Chicken and egg

More research on the difference between sociopath, this time it's a lower number of connections from the prefontal cortex and amygdala. From Scientific American:

The study’s most important finding centered on impairments in the link between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a control node for regulating emotion, threats, decision-making and social behavior) and the amygdala, a locus of emotional processing. . . . In theory, the faulty interaction between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex could fail to provide the proper negative emotional cue that robbing a bank or a ripping off a friend is just not kosher. Further tests are needed to confirm the implications of this breakdown in communication in the brain’s internal social network.

This finding, though, could also extend work by Newman that indicates that psychopathy may result from what he calls an “attention bottleneck.” Psychopaths may focus fixedly on one goal and ignore all other social cues, perhaps even signals sent over the prefrontal-to-amygdala pathway.

Good friend Hare warns:

Hare cautions that identifying what’s different in the brains of psychopaths isn’t the same thing as figuring out the cause of psychopathy. The weakened connections seen in the Wisconsin study could be a by-product of some other environmental or genetic factor commonly found among psychopaths.

“We have a chicken and an egg, in a sense,” he says. “There’s a tendency, certainly among people in the criminal justice system, to take any of these deficits and say, ‘Wow, we have a psychopath who has all these behavioral problems, and now we have this brain anomaly or dysfunction that seems to match, therefore one caused the other.’”