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Kent Kiehl and his research team regularly park their long, white trailer just outside the doors of maximum-security prisons across the US. Inside the vehicle sits the bulky body of a mobile MRI machine. During each visit, people from the prison make their way to and from the vehicle in hourly shifts to have their brains scanned and help to answer an age-old question: What makes a murderer?
“It’s not an uncommon thing for [incarcerated people], while they’re getting a scan, to be like, ‘I’ve always been different. Can you tell me why I’ve always been so different?’” says Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico and the Albuquerque-based nonprofit Mind Research Network (MRN) who helped design the mobile MRI system back in the early 2000s.
The author of The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without a Conscience, Kiehl has ...
