Saturday, June 11, 2011

An Excerpt

Ronson, Jon, The Psycopath Test: a journey through the madness industry (Riverhead Books, 2011)
ISBN 978-1-59448-801-6

Pages 115 - 117:

   "When I was doing my Ph.D.," he said, "I devised this personality test, and I advertised for volunteers amongst the student population. I put notices on the notice board, and a girl turned up. Young girl. She was a second-year student. About nineteen. She said, 'This is a personality test, isn't it?' I said, 'Yes.' She said, 'I've got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.' I thought she was winding me up. I said, 'Okay, fine.' So we went through the tests. When she was looking at photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center--it's a sexual thing--was fired up by blood and death. It's subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant." 
[...]
  "Where is this woman now?" I asked Adam. "Maybe I could meet her for my book? In a busy cafe or something."
  "I've no means of tracking her down," Adam said. "Participants in my studies are recorded only by numbers, not by name." He fell silent for a second. "So she's gone," he said.

72 69 76 76 79 13 10 73 78 65 78 78 65 13 10 69 82 69 83 72 75 73 71 65 76

1 comment: