ATOMIC DOG

Jeffrey Dahmer, a monster?

Ted Bundy and Andrei Chikalito, cold-blooded killers?

Aren't you being a little harsh, a little judgmental?

What about Albert Fish, the famed "Werewolf of Wysteria," who was said to be the real-life Hannibal Lecter?

Here's a "recipe" for roasted young boy that he gave to a reporter who visited him in prison:

I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did.

I suppose you're going to say he's "emotionally shallow," or maybe slap him with some other equally pejorative label.

Listen, feel free to call him an unimaginative cook for failing to brine the behind and not stuffing it with mangoes, but don't call him a homicidal maniac.

Shame on you, you, with your high-falutin', quick-to-condemn, better-than-thou attitude!

What you probably don't know is that scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have suggested that psychopaths like the ones I listed don't necessarily suffer from an inability to feel emotion.

Instead, they might have a type of "attention deficit."

"A lot of their problems may be a consequence of something that's almost like a learning difficulty," says Joseph Newman, the psychologist who conducted a study on how prisoners with psychopathic tendencies react when anticipating pain.

Previous investigations have suggested that psychos don't feel any fear, and brain scans have shown that they often show abnormalities in their amygdala, the brain region that processes fear and other emotions.

This has led to the popular perception that these individuals are "cold-blooded predators" with about as much emotional depth as Lindsay Lohan's vomit-mottled toilet seat.

But Newman questioned whether these amygdalal abnormalities told the whole story.

To test his hypothesis, he recruited 125 male prisoners and tested them for traits characteristic of psychopathic personalities (narcissism, impulsivity, and callousness). About 20 percent of the prisoners scored highly enough to be described as psychopathic, compared to about 1 percent of the general population, or, come to think of it, about 19 percent of the T NATION readership.

The experiment was pretty simple. Psychos and non-psycho controls were hooked to a device that measured how strongly they blink in response to certain stimuli—an indication of how afraid they are—and placed a screen in front of them.

They were then told that when letters flashed on the screen, an electric shock would sometimes follow a red letter, but never a green one.

All the subjects reacted accordingly, flinching after red letters but not after green ones.

However, when the researchers asked the subjects to also indentify whether letters were lower-case or capitals, the psychopaths barely blinked when they identified the red letters, as opposed to the non-psychos who continued to flinch accordingly.

Newman suggested the results show that the psychopathic individuals sense fear as much as any non-psychopath, but only seem fearless because they find it harder to pay attention to scary stuff.

In other words, the additional task of identifying whether the letters were upper or lower case distracted the psychos, so much so that they forgot about the impending shock. They weren't fearless, merely oblivious.

Obviously, I went too far with the allusion to serial killers, who are certainly a whole 'nother category of psychopath, the product of a poisonous brew of brain defects, bad chemicals, undefined demons that live in their underpants, and destructive upbringing. Clearly, serial killers are more than just distracted.

Still, Newman made an interesting observation about a topic that's been in the news a lot lately.

The Real Reason It's Called a Cockpit

A few weeks ago, a couple of Northwest Airline pilots made the National news when the plane they were flying missed their destination by 150 miles.

Their explanation?

They were distracted, distracted by their lap-top computers.

They weren't watching porn and they weren't watching that whimsical but ultimately disturbing Glee "Single Ladies" football video.

Instead, they were transfixed by the airline's new crew flight-scheduling procedures, so much so that they forgot what they were doing.

It wasn't until a puzzled flight attendant noticed that instead of Minneapolis, the plane was flying over big, glacier-sized chunks of Wisconsin cheese (at least that's the way Wisconsin's depicted on my Stuckey's coloring book placemat).

Keep in mind that the pilots were so distracted, they didn't take note of their instruments, were oblivious to their internal clocks, and unable to hear the increasingly frantic calls of the air traffic controllers.

Even William Shatner's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" was frantically beating on the airplane windshield, screaming "What the fuck!?! What the fuck!?!", but to no avail.

This is equivalent to a text-messaging driver veering off a highway and driving 25 miles through a farmer's market, the Mall of America, and a gay pride parade, all while the G.P.S. lady is intoning Whoa...whoa...and Willliam Shatner's T.J. Hooker is holding onto the hood of the car for dear life while screaming through clenched teeth, "What the fuck!?! What the fuck!?!, all without the driver looking up once from his Palm Pilot.

A lot of people no doubt found the airline pilots' explanation implausible to say the least, thinking that maybe instead the pilots had cajoled a couple of dim female flight attendants into finding out the "real reason" it's called a cockpit.

But there's a lot of evidence to suggest that maybe the pilots really were that distracted by on-line activities.

Case in point, around the same time the pilots made headlines, a Western Washington University study conducted an experiment in what they called "inattentional blindness," a state of such absorption and subsequent distraction in an activity where you fail to notice pretty much anything around you.

To test the hypothesis, they hired a clown on a unicycle to peddle around the university. Such was the inattentional blindness that three out of four cellphone talkers failed to notice the clown, while the number among people who were just walking and not talking was much lower.

Similarly, another study found that e-mail is more debilitating to your I.Q. than weed, while another more quantitative study reported that texting truck drivers were 23 times more at risk of a "car crash or near crash event" than non-distracted drivers.

It's not hard to believe that texting while driving is dangerous when you consider that the average text distracts a driver's attention for an average of 4.6 seconds, which is roughly enough time for a car traveling at 55 mph to traverse an entire football field, despite being bumped off the line by Troy Polamalu.

It probably explains why it's becoming increasingly common to find the freeways blocked by small mountains of Wonder bras, plungers bound for Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Captain Kirk figurines, or Trojan Magnum condoms (many of which had come unwrapped and encased a number of Priuses); whatever it was the truck was carrying before its text-messaging driver started driving west down Northbound Interstate 163.

The distraction caused by electronics is pervasive, with wide-reaching effects. Consider the case of the West Virginia jewel thief who broke into a house and stole some diamonds. Before leaving, though, he checked his Facebook page to see if Keira, Kira, or Kiera had left any messages on his wall.

Bright Boy forgot to log off, which, thanks to the CSI-caliber detective skills of the local Chief Wiggins, allowed the police to make a quick arrest.

Hell, throw together all the distractions like broadband Internet, I-Pods and smart phones, Bluetooth-enabled everything, Wii and Xbox and all the rest, many of which are being accessed at the same time, and it's like trying to drink out of a fire hose that's turned on full blast.

But it'd be unfair to electronics geeks everywhere to peg all distractions on their beloved microprocessor-driven brainchildren. We certainly can't forget the traditional distractions like booze, women, gambling, sports, or plain staring at the ceiling above your bed.

A lot of these distractions are self-imposed, consciously or subconsciously employed by some to keep them from thinking about the purposelessness of our lives, or maybe the sometimes depressing and upsetting drama of everyday life.

And maybe our brains, as a result of non-stop sensory input, have just begun to mirror our chaotic external lives.

Pudenda as Pretty as Red Heifers in a Flower Bed

It's hard for anyone to concentrate on any task nowadays, especially since multi-tasking is such an admired and often required trait.

Hell, just concentrating on what someone is saying is hard enough. How often do you even remember a conversation? If you do remember a conversation, it's because you were concentrating on what someone was saying. When you don't, if your memory of an event is poor, your attention is divided, distracted, or just M.I.A.

Various writer-cum-philosophers have tried to fix the concentration thing, espousing a be-here-now philosophy, but it's a lot tougher than reading shallow self-help books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

It's especially hard to concentrate when there are all those delicious mammals walking around in tight jeans or tight workout shorts or tight panties that make their pudendum look as pretty as a red heifer in a flower bed and who make us want to be in the wow instead of the now.

There are, however, ways to improve your concentration. When it comes to remembering conversations, it's as simple as asking questions of the person you're talking to. This just turns your attention on someone else's life experiences.

You can also practice concentration by giving complete undivided attention to every moment, no matter how mundane. That includes mowing the lawn, sorting the conveyor belt candies at your job, or working out.

A Really Ugly, Louie-Simmons-With-1000-Pounds-On-His-Back Face

I recently discovered a pretty cool thing while trying to apply a single-mindedness approach to lifting.

I was in the middle of a set of complexes, doing 8 reps of 8 exercises with a loaded Olympic bar, non-stop, for a total of—if my calculator's working correctly—64 reps.

Instead of focusing on the faraway end of the set, laboring over every rep, breathing like an asthmatic asbestos miner, bemoaning my fate, I focused on each rep and each rep only, pushing away the idea of the end of the set.

Almost miraculously, my breathing became easier, my joints articulated better, and the fear and anxiety went away. Most importantly, each rep felt more complete, as if the other reps had been done under the cloud of some pharmacological nerve block.

The next day I concentrated during my regular workout. Same thing. By focusing on the rep instead of the set, I got oh-so much more out of the workout.

It makes perfect sense because when you focus on the outcome of any action instead of the means of getting there, you create anxiety.

But not only did I get into the moment, I inadvertently started working harder.

Now everybody knows you're supposed to concentrate on your lifting, but I'm starting to think it's a lost art. You know how you can tell if you're concentrating and working out hard?

Take a look at the people lifting around you. How many of them are making ugly faces, really ugly Louie-Simmons-with-1,000-pounds-on-his-back faces? How many of them have a look on their face that looks like your wife or momma's while she's popping out a 15-pound hairy baby after 20 hours of excruciating, nails-scratching-the-wall labor?

If that doesn't describe you, you're not getting much out of your set; you're not concentrating.

If that doesn't describe you, you're either distracted and not in the weightlifting moment, or your lame heart just isn't into weightlifting at all, in which case you should go join the distracted masses and drive off into a deep drainage ditch because you're texting your sweet baboo.