The goal was to center his mind on playing the shot at hand, rather than obsessing, at exactly the wrong moment, about the consequences.

I’ve always maintained that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do so at the stock exchange,” he enthused. “Without doubt, there’s a greater proportion of psychopathic big hitters in the corporate world than there is in the general population. You’ll find them in any organization where your position and status afford you power and control over others, and the chance of material gain.

The results were extraordinary. Over 70 percent of those who scored high on the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale correctly picked out the handkerchief-smuggling associate, compared to just 30 percent of the low scorers. Zeroing in on weakness may well be part of a serial killer’s toolkit. But it may also come in handy at the airport.

If you want to stop someone from remembering something, the key is to use distraction.

He said that if you climb into the ring hell-bent on knocking the other chap into the middle of next week, chances are you’re going to come unstuck. But if, on the other hand, you concentrate on winning the fight, simply focus on doing your job, well, you might just knock him into the middle of next week anyway.

Sentiment is a chemical aberration found on the losing side. – Sherlock Holmes.

The volunteers displaying high levels of psychopathic traits released almost four times as much dopamine in response to the stimulant as did their non-psychopathic counterparts.

College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of twenty or thirty years ago,” Konrath reports.

I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present.

What if our better nature wasn’t better after all? But was instead, well, just nature?