The Anatomy of Violence Read Online Free PDF Page B

get. It was not too dissimilar from the case ofAntonio Bustamante, who impulsivelyburglarized a home for money and then battered an old man to death. As we saw in chapter 3 ,Bustamante’sPET scan similarly revealed orbitofrontal dysfunction. When Peyton surprised Page by unexpectedly coming back home, Donta actedimpulsively. Once in full control of this beautiful young blond woman in the bedroom, his emotions and sexual instincts overcame him and he perpetrated on her the ugly act that had been perpetrated on him when he was young and vulnerable—rape. 10 He lacked self-regulation and emotional control. He also lacked the ability to empathize with his victim or to be sensitive to her fear, and when she fought back, he stabbed her. He was angry at how his life, which had been at the brink of being turned around, had fallen back into old patterns. He was angry that he was being sent back to prison that very day, and he took that blazing anger and frustration out on his victim. Given his lifelong history of serious childhood abuse, it’s quite likely that either at a conscious or unconscious level, this was redirected aggression—dealing out to Peyton the abuse he had been on the receiving end of as a child.
    Nobody can deny that Page’s acts were abhorrent—and some would even say evil. But can you deny the predisposing factors that led him down the road to violence?
    A significant aspect of Page’sbrain scan is that the most salient areas of damage included the orbitofrontalcortex and the temporal pole—the frontal tips of both brain regions. These are the areas that are most susceptible to head injury due to the way they sit in the brain. And this damage can result from events far less insidious than the shocking head injuries that resulted in Page being taken to the hospital in infancy and toddlerhood.
    We know from family members’ testimony that Page’smother would vigorously and repeatedly shake baby Donta—simply because he cried too much. When that occurs, the brain of the baby rocks backward and forward inside the skull, with the orbitofrontal and frontal-temporal pole areas rubbing up against bony protuberances on the inner surfaces of the skull—and getting damaged. So the brainimpairments that we saw in his PET scan are quite consistent with the social history of very significant and severe child abuse.
    There were more elements of Page’s history that struck me. He was enuretic and encopretic until he was ten—he could not control his bladder and bowels in bed. For that he was beaten by his mother. You might see this in children at age three or four years, but the fact that it went on till the age of ten illustrates the anxiety, fear, and tensionthat the young DontaPage must have experienced in his unbearably traumatic upbringing. He clearly had a very disturbed and harrowingchildhood.
    At a neuropsychological level, Page performed poorly on theWisconsin card-sorting task, a classic measure ofexecutive functions—what we’d expect given the results from thePET scan that showed a lack of regulatory prefrontal functioning. Donta also flunked three grades as a child, a clear indication oflearning disability.
    At a psychophysiological level, his resting heart rate was 60 beats per minute. I compared that to a demographically matched sample of males his age, and this would place him in the bottom 3 percent of the distribution. We’ve seen earlier thatlow resting heart rate is one of the best-replicated biological correlates of antisocial behavior—a marker of fearlessness and an indicator of low arousal that can give rise tostimulation-seeking behavior.
    At a cognitive level there was a striking difference between his verbal and spatial IQ scores—a gap of 17 IQ points, with the spatial “right hemisphere” score being much lower than the left, suggesting relatively more impairment to the “emotional” right hemisphere. Neuropsychological testing also revealedmemory impairments in both auditory and