The fascination with true crime stems from a primal survival instinct, amplified by our brain's threat detection mechanisms and the dopamine reward system, which can lead to a desire for understanding the unknown and a temporary escape from mental noise.
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Why do people get obsessed with True Crime? Why are people, myself included, fascinated by serial
killers? I'm a neuroscientist and psychiatrist and in this video I'm going to try to provide
some answers. The first reason of these actually relates to all of the other reasons, in some
form or another and that reason is Survival Instinct. Animal brains in general give more
weight and attention to potential threats than potential rewards, because in evolutionary terms,
missing a Potential Threat is game over for your genes... you know, ignoring that
rustling in the bushes that turns out to be a saber-toothed tiger? You can't afford to do that,
even once. Whereas missing out on a potential new source of food in your environment? Not a huge
dea,l you could probably find berries tomorrow right? you're not going to die immediately.
So this same principle, I think, accounts for why today we might pay more attention to bad
guys than Good Guys. Serial killers for example are like that saber-toothed tiger but instead
of rustling in the bushes they're... doing what exactly? Well that question I think is why we're
so drawn to True Crime. So let's talk about how our brain normally detects threats. The
key region involved in threat detection is the amygdala. as your brain is parsing through the
barrage of information that's coming in from your environment the amygdala is scanning that
information looking for potential threats to flag. and when it Flags something as a threat
there are two Pathways from the amygdala one which we'll call the slow pathway is sending
that information to your higher order cortical regions which process complex information and
in this case can figure out whether that thing is really a threat. In humans this is when you become
consciously aware of something this is what it is to think about something it's your higher order
cortical regions processing information but again this takes [TIME]... So the other pathway is the
fast pathway and this is what gets immediately engaged if the amygdala Flags something as
a Potential Threat that's dangerous enough... something that could kill you in a moment like
a snake which could have lethal Venom... that's dangerous enough that the amygdala is going to
send a signal to go into fight or flight mode immediately. It may even trigger reflex motor
behaviors so an example of this fast pathway is what happens if you put a cucumber behind a cat...
the cat freaks out this is pre-thinking this is a reflex Behavior because the cat's amygdala has
sent a signal that hey that could be a poisonous snake so get out of here you got to get out of
here in time that slower higher cortical pathway is still getting engaged and so the cat realizes
after that initial reflex that okay wait that's not actually a snake Okay so then the cat may
decide to investigate the Cucumber you know give it a sniff figure out what the deal is that's that
slow pathway that happens after that immediate reflex motor behavior that fight or flight mode
so let's get back to True Crime I think if you're scanning your environment for something to do
let's say there are aspects of True Crime that might in fact engage that fast pathway immediately
get flagged by your amygdala and put you in kind of a state of excitement you know your heart rate
might speed up just from looking at some of these Sensational thumbnails or seeing a cover
of a book and that reflex might be just clicking on the thumbnail or pulling the book off of the
Shelf just instinctively but the part that's really going to keep you engaged is that slow
pathway once the amygdala is sending it to your higher order cortex you start paying conscious
attention to it and at that point you realize oh this this definitely is worth continuing paying
attention to you know you find that you're quite curious to learn more and that leads me to morbid
curiosity so wanting to understand the killer isn't this perverse as it seems It's actually
quite natural in my opinion because again the difference between the kind of predators our
brains are good at detecting the ones they can detect easily like a snake or beast of some sort
versus Psychopathic Killers is that the latter can hide in plain sight when we become aware
that there are people that seem normal that look normal or even seem Charming that might actually
be cold-blooded Killers we're going to feel like we need to figure out who they are we need some
system to detect these people otherwise what if they kill us right now I do think the survival
Instinct is essentially Universal but we all vary in the extent to which we enjoy the Curious aspect
mirror curiosity by itself is a trait that we vary in probably most closely related to openness to
experience in terms of the Big Five personality traits and then within curiosity there are more
specific interests that we also might vary in like interest in human psychology certainly a
cool thing to be interested in and I think that most people that are into True Crime are probably
interested in human psychology right and then there's also variation in The Morbid part some
people are just just more drawn to dark or morbid topics some people are fascinated by natural
disasters right Storm Chasers certainly come to mind as people that are highly drawn to natural
disasters in terms of the effort they're willing to put into that interest and that I think again
fundamentally is related to a survival Instinct but there's variation in whether people actually
enjoy what that survival Instinct leads to which is curiosity and learning more and I think serial
killers and spree Killers can be thought of as a type of natural disaster but where the nature in
this case is human nature so true crime represents these case studies in disasters of human nature or
in human predators and in turn there's going to be this kind of innate survival-based curiosity
and again I think True Crime fans are probably a curious people and that Curiosity has kind of
a morbid quality so what my might be going on in the minds slash brains of people who are enjoying
this type of curiosity well one thing I think is a break from mental noise I remember watching an
interview with the comedian Norm Macdonald and he was talking about gambling with which he was
known to have a problem but he explained what made gambling so appealing to him in this way
that made more sense to me than anything I had heard before when he was betting on sports which
was his favorite the reason he loved it so much was that when he put down you know thousands of
dollars on a game it was as if nothing else in his life mattered from that point on until the
end of the game every play he was just enraptured with what was happening with the full force of his
attention and this was an unbelievably powerful escape from the day-to-day stressors of life
now True Crime I think because it is so Salient again because of our brain's survival Instinct it
offers a similarly powerful escape from the kind of usual background noise and stress that's kind
of bouncing around in our minds all day long but without having to gamble right as you get
invested in the details of a case your mind just aligns its focus completely towards this thing
and I think this can be a pretty nice break from the mental chatter that might otherwise be going
on in your minds now what do I mean by mental chatter I mean the kind of self-talk that's
often just happening in our minds as we go about our Waking Life you know blah blah blah blah you
need to do this you need to do that why did you do this why did you do that in a neuroscientific
terms mental chatter I think is the activity of the default mode Network the default mode
network is so named because it is the part of the brain the circuits of the brain that are active by
default so when you aren't doing any one thing in particular and your mind is just sort of wandering
your default mode network is active and that's comprised of multiple brain regions and the
activity of the network has contributions from all of these regions if you're dealing with
stressors in your life and your mood is maybe getting low you're getting anxious the network
is thought to be getting higher contributions from regions like the dorsal medial prefrontal
cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex which are regions that can shift the focus towards
negative thinking particularly like ruminations about the past or worries about the future and
also negative self-evaluations or self-criticism why did I do this why did I do that I'm no good
that kind of thing so I think in those times it might be especially attractive to have something
external to your mind that brings your attention out of that default mode to a greater or lesser
extent there's probably always something kind of enjoyable about a release just from mental noise
in general and that leads to enjoying a true crime case that's capturing your attention so how does
that shift in attention happen in the brain I submit its thanks to our good friend dopamine
people tend to think of dopamine as the feel-good chemical you know because when you get a hit of
dopamine it must feel good right and that's why it underlies anything that's addictive but it can't
actually be the feel-good chemical because it also gets released just when you're expecting something
good to happen but when it hasn't happened yet and in fact it gets released when your brain detects
a threat which is not a good thing right signs of immediate danger cause a surge of dopamine
release into your cortex so why would this be well it's because what dopamine actually is is
the that's important chemical it's your brain's way of tagging something that is important and
worth paying attention to when there's a surge of dopamine it's your brain saying this is important
pay attention to it keep paying attention to it as long as the dopamine's going so yes that does
include rewards reinforcing good things like food or mating opportunities but it definitely
includes threats as well so remember we talked about the amygdala as the threat detector in
the brain well the amygdala is part of the limbic system a major dopamine pathway that
also connects to your frontal cortex where the conscious control of your attention is
also located and so this is a pathway that's about learning or knowing what to pay attention to none
of this is as simple as just dopamine making you feel good the pure Feeling Good Feeling is more
likely accounted for by other neurotransmitters and really endorphins like endogenous opioids
these things I think fundamentally feel good to the brain but I think they're sort of secondary
to dopamine they can happen based on whatever dopamine is doing in the brain but it may be
that those secondary effects vary in people in terms of How likely pure dopamine is to lead
to a good feeling you know something that you want to do rather than something that you're
just motivated to do I would guess that true crime fans are people that are much more likely to enjoy
the dopamine effects on attention as opposed to enjoying maybe just staying in the default mode
of being non-stimulated and letting your mind wander to seek out true crime is to seek out
dopamine stimulation I think they may also be people who enjoy horror movies other situations
where you're enjoying the threat response in some form right now if I were going to extend this
hypothesis I would also add that if you really enjoy True Crime then maybe don't ever try cocaine
okay because cocaine is essentially pure dopamine and so if you're someone
that likes that dopamine-based stimulation you probably would like cocaine too much you know
and okay speaking of dopamine and addiction well what's something else we know about that
desensitization so what can happen with dopamine releasing stimuli is our brain adapts to it so
this is why people that do use cocaine they might start as only occasionally using it only using a
small amount but over time the amount they have to use to get the same effect goes up that's
tolerance right and there becomes a point where they have to actually use cocaine just to feel
normal because if they don't use it they're in withdrawal so tolerance and withdrawal are
examples of the price we have to pay for having a brain that is very adaptable our brains are always
seeking homeostasis or a return to Baseline so things that increase dopamine regularly our brain
starts anticipating that and requires a higher or stronger stimulus to get the same amount of
dopamine release so I think this can happen in True Crime and not just based on the true crime
stories themselves but based on the bombardment of threatening stimuli that we all get nowadays
thanks to the mass media news outlets all of these organizations are vying for your attention
and one way to do that is to present you with threatening stimuli so news stories are generally
weighted towards scary types of stories stories of threatening violence or scary Health stories
anything that's a threat is more likely to get you to click right but then what your brain starts
doing is adapting to an environment where there's constant threatening stimuli and so maybe it ends
up taking particularly grisly sorts of stories to get you that same degree of dopamine stimulation
to you know click and invest your attention and energy into something so I think desensitization
ends up being both a cause and an exacerbating factor of a sort of True Crime addiction so what
can you do in this world of being over stimulated and desensitized to threats the generic advice
from internet psychology websites would be to just unplug and I don't think that's a bad
idea at least from time to time but I'm not sure it's always viable and I think it may be overly
broad if you're desensitized to dopamine release along one particular circuit which is this threat
detection circuit do you need to then live like a monk and not do anything that's stimulating to you
to reset that tolerance I think our brains are a bit more elaborate than that where these circuits
each reach their own homeostasis so you could just let one circuit reset itself to its Baseline but
still get stimulation from other things in your life so a selective break from threatening stimuli
might reset that tolerance to a point I remember saying in the first true crime video I made about
the JonBenet Ramsey case that if you're in a rabbit hole it may be time to Cease the rabbit
hole at least if you were looking for satisfaction because I think in a case like that to look for
satisfaction might be to chase a horizon that you're never going to get to but on the other
hand maybe satisfaction is always just over the horizon but only very temporarily with us there
was just an article about this on the Atlantic about how the Rolling Stones I Can't Get No
Satisfaction was actually a a prescient indictment of the state of being a human that satisfaction is
fleeting but I think what you can know about yourself is whether or not you've saturated
a certain dopaminergic circuit to the point where you're not getting those secondary good
feelings that used to come with the stimulation if you're at that point I do think it's time to
look for other things that are stimulating to you at least for long enough to allow that circuit to
reset sort of like if one circuit has gotten so soaked with dopamine you have to let it spin dry
you know you have to go through a spin dry cycle in the dryer with that part of your brain
but if you're at a point where you're getting stimulated by it and still enjoying it
I thank you for your attention because I know that is a precious resource
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