“Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and, as Ahmed Karim and his colleagues at the University of Tübingen did, to the brain’s morality neighborhood, and you’re well on the way to giving someone a ‘psychopath makeover.'”

Kevin tried this in a lab, under test conditions.

He was shown horrifying images that made him recoil. Then, after the “psychopath makeover” he was shown the images again. This time he “found it difficult to suppress a smile.” They had no effect on him.

But what did it feel like in his head to briefly be a psychopath? Here’s Kevin:

“It’s as if you’ve had a six pack of beer, but you don’t feel the tiredness and sluggishness that go with it. Your inhibitions are gone, but you’re very very alert… A lot of us drive around with a foot hovering over the brake pedal too much. Psychopaths drive around without any thought to the brake pedal at all, with their foot flooring the gas. It was a beautiful feeling, I must say. It was really really good.”