He refers to it as "that moment Gandalf knocks on your door," summoning him on a great mission. He told his wife of many decades, who wasn't surprised. Then he just let this knowledge lie for a couple years, like so many of us do when it comes to disturbing things like lingering health concerns, or recently purchased exercise equipment.
But others had taken notice of Fallon's probable diagnosis long before he did -- be they family, or the top psychiatrists in Norway. See, Fallon was asked to give a talk on bipolar disorder at the University of Oslo in 2010, and for ethical reasons, he used his own brain scans for the PowerPoint presentation. Some of the country's top psychiatric minds invited him to a friendly, hours-long chat after -- nothing fancy, understand; just a "thanks for participating! We think you're probably a borderline psychopath" kind of affair.
"That's the first time I took it seriously," Fallon says. "They didn't know me, but they knew my biological and psychological data."
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Usually inappropriate vacation pics accidentally slipping in are the worst thing of yours co-workers see in your PowerPoint presentation.
Fallon had stumbled across what Dr. Kent Kiehl already knew too well. Kiehl has spent years lugging a mobile MRI machine to prisons to analyze the brains of high-rating psychopaths, and he knew that the scans of a psychopath show much lower than normal activity in the areas of the brain responsible for impulse control and "emotional responsiveness," among other things. Kiehl published some of the first studies showing that brain scans can predict antisocial behavior. If this sounds a little too Minority Report for you, keep in mind that it's much more accurate than a lot of the risk equations we use today -- take, for example, parole boards -- to predict recidivism:
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