Caroline Fraser

I mean, it's, you know, what you said about the lying is really true.

And this is what you see in serial killers, you know, that they lie about everything.

They lie about stuff they don't even need to lie about.

It's just, it's their... It's their MO.

Yeah.

They're just so inured to it and they want to get away with what they're doing.

Yeah, I think that kind of psychopathy is maybe more common than we would like to think.

Well, I think it can be brain damage.

I mean, what happens to the frontal cortex of these kids who are exposed to lead and cadmium is that certain parts of the brain fail to develop correctly.

And you can see the deficits, the little holes that are supposed to be full of something that helps you

make good decisions, you know, the part of your brain that helps you control yourself and control your behavior.

That's kind of missing in some of these kids.

And they have shown now that the effects are worse in men than they are in women, that the

You know, the damage to the frontal cortex, the neurology is more marked in men, and they can see this on the MRI scans.

And I think there's, you know, I don't know that they know why that's happening, but it does seem to be, you know, a real effect that they're writing papers about.

Yeah, I mean, it obviously is some incredibly important discovery, what they make of that and how it's all going to come out in the wash in terms of what can be done to help kids who have these issues.

That, I think, is another story.

And one of the things that sort of blows my mind is that we've known for centuries, for eons, that these things are bad.

I mean, the Romans and the Greeks knew that lead caused people to go crazy.

I mean, they had people who worked with lead in foundries and things then, and they knew it was a problem.