Brain scans reveal link between thinner brain cortex regions and higher psychopathic traits

A team of researchers  was curious to know if people with high psychopathic traits have anomalies in the brain's physical structures, which make them incapable of feeling regret or capable of manipulation and other antisocial behaviour. They conducted an experiment in which they interviewed men convicted of intimate partner violence (IPV) and a control group with no history of violence to measure their psychopathic traits, followed by brain scans.

The results showed that men with thinner cortex in certain brain regions—particularly fronto-temporo-parietal areas—tended to display higher antisocial tendencies, regardless of their history of violence.

Fronto-temporo-parietal cortex regions refer to parts of the brain's outer layer, which houses gray matter and supports functions such as sensory processing, motor control, and higher cognitive activities. The findings further reinforce a broader idea in neuroscience that regions in these brain regions play a major role in shaping behaviours such as callousness, a lack of empathy, and manipulative tendencies.

In recent years, researchers have increasingly tried to understand psychopathy by looking at the brain itself as advances in neuroimaging have made it possible to examine the brain's structure in detail, including the thickness and volume of the cortex.

After sifting through over two dozen previous studies, the researchers found that the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas of the brain were linked to psychopathy.

Psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder that affects how people feel, think, and control their behaviour. Individuals with strong psychopathic traits often show little empathy for others, have shallow emotional responses, and struggle with impulse control. Even though they make up only a small portion of the population, people with psychopathic traits are linked to a surprisingly large share of serious crime.

In their work, the researchers found that higher psychopathic traits were significantly and inversely correlated with reduced thickness in the left orbitofrontal cortex, the left insula, the bilateral superior frontal gyrus, the right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the right anterior cingulate cortex.

Based on these findings and existing neuroscientific evidence, the researchers suggest that changes in gray matter on the left side of the brain may help explain traits such as poor decision-making and impulsivity. Differences on the right side may be linked to emotional and empathy difficulties, while reduced thickness in the insula may affect the ability to understand and interpret other people's perspectives.

The researchers highlight that since brain scans cannot be faked the way answers during an interview or interrogation can, they can give forensic specialists and psychologists a clearer window into the mind. Combining neuroimaging with existing psychology tools can be used to build more accurate profiles of people with psychopathic traits and perpetrators of domestic violence.

Ángel Romero-Martínez et al, Reduced cortical thickness in fronto-temporo-parietal regions associated with high psychopathic traits: Conclusions of a review and an empirical study with intimate partner violence perpetrators, Aggression and Violent Behavior (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2026.102134

The seven hour cosmic explosion

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the sun will emit across its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Most are over before you've had time to register them, gone in seconds, minutes at most. So when something arrived on 2 July 2025 that kept going for seven hours, fired three distinct bursts spread across an entire day, and then left behind an afterglow lasting months, astronomers knew immediately they were looking at something completely new.

GRB 250702B, detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is the longest gamma-ray burst ever recorded and it dwarfs all others in duration.

A new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society focuses on one of the most intriguing possibilities, an intermediate mass black hole. Black holes come in dramatically different sizes. At one end, you have stellar mass black holes, a few times heavier than the sun, formed when massive stars die. At the other, you have the supermassive monsters lurking at the centers of galaxies, millions or billions of solar masses across. In between sits a largely missing population, intermediate mass black holes, ranging from a few hundred to a hundred thousand solar masses. Theory says they should be common. Finding them has proven stubbornly difficult.

The researchers propose that GRB 250702B was produced when an ordinary star like our sun wandered too close to one of these intermediate mass black holes and was torn apart by its tidal forces. As the shredded stellar material spiraled inward and was consumed, it powered a relativistic jet of particles firing outward at close to the speed of light, generating the extraordinary gamma-ray emission Fermi detected.

Crucially, the repeating nature of the bursts fits this picture neatly. The star wasn't necessarily destroyed in one go. Models suggest it could have been partially stripped across multiple close passes before final disruption, each encounter generating a fresh burst of emission which would explain the near regular spacing of the three Fermi triggers.

Jonathan Granot et al, A milli-tidal disruption event model for GRB 250702B: main-sequence star disrupted by an IMBH, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2026). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag328

A brain pathway that allows people to quickly detect scary sounds and respond

Preclinical studies on animals have identified brain pathways that drive quick, protective fear responses to "scary" sounds.
Analysis of human brain imaging data identifies a pathway connecting auditory regions with a fear-related area, associated with both enhanced hearing in noisy settings and higher self-reported fearfulness. This pathway may facilitate rapid, unconscious responses to threatening sounds, similar to mechanisms known for visual fear processing.
Researchers examined links between different pathways in the brain and behavioral measures for emotion and sound processing. A pathway linking two auditory brain areas and a brain region involved in fear was associated with better hearing ability in noisy environments and increased self-reported fearfulness.

While a part of this pathway in the brain was previously described in humans, according to the researchers, this work reveals a new role for this pathway in quickly responding to "scary" sounds.
This pathway may be involved in the unconscious processing of acoustic fear, paralleling an already established pathway for unconscious processing of visual fear.

A Direct Auditory Subcortical Route to the Amygdala Associated with Fear in Humans, JNeurosci (2026). DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1431-25.2026

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