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Six months ago, nearly to the day, thirteen-year-old Viola Kent had stabbed her sleeping mother, Claire Kent, to death. When pressed, her father, Reed Kent, had admitted that Viola had violent tendencies and was regularly seeing a psychiatrist.
“We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are,”
“Did you know a high percentage of serial killers were abused as children?” He did know that. The fact that he had pored over research on violent antisocial personality disorders was no secret to anyone in this house. And it was true. Genetics loaded the gun, environment pulled the trigger.
“The Hare spectrum is a twenty-item checklist. The top score is forty. For reference, Ted Bundy scored thirty-nine.”
“Then what else is on the Hare spectrum?” “Lack of remorse or guilt, pathological lying, poor behavioral controls,” Gretchen ticked off. “Failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions.”
Psychopaths read power the way empaths could read body language. Instinctually.
“There are brains that are more prone to illusory pattern perception,” Gretchen said instead of acknowledging it. “More prone to finding connections in unrelated data. They’re simply wired that way.” “All right, so what brains are prone?” “People who have an excess of dopamine pumping through their gray matter,” Gretchen said, popping a slice of decadent duck into her mouth. “It’s the reverse of low dopamine in addicts. That deficit makes them think that nothing matters. For someone with high dopamine levels, they think everything matters.”
“Pareidolia,” Gretchen said easily, snagging the last pierogi without shame. “That’s a fancy word for humans’ tendency to find significance in something where there is none. Like kids finding shapes in clouds. We do that a lot. And that technically is a subset of apophenia, which is the tendency to find connections where they don’t exist.”
So many people thought they were in full control of their actions, but much of human behavior was hardwired through evolution. People couldn’t change it if they wanted to. “If a man is walking through the forest and he hears a noise . . . if he assumes it’s a tiger and runs away, he’s more likely to survive than the man who hears a noise and guesses it could be anything. The man who survives has kids who have the gene to be suspicious of random noises and make connections even if they don’t exist.”
Life wasn’t always about making the right choices. Sometimes it was about making the wrong ones just to see what would happen.
