so I finally saw the Joker and in this video we're gonna try to get inside of
the deranged mind of the Joker played by Joaquin Phoenix but the real question is
could something like this really happen to somebody and the bigger question I
want to ask is how responsible is someone for their actions when they have
a traumatic brain injury so by the way in case you didn't figure it out yet
there will be some spoilers in this video what is up everybody this is Chris
from the rewired soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the
solution and if you're new to my channel what I try to do take different topics
from the YouTube community or pop culture like movies and TVs try to see
what we can learn from them I try to blend in some psychology maybe some
philosophy may be some neuroscience and just get our wheels turning a little bit
so if you're into that stuff make sure you subscribe and ring that notification
bell and every video we do we donate 20% of the ad revenue to a good cause so
this video since we're gonna be talking about some mental illness and things
like that we will be donating 20% of the ad revenue to Nami
alright Nami is the National Alliance on Mental Illness a great organization so
if you would like to donate to them directly I will provide a link down to
the description and in the pinned comment below alright so this movie is
the untold origin story of the Joker and he's played by Joaquin Phoenix
Arthur is a man living in Gotham City just trying to get by and take care of
his mother but he's someone who also keeps getting beat down by society
because a parent that Arthur struggles with a mental illness and is on upwards
of seven medications to keep his illness under control Arthur is also seeing some
type of social worker who helps him out and gets him these medications
prescribed but because of lack of funding this gets taken away we also
discover that Arthur has a disorder called the pseudo bulbar effect which is
kind of like two ruts but for a laughter and you can't control it we
later find out that this is part of a traumatic brain injury based on being
repeatedly abused as a child but is it possible that the brain injury also set
him on the road to becoming a psychopath so for the answers to these questions
we're gonna be referring to one of my new favorite books which is called the
science of evil by Simon baron-cohen okay this dude has spent I believe about
20 years studying evil and empathy and all these other things alright so this
book dives into the psychology the neuroscience and a variety of different
environmental factors that can turn somebody into a psychopath
alright so Simon and other scientists have discovered that there's actually an
empathy circuit in the brain when these parts of the brain aren't communicating
properly it causes people to lack empathy for their fellow human beings
this is something interesting because a lot of people want to take the brains of
psychopaths and study them after they die and while there are some answers we
can get like if there are abnormalities with the physical appearance of
different parts of the brain a lot of this has to do with how these parts of
the brain communicate with each other when you know the quote-unquote lights
are turned on so throughout the movie even before transforming into the Joker
we see that Arthur doesn't have much fear we can see this as he chases a
bunch of kids who stole his sign he also gets up on stage to perform his
horrendous stand-up act most of us can't even stand up in front of our co-workers
and do a presentation for work so to explain this lack of fear we're gonna
turn to dr. James Blair all right this is another scientist that Simon
baron-cohen refers to in his book the science of evil and James Blair has done
a lot of neurological studies on psychopathy and it comes to find out
that the amygdala is not working properly in the brain of psychopaths so
Before we jump into that let's do a quick little brain discussion all right
so do me a favor hold your hand up like this
all right so we're gonna do a quick little hand braid model all right so
this part of the brain all right this is the amygdala you fold this over this
part is going to be the hippocampus remember that we're going to come back
to that later if you fold your fingers over like this these two middle finger
nails those are the prefrontal cortex this is a pretty accurate kind of
shaping of the brain all right this is something that dr. Daniel Siegel does is
kind of give people a visual of the brain all right so first we're gonna be
focusing on the amygdala what the hell does the amygdala do the amygdala is
part of our survival instincts all right you know that fight flight or freeze
that comes into play that is largely based on the amygdala it also helps
regulate your emotions and everything like that so for example people who have
any type of things ie disorder like I've been diagnosed with a generalized
anxiety disorder people have an overactive amygdala we get stressed or
scared like very easily right or we start freaking out because the amygdala
is acting too much but in Psychopaths it's been discovered
that the amygdala isn't working properly so their fear response is much different
so what people like James Blair did was they put Psychopaths in neuro imaging
scans and they found that the amygdala is less active under stressful
situations so when asking how this happens they discovered that early
ongoing stress affects the amygdala greatly and as you recall Arthur was
repeatedly abused and they found him chained to a radiator so remember the
hippocampus the hippocampus is responsible for our memories and as you
can see the hippocampus and amygdala are very closely linked and basically what
that does is the hippocampus since it's responsible for memories it reminds us
like yo you should be scared of this thing if you want to go back into like
kind of you know some ancient evolutionary psychology and brain
development basically if you're walking past some tall grass and a lion jumps
out all right you survived it your
hippocampus would have to log that memory and say yo next time you're
walking past tall grass maybe you should be a little
worried that a lion might jump out and eat your face off all right
but like James Blair discovered is that the hippocampus is also affected by
ongoing stress at an early age or even later on in life so part of the hormonal
response involved in this is the amygdala triggers the hypothalamus to
trigger the pituitary gland that triggers ACTH the Adreno corticotropin
this is carried from the brain through the blood stream to the adrenal glands
which triggers cortisol and cortisol is the stress hormone this stress hormone
then sends a signal back up to the hippocampus being like yo you should be
afraid of that but like an Arthur's case ongoing
childhood exposure to stress shrinks the hippocampus and diminishes that fear
response so when you start to combine the problem with the empathy circuit in
the brain the ongoing traumatic experiences as a child and how that
affects the hippocampus and the amygdala we can start to see how someone begins
on the road to becoming a psychopath so the question I would love for you to
answer down in the comments below is what are your thoughts like now that you
know a little bit more about traumatic brain injury how childhood abuse and can
affect how somebody turns out how responsible is that person for their
actions especially if the brain is actually damaged all right let's have a
conversation down in the comments below ok anyways that's all I got for this
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you are all awesome alright anyways that's all I got for this video I'll see
you next time