A woman who says she is a diagnosed psychopath has shared what her internal monologue is like and how she visualizes future memories and events in her mind.
“I close my eyes and I see black,” said the TikToker, who goes by the name victhepath, revealing the darkness of her purely abstract thoughts.
“It’s very difficult for me to describe it because it’s just conceptual,” he continued. “I can imagine things, but I can’t actually see the things I’m imagining.”
When it comes to his own ‘internal monologue’, as he also told his followers, it is also devoid of vivid details: ‘The voice is not something I hear. It’s just something I understand, like I’m thinking of words, but I don’t hear them.’
For victhepath On TikTok, his own lack of rich, vivid, emotionally charged internal thoughts and visualizations was difficult to compare without knowing what others’ internal monologues are like.
“I don’t really know how to describe my inner monologue,” he said, “because I can’t conceptualize how other people might describe their internal monologues.”
“I can never tell when people talk about visualizing things or having an internal monologue if they are actually seeing and hearing things,” he confessed.
“I have an internal voice,” he said, “but I couldn’t tell you anything about the voice.” I couldn’t tell you what it sounds like. I couldn’t tell you if it was a man or a woman. I couldn’t tell you if he has a personality or an attitude.
“I don’t think there is any inflection,” he finally concluded. “They are only words.”
The same was true for Vic when it came to visual memories or imagining things.
“I can imagine things, but I can’t actually see the things I’m imagining,” he said.
‘It’s not something physical, tangible. It’s not that I close my eyes and see an image.’
Generally, people who are described as psychopaths display traits such as antisocial behavior, falsehood, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse or empathy.
Their descriptions resemble a condition known as “aphantasia” or “mental blindness,” which psychologists at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany) and elsewhere have increasingly linked to psychopathic tendencies in people. last years.
“Under the psychological hood of human morality,” SUNY Albany psychologist Dr. Brendan O’Connor and his co-author wrote in 2022, “lies the sophisticated integration of inputs from multiple mental processes.”
A woman who says she is a diagnosed psychopath has shared what her internal monologue is like and how she visualizes future memories or events in her mind. “I close my eyes and I see black,” said the TikToker, who goes by the name victhepath, revealing the darkness of her thoughts.
Dr. O’Connor points to research on brain anatomy that shows that the degree of psychopathic tendencies appears to be related to smaller sizes of the hippocampus—a part of the brain critical for making detailed representations from memory.
“The lack of empathy characteristic of psychopathology,” as he put it, “may be related to an impoverished capacity to generate rich and vivid episodic representations.”
Based on previous psychological studies he reviewed, Dr. O’Connor now theorizes that a psychopath’s lack of internal visualization ability leads to an “empathic deficit.”
“Certain psychopathic traits are positively associated with a sense of feeling ‘stuck in the present,'” he noted, adding that “individuals with psychopathy show memory deficits for emotional stimuli.”
Dr. O’Connor’s study, published in September 2022 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Reviewconcluded that “episodic processes,” such as memory capacity, “may be a key component underlying not only one’s own moral decisions, but also how one comes to evaluate and judge the moral decisions of others.”
Research on brain anatomy has shown that the degree of a person’s psychopathic tendencies appears to be related to smaller sizes of the hippocampus (pictured, MRI), a part of the brain critical for making detailed representations from memory.
Only about 1.2 percent of American adults are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits, but that increases in prison, where between 15 and 25 percent of inmates display these characteristics.
The disorder is diagnosed using a 20-item Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which features traits such as lack of empathy, pathological, and impulsiveness.
Each is rated on a three-point scale, with zero meaning “not applicable” and two meaning the diagnosis “completely applies.”
However, some medical professionals avoid the term “psychopath” and sometimes label it as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).
Researchers at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt found that exposure to testosterone during puberty is a factor that decides both the size of the hippocampus that creates memories and visualization, as well as ASPD tendencies.
“Certainly, testosterone has long-lasting effects on the brain, especially during sensitive periods of development such as puberty,” they wrote in the journal. Personality and individual differences.
“Brain regions affected include the amygdala and hippocampus, limbic structures that are crucially involved in socio-emotional behavior.”
“Notably, these two regions are among the core regions in which structural and functional brain abnormalities have been reported in psychopathy.”
On TikTok, victhepath recently said that the most accurate depiction of a psychopath in media is Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film series (above).
Vic has gained over a hundred thousand followers on TikTok in recent months for his videos sharing his experiences and perspectives as a person with ASPD.
You have said that the most accurate representation of a psychopath in the media is Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film series.
And she recently revealed that her special interests as a child included the Holocaust, ancient Mayan human sacrifice, and the original Grimm fairy tales, among other gory stories.
“When I was a child I was especially interested in the Holocaust, not World War II,” he said. TikToker said in the video..
“When I was in third grade, we had a book fair at school and I remember seeing this little black book called The Holocaust and being really intrigued.”