Neuroscientist Kent Kiehl uses imaging technology to study the brains of criminals.

by Luke Frank

Perhaps the most notorious psychopath in modern time is serial killer Ted Bundy, a cunning, remorseless mass murderer from the Pacific Northwest who struck for at least a decade in the 1970s. Bundy’s modus operandi was so deviant from normal human social behavior – so very violent and depraved – that it lured a young Kent Kiehl into the neurosciences.

There was another compelling hook for Kiehl’s interest. He and Bundy grew up in the same neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington, although a generation apart. Kiehl just couldn’t reconcile how somebody with whom he had shared similar socio-economic environments could take such a bizarre and horrible turn. And what effects might these environmental sets have had on Kiehl himself?

Bundy is long gone, and believe it or not, Kiehl is in prison. About two days a month he travels to New Mexico Correctional facilities, mostly in Grants and Albuquerque, interviewing inmates with a history of psychopathic behaviors – with their full consent. His team also is out there six days a week collecting and organizing as much data as possible.

The road trips involve tugging a 30-ton trailer fully loaded with an fMRI scanner and all of its accoutrements. Kiehl helped custom-build the $2.3-million rig that resides at the Mind Research Network (MRN, or the Mind) at the UNM Health Sciences Center.

Inside the Mind
The Mind is a remarkable imaging center loaded with MR and MEG / EEG cores, as well as a specially designed MEG apparatus for children, called the BabySQUID, housed in the same building with UNM’s Biomedical Research and Integrative Neuroscience (BraIN) Center.

All of this imaging technology is the very nucleus of Mind. From there, its network expands through in-house neuroinformatics and neurogenetics cores, then outward to UNM’s departments of psychiatry and neurology and onward to engineering and psychology on  the UNM Main Campus. The network further expands to Sandia and Los Alamos national labs, the University of Minnesota, Massachusetts General Hospital, UC Irvine, and further outward from there.

Kiehl is director of MRN’s Mobile Imaging Core and Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience Program and Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNM. Also a principal investigator, Kiehl believes that aberrations in human brain circuitry can be identified through the Mind’s intricate network of neuroscience capabilities.. More specifically, he wants to know where the circuitry goes wrong in a psychopath, so he goes looking for them in New Mexico prisons.

With support from the National Institutes of Health and the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, Kiehl and his team spend hours interviewing each subject, assessing him for psychopathic tendencies, substance abuse, and other mental health problems. They employ functional and structural MRI to record neural activity during various tasks, and collect anatomical images of the brain. DNA samples are collected to search for genetic risk factors.

What’s it like working with violent offenders? “I’ve been doing this for awhile now,” says Kiehl. “You get to know the social dynamics inside.” Most inmates welcome the diversion of people from the outside. If you deal with inmate “leadership,” you run the risk of winning the approval of the entire group or alienating them all.

What Is a Psychopath?
Psychopaths are individuals – male, female; young and old – who exhibit a host of the following behavioral characteristics: glibness and superficial charm; a grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; cunning and manipulative behavior; lack of empathy, remorse, or guilt; a failure to accept responsibility; and promiscuous behavior.

Other characteristics include: a need for stimulation/proneness to boredom; poor behavioral control; a lack of realistic, long-term goals; impulsivity and irresponsibility; juvenile delinquency; short-term marital relationships; and criminal versatility.

The first MRI studies of psychopaths, published less than 10 years ago, indicated reduced amygdala activity buried deep in the brain tissue of psychopathic criminals in response to emotionally charged words. Kiehl was the primary author in that study, but has taken a wider view, observing the entire paralimbic network in the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain.

Ultimately, Kiehl is looking for the combinations of behavioral and personality traits more common in violent criminals that also are indicators of repeat offenses. “The societal cost of crime is estimated at more than a trillion dollars annually,” Kiehl offers. “Consider the scope of various impacts associated with prevention or treatment answers to psychopathy. Such impacts could be enormous.”

___________________________________________________________________________________