Quantum Night

Quantum Night

By Robert J. Sawyer

“A real psychopath looks at you not just without blinking much – although that certainly adds to the reptilian effect – but also without performing microsaccades.”

Heather had heard me talk about them before. Microsacades are involuntary jerks as the eyeball rotates two degrees or less; they occur spontaneously whenever you stare at something for several seconds. Their purpose is debated although the most common theory is that they cause the neurons perceiving an object to refresh so that the image doesn't fade.

Heather's eyebrows rose above her wire-frame glasses. “Really?”

I nodded. “You. The paper's coming up in Nature Neuroscience.”

“Way to go!” But then she frowned. “Why would that be, though?” What have microcascades go to do with psychopathy?”

“I'm not sure,” I admitted, “but I've demonstrated the lack in forty-eight our of fifty test subjects, all of whom had scored thirty-two or above on the PCL-R.”

“What about the other two?”

“Not psychopaths; I'm convinced of it. And that's the problem with the PCL-R: it's not definitive. Bob Hare got pissed several years ago when a pop-sci book called The Psychopath Test came out. It implied anyone could properly assess whether their neighbors or bosses or even casual acquaintances were psychopaths. As Hare said, it takes a week of intensive training to be able to score his twenty variables properly, and that's on top of formal psychological or psychiatric education. But his test can have false positives if a clinician miscategorizes something, or assigns a score of two when only a one is really warranted – or if the psychopath is good at evading detection.”

Psychotic Night. Illustration by Elena.

… It's more than that, I said. You know, a lot of the world's most-cutting-edge work in psychopathy has been done here in Canada... which says something, I'm sure. Not only is Bob Hare Canadian – he's emeritus now at UBV – but so is Angela Book. She published a study in 2009 called “Psychopathic Traits and the Perception of Victim Vulnerability.” That study and subsequent ones have shown that psychopaths have an almost preternatural ability to target already wounded people.

In one of my own experiments I made high-resolution videos of a group of female volunteers, some of whom had been assaulted in the past and some of whom hadn't, milling about in a room with some male grad students. I then showed the footage to a group of men, asking them to pick out which females had been previously assaulted. For normal men, the success rate was no better than chance: they simply couldn't tell and so just guessed. But the psychopaths averaged eighty percent correct.

When I asked the psychopaths how they could tell, their answers ranged from the not-very-helpful “it's obvious” to the significant “I can see it in their faces”. And apparently they could. Human faces are in constant, subtle motion, exhibiting fleeting microexpressions that last between a twenty-fifth and a fifteenth of a second. When a psychopath turns on the microexpressions stare, free of microsaccades, he can clearly see ever-so-brief look of fear might pass over their faces when a man looks at them, and not only  do the psychopaths notice it, but they gravitate toward those exhibiting such things.

How precisely does the method work? How the test is conducted?

Microsaccades are a fixational eye movement – they occur only when your gaze is fixed on something. And to get a really solid, really good track, doctors normally use film.  Rather, they use a modified set of ophthalmologist's vision-testing goggles. I get the suspected psychopath to wear them and simply ask him or her to stare for ten seconds at a dot displayed by the googles. Sensors check to see if the eyes stay rock-steady or if they jerk a bit. If the former, the guy's a psychopath, I guarantee it. If the latter – if the subject is performing microsaccades – he isn't. You can't fake microsaccades; the smallest volitional eye shift anyone can do is much bigger. As long as the person doesn't have an eye-movement disorder, such as congenital or acquired nystagmus, which would be obvious before you did the test, with my technique, there are no false positives. If the doctor says you're a psychopath, you bloody well are.