The Importance of Brain Imaging

At the time, Harvard had no magnet. The only way to get into scanning was to know somebody at MGH who had a couple slots per week at 3 in the morning on a Tuesday or something. That is pretty lucky. Incredible lucky. So much luck. Unbelievable. I got to do research doing ephemeri studies with kids who have psychopathic traits. We wanted to test how their brains are responding to these facial expressions. And we found as exactly as we hypothesized that the psychopathic children showed on average no amygdala response at all to the fearful expressions. Whereas both the healthy kids and the kids with ADHD showed the pattern you find pretty reliably, which is an elevated amygdala