The clinical neuroimaging picture of the brain of patients with COVID-19 does not tally well with the neuroimaging picture and functional picture of the brains of primary psychopaths.

For example, primary psychopaths have a deficiency in gray matter, which is not evident in patients with COVID-19.

So this is a disease.

What about blood force trauma injury to the brain? The brain is redundant. The minute a region, a locale, a location is damaged, the brain immediately starts the process of rewiring itself, transferring functions from one place to another, sometimes from one hemisphere to another.

We have had cases of people without one hemisphere, half a brain, and they still function. The brain is neuroplastic, much more than we imagine.

That’s why people who had experienced abuse, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, ultimately recover and heal. The brain changes pathways, creates new pathways, creates new deposits of biochemicals in the forms of memory, that is memory, and so on.

And at the end, it’s not recognizable. It’s another brain. It’s like you get another brain.

So redundancy and neuroplasticity conspire in a good way to compensate for blood force trauma and injury.

And some changes are irreversible.

Phineas Gage was a 25 years old construction foreman. He lived in Vermont in the 1860s. While working on a railroad bed, Phineas packed powdered explosives into a hole in the ground using a tamping iron. So he put the explosives and used the tamping iron. The powder heated and blew up in his face. The tamping iron that he was holding rebounded and pierced the top of his skull, ravaging the frontal lobes. He entered here, exited here. Frontal lobes were gone. A few years later, in 1868, his doctor, aptly named Harlow, his doctor reported the changes to Phineas Gage’s personality following the accident.

Listen to what the good doctor has to say.

He wrote, Phineas became fitful, fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity, which was previously not his customs, manifesting but little deference to his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires.

At times, Phineas is pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans for future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abundant, in turn, for other plans appearing more feasible.

His mind, says the doctor, was radically changed, so that his friends and acquaintances said he was no longer Phineas Gage.

In other words, Phineas Gage’s brain injury had turned him into what we today would recognize as a psychopathic narcissist.

Similarly, startling transformations had been recorded among soldiers with penetrating head injuries suffered in World War I.

Orbitomedial wounds made some people pseudo-psychopathic. That was the term in the literature at that time. Pseudo-psychopathic in the literature then simply meant a tougher combination of psychopathic narcissists, grandiose, euphoric, disinhibited and puerile.

When the dorsal lateral convexities were damaged, the soldiers affected became lethargic and apathetic, and they were called pseudo-depressed.

As Geschwin noted, many soldiers had both symptoms.

In a study titled Gray Matter Abnormalities in Patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, published in June 2013 in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the authors conclude the following.

Relative to the control room, patients with narcissistic personality disorder had smaller gray matter volume in the left anterior insula.

Independent of group, gray matter volume in the left anterior insula was positively related to self-reported emotional empathy.

In other words, the more you have gray matter in that area, the more emotionally empathic you are.

Complementary whole-brain analysis yielded smaller gray matter volume in fronto-paralympic brain regions, comprising the rostral and median singulate cortex, as well as dorsal lateral and medial parts of the prefrontal cortex.

Here, we provide, say, the authors, the first empirical evidence for structural abnormalities in fronto-paralympic brain regions of patients with narcissistic personality disorder.

The results are discussed in the context of narcissistic personality disorder patients’ restricted ability for emotional empathy.

The DSM is clear. The brain injured may acquire traits and behaviors typical of certain personality disorders, but should not be diagnosed with these disorders.

In the General Diagnostic Criteria for Personality Disorder, Article F says the enduring pattern of personality disorder is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance, drug abuse or medication, and is not due to a general medical condition such as head trauma and injury.

Still, there is no disputing that the disease process, the example of which was syphilis, and brain trauma and injury, which I’ve just described, both yielded, led to, resulted in such massive changes and alterations to the personality that the patients know can be in principle properly diagnosed with a personality disorder of the cluster B group, the dramatic or erratic group, the group that includes antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder and possibly narcissistic personality disorder.

So now let’s go back to COVID. What does COVID do?

I describe the effects that COVID has on the brain.

And just to refresh your memory, COVID has effects on the brain in a variety of ways. It affects the stem, the thalamus, the cerebellum.

Most importantly, the temporal lobes and white matter, and it dysregulates the amygdala.

Now let’s compare these to psychopaths and then to borderlines.

Again, when I say psychopaths, I’m referring mostly to secondary psychopaths and people diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.

Regrettably, most of the neuroimaging studies we have were conducted on people in prison or in other captive settings where most of the patients suffer from primary psychopathy, the robot hair psychopathy, not the colectively psychopathy. The robot hair psychopathy, colectively, Harvey Colectively described another type of psychopath, which I call the mischievous psychopath. Apologies. I don’t have coffee. And it’s a psychopath that is essentially borderline. It’s a labile psychopath, dysregulated psychopath.

There were two types of investigations conducted on psychopaths and the brains of psychopaths. One type involved functional MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, and one involved DTI, diffuse tensor imaging.

Now, diffuse tensor imaging is much more sensitive, much more powerful when it comes to three dimensioning the brain, but is essentially good only for investigating white matter. It’s not very good with gray matter and glia. Functional MRI is good at describing the interactions within the brain, the functioning of the brain via mostly blood flows. But it’s not very good at ascertaining structures, especially deep structures like basal ganglia.

So we have limitations when it comes to structure. None of our technologies right now allows us to gain a deep, profound insight into the structure of the brain. But it’s good enough. The functionality is well researched.

So first thing we saw with psychopaths is that there was a reduction in prefrontal gray metaphor volume.

This does not happen in COVID-19. This happens with primary cycles.

There was gray matter loss in the right superior temporal gyrus. There was volume loss in the amygdala. There was a decrease in posterior hypo-couple volume. There was an exaggerated structural hypo-couple asymmetry. There was an increase in colossal white matter volume. There was a significantly reduced gray matter volumes in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal pores.

These are exactly the areas that regulate empathy and the exercise of morality, normativity, norms, adhering to norms, mores, rules, expectations.

You’re beginning to see the picture that primary psychopaths have a massive deficiency in gray matter everywhere in their brains, not only in one location and especially in areas which are critical to interpersonal and social functioning.

But it gets worse.

In psychopaths, there are reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is responsible for sentiments such as empathy, shame. This part in the psychopaths is hardly connected at all to the amygdala. The amygdala mediates fear and anxiety. In other words, psychopaths will not be able to experience fear and anxiety. They will be fearless, sometimes stupidly fearless, reckless, precisely because their amygdala is not being fed information and signals from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex like in healthy people. There’s a disconnect between these two very critical structures.

Psychopathy is associated with brain abnormalities in the prefrontal temporal limbic circuit. These are the regions exactly that are involved among others in emotional and learning processes.

We have come to conceptualize, conceive of psychopathy as a brain disorder akin to, shall we say, schizophrenia or depression or psychotic disorder. We used to think of these as mental disorders, but today we think of them largely as brain disorders.

It seems that psychopathy is going this way, the extreme, the extreme pole, the extreme end, the radical end of antisocial personality disorder is going this way. I think malignant narcissists or psychopathic narcissists are heading this way as well. These are all brain disorders.

That borderline personality disorder is a brain disorder has been long established 20 years ago.

It seems that in the DSM-6, there will be a single personality disorder with emphasis. The etiology of the personality disorder, of this personality disorder could be either physiological, neurological, brain abnormalities, or nurturing, upbringing, ambient, childhood, abuse, and trauma.

There will be two pathways to create the same personality dysfunctions.

I want to go to you, to those of you who are into neuroscience, I want to quote to you from an article just published.

The article is titled, A Systematic Literature Review of Neuroimaging of Psychopathic Traits, written by Micah Johnson and others, published in the Frontiers of Psychiatry, February 2020.

So it’s absolutely most recent thing we have.

I want to quote a segment. There’s a lot of neuroscientific material here. So I apologize to those of you who are not into neuroscience.

Psychopathy was associated with numerous neuroanatomical abnormalities. Structurally, gray meta anomalies were seen in frontotemporal, cerebellar, limbic, and paralimbic regions. And gray meta volume reductions were most pronounced, particularly in most of the prefrontal cortex, which is, by the way, what makes us human.

There were also problems with gray meta volume in the temporal gyri, including the fusiform gyrus. Also decreased gray meta volume of the amyloid and hypocompy, as well as the cingulate and insular cortis. And these were associated with psychopathy, as well as with an abnormal morphology of the hypocompy, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens.

Functionally, says the article, psychopathy was associated with dysfunction of the default mode network, which was also linked to poor moral judgment, as well as deficient metacognitive and introspective abilities.

Second, reduced white meta integrity in the unsinate fasciculus and dorsal cingulum were associated with core psychopathy.

Third, emotional detachment was associated with dysfunction of the posterior cerebellum, the human mirror neuron system, and the theory of mind, and all these deficiencies.

They denoted a lack of empathy and persistent failure in integrating effective information into cognition.

The conclusions of the study are that structural and functional aberrancies, I hope I’m pronouncing correctly, involving the limbic and paralimbic systems, including reduced integrity of the alcinate fasciculus appear to be associated with core psychopathic features.

Furthermore, this review points towards the idea that antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy might stem from divergent biological processes, which is exactly what I said before.

We may end up with a family of cluster B disorders, all of them interrelated.

Now we are beginning to see that borderline personality disorder bleeds into secondary psychopathy, which bleeds into narcissism, which by the way, I had been advocating since 1995. In 1995, I wrote an article suggesting that there is a single personality disorder, but with different etiologies. And it is the etiologies that confuse us.

We got confused because of the etiologies.

Some personality disorders are the resounding irreversible results of childhood abuse. Other personality disorders are brain disorders and would require much, much more massive intervention, or maybe have no cure and no healing.

What about the borderline?

I want to quote to you from another article, another paper, titled Neural Correlates of Negative Emotionality in Borderline Personality Disorder and ActivationLikelihood, EstimationMeta-analysis. It’s published in the Journal of Biological Psychiatry, August 2012.

The authors are Ruko et al. So I’ll just quote the results.

Healthy control subjects activated a well-characterized network of brain regions associated with processing negative emotions. And these brain regions included the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala.

Compared with healthy control subjects, patients with borderline personality disorder demonstrated greater activation within the insula and posterior cingulate cortex.

Contrary, borderline patients showed less activation than control subjects in a network of regions that extended from the amygdala to the sub-general anterior cingulate and also lateral prefrontal cortex.

And this is revolutionary, as we used to believe until recently, that the amygdala which regulates emotions, anxiety, fear, we used to believe that the amygdala in borderline patients is hyperactive, overreacts, and that’s the reason that emotions overwhelm the borderline.

Today we know that actually the amygdala in borderline patients is hypoactive, almost does not react.

This opens very interesting issues because this is also common of psychopathy.

In psychopaths, the amygdala does not react. In borderlines, the amygdala does not react.

How can they process emotions so differently? How come the psychopath has no access to his emotions, is emotionally cold-blooded like a fish? And the borderline patient is hot-tempered leb, dysregulated, defiant, and impulsive. How come?

Well, we’ll come to it a bit later, but it seems to have something to do with other parts of the brain and other functional patterns.

It’s not the amygdala.

As far as these regions are concerned, borderline patients are indeed indistinguishable from secondary psychopaths.

And here’s the clinch, indistinguishable from COVID-19 patients.

Conclusions of the article, processing of negative emotions in borderline personality disorder might be subserved by an abnormal reciprocal relationship between limbic structures representing the degree of subjectivity, subjectively experienced negative emotion.

So the processing of negative emotions, there is an abnormal reciprocal relationship between limbic structures representing the degree of subjectively experienced negative emotion and anterior brain regions that support the regulation of emotion.

The authors say contrary to early studies, borderline patients showed less activation than control subjects in the amygdala and the conditions of negative emotionality, precisely a psychopathic clinical picture, neuroimaging picture.

You recall that in COVID-19 patients, the effects of the virus via the various pathways, is toxic. The toxic, the simply poisoning of the brain, the cytokine storm, the attack by the immune system itself, penetrating via the blood, a variety of other ways.

And probably what happens is the virus remains latent in the brain, the deep structure of the brain. I don’t believe that once having entered the virus exited the brain, I don’t think so. I think COVID-19 patients carry the virus in their brains for life. I don’t think the virus leaves the brain. And I think it’s simply buries itself, disguises itself to the immune system, which many coronaviruses do, and reduces the viral load and acts within the cells via RNA and RNA messenger techniques.

But I think the brain of COVID-19 patients, including asymptomatic patients, at least half of them, are totally flooded with the virus. There’s a virus in every cell, and therefore they have a virus brain. The virus brain is indistinguishable from the brains of borderline patients and the brains of secondary psychopaths. It’s an army of borderline and psychopathic zombies driven and controlled by viruses. It’s the stuff of horror movies, day of the day.