’ll have a sound track that’s no use to anyone. But if the sound track is graded and some controls are turned up higher than others—such as fearlessness, focus, lack of empathy, and mental toughness, for example—you may well have a surgeon who’s a cut above the rest.
    Of course, surgery is just one instance where psychopathic “talent” may prove beneficial. There are others. Take law enforcement,for example.In 2009, shortly after Angela Book published the results of her study, I decided to perform my own take on it. If, as she’d found, psychopaths really were