excerpt
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/09/11/news/californian/20_47_359_10_05.txt
Working with several colleagues, Galynker has performed brain
scans on 22 pedophiles and found that they had below-normal activity
in the temporal lobe. Other studies have found a similar pattern. And
medical journals describe rare cases of men who began molesting
children when tumors invaded the same part of their brains; when the
tumors were removed, their pedophilia subsided.
"There's something different about the brains of pedophiles," said
Vernon L. Quinsey, a psychologist at Queen's University in Canada.
"But what exactly it is, it's hard to say so far."
But Quinsey believes it is more likely the tendency toward pedophilia
arises even before birth. Some researchers have proposed that male
homo.uality can result if the mother's immune system attacks her
son's cells in utero, disrupting the process that gradually
differentiates male from female brains.
"We think that some similar mechanism might also relate to
pedophilia," Quinsey said.
That doesn't make the two conditions the same, however. According to
Quinsey's theory, the brains of homo.ual men end up with a complete
set of functioning components for .ual behavior, albeit a
combination of male and female elements.
But in pedophiles, Quinsey believes, the mother's immune system causes
a specific defect in one of the components that guides .ual
behavior.
Pedophiles appear to have a malfunction in whatever brain circuitry it
is that causes men to seek partners in the optimum age group for
successful reproduction. Over evolutionary history, that set of
subconscious instructions would have directed most men to partners in
the Playboy centerfold demographic ---- robust and young, but .ually
mature.
Quinsey proposes that pedophiles have the part of the apparatus that
codes for robustness and youth ---- but they lack the requirement for
.ual maturity. So they focus their .ual energies on children.
Quinsey's hypothesis is beyond the ability of current science to test.
But whatever it is about their brains that attracts pedophiles to
children, it is clear they have no choice in the matter, said Fred S.
Berlin, founder of the .ual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins
University.
"These are not people choosing simply to experience an alternative
state of mind," Berlin said.
That leaves society with a difficult question ---- how to handle
someone who will never be truly "cured" of his deviance?
In his Internet diary, Duncan railed against . offender registration
laws and complained about police officers checking up on him at his
apartment.
"I have no privacy at all. Anyone in the State, Country, even World
can find out where I live, what I look like and what I did when I was
a kid by typing my name on any Web browser," he wrote in a Feb. 2
entry.
Yet . offender laws gave Duncan enough privacy, freedom and
anonymity to go to Idaho three months later with, authorities allege,
. and murder on his mind.
Even a Washington state law that allows for the indefinite commitment
of . offenders after they have served their prison terms failed to
contain Duncan. Before releasing him from prison in 2000, the state
considered holding him for treatment under the law. But because Duncan
had been convicted of only one offense before going to prison for
virtually all of his adult life, there was no way to demonstrate
legally that he couldn't control himself in public ---- he had never
really had a chance to live there.
http://en.bcnq.com/english/doc/2005-09/21/content_479731.htm
Psychopaths could be best financial traders?21 Sep 2005 ... "Wanted:
psychopaths to make a killing in the markets." ... The result was
those with brain damage outperformed those without.
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