I'm baffled by the bolded portion. Are you saying that other people shouldn't be curious? Or indulge their curiosities?

Yeah, I think its silly when people think that we are all the same, and if we all had the same experiences, we would come to the same place. Its not so black and white as that. But, its also too easy for those of us who haven't experienced abuse to judge those who don't handle those experiences as well as you did.

The evidence suggests that it is possible, but no one is claiming that this is the whole story.

I agree this is true much of the time, but there have been individual cases where it appears to be entirely due to physical or chemical abnormalities of the brain.

That article title is misleading.

If I write an article that says "105yo woman paints her house all by herself" I think most people would think she had already done so, not that she is in the process of doing so. The rest of the article makes clear that scientists have not successfully decoded very much of the neurobiology of pedophilia at all, but simply have taken another small step in that direction, and are continuing to work on the problem.




They should have said 'male pedophiles'. As phrased, it sounds like they compared 'pedophiles in general' only to men, and/or they mean to imply only men can be pedophiles. Sure, men are the majority by far, but its not a men-only problem.

[quote
the brain mechanisms causing pedophilia are not clearly known.

Quoted for importance.

Yes I agree that the title of the article was misleading. That is the media for you.

I met a young man briefly, when I was about 27 years old who confessed to me that he was attracted to little girls and not adult women. He did not understand it at all, and he knew it was not right. He wanted to know what was wrong with him. Kind of creepy.

I think about him once in a while and wonder how many little girls he has molested since then.

Yes, they all should be examined. If there is a even a remote chance that this vile disease can be cured, slowed down....yes, anything is better than nothing at all.

If only a few are helped then a few of them and god knows how many children can be spared. Seems a small price to pay.

I only know one (pedophile) that ever talked to me about this and he also knew it was wrong, hated himself for his thoughts. He did 7 years in prison for his crimes...3 different children. Yet, even now the thoughts still are there. He has considered killing himself.

Gota love the title which claims "we have it figured out". Then you see the actual quote . . which was, "this may eventually lead to us figuring it out"

Science reporting is atrocious.

Science reporting is atrocious!

At first I thought the headline was an outright and complete lie, and then I realized it could be a trick of misleading verb tense, instead of a lie.

Technology reporting is often horrible too, but I like the way it happens on some websites that allow comments.

Before the internet I would read an article and just be stunned and somewhat frustrated by how WRONG the article was, listing off all the inaccuracies, and wishing that everyone who read the article could benefit from those corrections I wanted to make.

These days, when I come across a crap article like that, it turns out that all those same corrections are covered by other people in the comments section.

So as long as people go to sites with good communities, and read the comments, they have a chance of getting to the truth that lies on the other side of incompetent journalists.

Yeh you can learn more from the comments than from the article sometimes. Not always.

Newspapers, magazines, the Internet, 95% of it is crap, inaccurate, bad reporting, propaganda with agenda etc. Its so much B.S.

Yes, science reporting IS attrocious. But not because they mislead the public this time. Yes, to you and me "decode" means "to solve the puzzle, no longer a mystery, we can construct it and deconstruct it at will into and from its building blocks or constituent elements".

But I don't think this reporter was that sly. This is not an error he made intentionally.

I think he wrote "decode" because he wanted to write, "Scientists slurp out the brain of Pedophiles with a long needle to study it", but he knew the boss don't like long, wordy titles, so he asked the guy at the next desk, "how do you say "slurp it out with a long straw so you can study it?" in one word, and the coworker replied, "decode".

That's an alternative to this instance of explaining the phenomenon of journalisic reporting of science.

Not really.

Journalists are not scientists, they are trained to create a short attention attracting headline.

To a layman, the mystery of what makes a person a pedophile is pretty much unknown. Lately, several things have been discovered, so some questions have been answered. Completely "decoded" it is NOT.

So what would be an accurate SHORT catchy headline that is not misleading?

How about:

Scientists Study the Brain of the Pedophiles.

Not as attention grabbing because people want the problem SOLVED as in "decode."




How about the headline:

Scientists attempt to decode brain functions of Pedophiles.

Sadistic personality disorder is different from psychopathy. Antisocial personality disorder is somewhat qualified with absence of empathy, but it is more typified by lack of caring and a disregard to very predictable future outcome.

Sadists are masochists in a way. A sadist can't enjoy pain he causes in others, unless he knows how this pain truly feels.

As a consequence, most, almost all, sadists never live out their fantasies. Their fantasies are against the law, and a sadist is capable of knowing and understanding the consequences of their actions.

Also, it takes a special sadist to fully empathise with a victim, and enjoy the victim's pain in real life situations. This is done much easier in fantasy, where the sadist can vacillate at will between being the torturer and the victim, and thus keeping his pleasure alive.

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A sociopath has no empathy whatsoever. And it makes him very lonely.

To a true sociopath other people do not count as being sentient beings. To him another person has as much capacity to feel as a table or a pebble. So while the sadist enjoys killing and torturing others, a sociopath gets no similar pleasure out of it. It's a chore to him, like to a normal person taking the leaves off a cob of corn, before cooking and eating it.

Because the sociopath has no sense of social environment, he is moving about in his doings without any human touch he can feel, both cognitively and emotionally. He is living in a world of inanimate things, with him being the only living thing.

This is not good, if you think about it.

I think the sociopath lives his life in complete social isolation, despite perhaps being much of his life among people. His loneliness is the only life he knows, and it's not a happy life. But whom could he tell it to? He figures there is noone worth telling it to, since he is the only one live sentient, sapient and sensing, thinking being around.

That line can only be drawn arbitrarily.

The current view of the psychiatric community is that any mental or emotional difficulty that materially hinders the functioning ability of a person is an illness. They treat it as an illness. Psychiatrists, as such, do not have to spend more philosophic brainpower on the nature of mental illness after this basic step.

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Furthermore, it is impossible to find out what is physically caused and what is caused non-physically in mental patients. This is impossible because we don't even know how the brain works. What is hard-wired and what is programmed? We don't know. What is hardware and what could be hardware problems in the brain, and what is the operating system and operating system problems in the brain?

We know people learn to replace the missign parts in their brains after an injury, by transferring the one-time functions in the lost or dead parts of their brains. Maybe it's not tranference, but newly developed abilities. We don't know. So the logic and operation of one hardware part that used to serve exclusively one or another part of the operating system can be recreated elsewhere in the brain. Hardware is not essential to be kept intact for full functionality.

It also seems that full hardware equipment still can malfunction, so it's got to be a software issue. People with all kinds of mental diseases show no difference in their brain structure from their normal coutnerparts.

We don't know for sure what causes one mental disease, and what causes the other.

If we talk about brain chemistry as opposed to neural structure, then we can say that all or almost all emotional-mental diseases can be traced back to the same chemical imbalance. This does not necessarily include trauma-induced psychiatric diseases, or drug abuse-induced problems.

The psychiatric diseases are grouped into apparent functional breakdowns. Some are anxiety-ridden, some hear voices, some behave irrationally angry and unpredictably, some get sad, some fear the known but imagined, some fear the unknown and not imagined, some do things that they know is stupid to do but can't stop themselves from keeping on doing the stupid behaviour.

These are all treated with a new generation of antipsychotic drugs and with a family of antidepressant drugs, called selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors.

Historically, these diseases had been treated with psychotherapy, with lithium, with barium, with elecroshock therapy, with lobotomy, with cold showers, with valium.

But now all and each is treated with SSRIs and with antipsychotics.

So my opinion is that there is only one brain disease, which is brain chemistry-induced. It can take many forms, but since the one and only one drug combination helps alleviate symptoms in differently diagnosable diseases, it must be that the responsible agent for all these diseases is one brain chemical or one given set of brain chemicals. The widely varying symptomalogy may be explained by the different mix of the few (or many) brain chemicals that are out of balance. The fact that many patients have more than one delineable disease, (80 percent of the mentally ill have more than one major mental-emotional psychiatric diagnosis) tells me that a few chemicals make up a colour diagram-type mixture of diseases.

If you take red and yellow, you get orange. If you mix blue and yellow, you get green. If you mix red and blue, you get purple.

Similarly in brain chemistry imbalances. The diseases that are treated with at least some success using an SSRI and AP therapy, are diseases that are the colour mosaics, and the different ratios of the chemicals in imbalance create the different diagnoses or mixes of diagnoses.

Whether SSRIs and APs are sufficient, or maximally optimal, is unknown; I trust that other chemical counter-agents or proactive agents will be discovered, that the mental health healing professional can use to establish a proper and very therapeutic personalized mix for each patient.

Interesting. So a sociopath would feel like a person living in a virtual reality with fake people who were like robots in a holodeck. Is this accurate?

I have known at least two, maybe three people who confessed to me that they hear voices in their head.... telling them to do things.

That is very scary. All three people were young men. One of them had been hearing voices for so long he thought it was a normal thing and asked me if I or everyone else also hear voices. I don't know what became of him....

Another man told me that his voices were like demons and they wanted him to do horrible things. (This was really scary.) He was into witchcraft and had a lot of books on witchcraft. He said he refused to do the horrible things and the demons were threatening him and told him that he broke his contract. He died of a brain aneurysm at age 35.

I am curious about people who hear voices, especially ones that tell them to do horrible things. Does anyone know what that's all about?

JB, you very courageously don't shy away from asking the toughest questions.

I don't know if this is accurate. I have never been inside the heads of others. Or maybe I am in everybody's heads, all at the same time.

I am talking of the constructed models of the diseased minds. I don't know if the models are accurate and they are well-constructed.

I assume they are. Otherwise my previous few posts wouldn't make sense.

You speak of very sad minds.

I used to hear my mother's voice, telling me horrible things. "Andrew, get up, it's time to go to school." or "clean up your room this instant." or "eat all your veggies, and until you cleaned your plate, no desert for you, young man."

But then my algebra teacher's voice said even more horrible things. He said on rainy morning, "the sum of the square of two sides of a right-angle triangle equals the square of the hypotheneuse of the triangle." Or he would say, while there were werewolves howling, "A circle is the geometric placement of the collection of those points on a plane that are equodistant from a focal point."