A woman who claims to be a diagnosed psychopath has opened up about what her internal monologue is like and how she imagines memories and future events in her head.
“I close my eyes and I see black,” said the TikToker, who goes by the name Victhepath, revealing the inky darkness of her purely abstract thoughts.
“It’s so hard for me to describe because it’s just conceptual,” she continued. “I can imagine things, but I can’t actually see the things I imagine.”
When it comes to her own “internal monologue,” as she also told her followers, it is also stripped of vivid detail: “The voice is not something I hear. It’s just something I understand. For example, I think in words, but I don’t hear the words.’
For victory path on TikTok, her own absence of rich, vivid, emotionally charged internal visualizations and thoughts was difficult to compare without knowing what others’ internal monologues are like.
“I don’t really know how to describe my inner monologue,” she said, “because I can’t imagine how other people might describe their internal monologues.”
“When people talk about visualizing things or having an internal monologue, I never know if they’re actually seeing and hearing things,” she admitted.
“I do have an internal voice,” she said, “but I couldn’t tell you anything about that voice. I couldn’t tell you what it sounds like. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. I couldn’t tell you if it has a personality or an attitude.”
“I don’t think there’s any inflection in it,” she finally concluded. “They’re just words.”
The same was true for Vic when it came to visual memories or imagining things.
“I can imagine things, but I can’t actually see the things I imagine,” she said.
‘It’s not a physical, tangible thing. It’s not like I close my eyes and see an image.’
In general, people described as psychopaths exhibit characteristics such as antisocial behavior, untruthfulness, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse or empathy.
Her descriptions resemble a condition known as “aphantasia” or “mind blindness” – which psychologists at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany) and elsewhere have increasingly linked to psychopathic tendencies in recent years.
“Underneath the psychological cap of human morality,” SUNY Albany psychologist Dr. Brendan O’Connor and his co-author wrote in 2022, “lies the sophisticated integration of input from multiple mental processes.”
A woman who claims to be a diagnosed psychopath has opened up about what her internal monologue is like and how she imagines memories or future events in her head. “I close my eyes and I see black,” said the TikToker, who goes by the Victhepath, revealing the inky darkness of her thoughts
Dr. O’Connor points to brain anatomy research showing that the degree of psychopathic tendencies appears to correspond with smaller sizes of the hippocampus: a part of the brain that is critical for making detailed representations from memory.
“The lack of empathy that characterizes psychopathology,” as he put it, “may be related to an impoverished ability to generate rich and vivid episodic representations.”
According to previous psychological studies he reviewed, Dr. O’Connor now that a psychopath’s lack of internal visualization ability leads to an ’empathic deficit’.
“Certain psychopathic traits are positively associated with feeling ‘stuck in the present,'” he noted, adding that “individuals with psychopathy exhibit memory deficits for emotional stimuli.”
The study of Dr. O’Connor, published in September 2022 in the magazine Personality and social psychology overviewconcluded that “episodic processes,” like memory, “may be a key component underlying not only one’s own moral decisions, but also the way one comes to evaluate and judge the moral decisions of others.”
Brain anatomy research has shown that the degree of a person’s psychopathic tendencies appears to correspond to smaller sizes of the hippocampus (pictured, MRI scan) – a part of the brain critical for making detailed representations from memory
Only about 1.2 percent of American adults are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits, but that increases in prison, where 15 to 25 percent of inmates exhibit these traits.
The disorder is diagnosed using a 20-item Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which includes characteristics such as lack of empathy, pathology and impulsivity.
Each is scored on a three-point scale, with zero meaning ‘not applicable’ and two meaning the diagnosis ‘completely applies’.
However, some medical professionals avoid the term “psychopath” and sometimes label it as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).
Researchers from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt found that exposure to testosterone during puberty is a factor that determines both the size of the hippocampus for memory making and imagining, and ASPD tendencies.
“Undoubtedly, testosterone has long-lasting effects on the brain, especially during sensitive developmental periods such as puberty,” they wrote in the journal Personality and individual differences.
‘The brain areas affected include the amygdala and the hippocampus, limbic structures crucially involved in social-emotional behavior.’
‘Notably, these two regions are among the core regions for which structural and functional brain abnormalities have been reported in psychopathy.’
On TikTok, Victhepath recently said that the most accurate portrayal of a psychopath in the media is Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film series (above)
In recent months, Vic has gained over a hundred thousand followers on TikTok for her videos in which she shares her experiences and perspectives as a person with the ASPD.
She has said that the most accurate portrayal of a psychopath is in the media Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film series.
And she recently revealed that her special interests as a child included the Holocaust, human sacrifice by the ancient Mayans, and the original Grimm fairy tales, among other gory tales.
“I was really interested in the Holocaust as a child, not really in World War II,” says the TikToker said in the video.
“When I was in third grade, we had a book fair at school and I remember seeing this little black book called The Holocaust and being really intrigued by it.”