What Happened to Bryan Kohberger? Part 7: How Brain Damage Can Create a Criminal Mind
[Note: This part will make more sense if you read the earlier parts of this series, available here.]
Are Psychopaths Born or Made?
This is a perpetual debate in criminology. Take Ted Bundy, for example: According to his Wikipedia page, at only three years old he surrounded his sleeping sister with kitchen knives and engaged in other disturbing behavior while quite young — which suggests the former.
But Kohberger’s case is not as clear-cut, as we haven’t heard any recollections of his behavior at a very young age that point to murderous potential.
And furthermore, Kohberger’s online forum posts reveal a person who is not comfortable with his mental state (at least at this early stage), unlike Bundy, who apparently never was bothered by his own behavior or showed real remorse for what he did (his quotes were consistently defiant, and even a pre-execution interview in which he blames his addiction shows signs of deception, according to an expert).
In contrast, Kohberger’s writing clearly shows someone troubled by his interlinked physical and mental conditions, and desperately seeking answers. He wanted to get better. Despite “thinking in depth nonstop for 1.5 years about [visual snow] causes and cures” as he writes in the online forum, seeing doctors, and taking medications, he could find neither answers nor relief.
But then something in Kohberger radically shifted. He left the forum, saying in a final post that he had “come to terms” with his visual snow.
And, it seems, eventually he transferred his obsession with healing his symptoms to studying the criminal mind, as we’ve learned from news stories. A study so deep that he would (allegedly) become a violent criminal himself and take four human lives.
His long post eerily portends that criminality, though at that point he has enough self awareness and morality left to seem troubled by it:
I felt like a criminal, but where was my record?
and
I feel like an organic sack of meat with no self worth, as I am starting to view everyone as this.
If Kohberger can be classified at all, it seems that he wasn’t born criminal but made so. But what, exactly, made him criminal?
How Toxic Heavy Metals Can Create Psychopaths
As I’ve covered in previous parts of this series, toxic heavy metals and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection can cause a lack of emotion and depersonalization. But does it necessarily follow that afflicted people must seek to harm others? No; everyone has toxic heavy metals and most have EBV, but clearly psychopathic behavior is rare.
Medical Medium explains that the parts of the brain affected by toxic heavy metals makes a difference. In Brain Saver he writes about what causes people to feel guilt — and fail to feel guilt:
In the emotional centers of the brain, certain areas of the nerve tissue are partly responsible for the way we feel. It’s not only the tissue itself. The brain’s emotional centers are intertwined with our soul. If someone feels guilty for something they’ve done and that’s appropriate for the circumstance, the soul is tied in to this emotional response in the brain. If someone never feels guilty even when they should — when it would help them learn and grow and give others resolution — there’s a disconnect. For one, there’s a disconnect between the the soul and the brain’s emotional centers; the soul has pushed away from the brain. For another, there’s usually been some sort of toxic exposure in the emotional centers of the brain causing a disconnect in electrical signals. When toxic heavy metals such as mercury and aluminum take up residence there, it can interfere with the empathy, sympathy, compassion, and guilt that are supposed to arise upon causing harm to others. It can mean that someone never apologizes for what they’ve done. That’s because heavy metals can derail electrical impulses, never allowing them to reach the guilt region of the brain, which is one of the places where the soul connects to nerve tissue. It’s the part of the brain that allows someone to have heart.
Medical Medium doesn’t explain how someone’s soul can disconnect from the brain by itself, as he asserts in the first case. But the second case, where toxic metals interfere with electrical signals in the brain’s emotional centers (thereby disconnecting the soul), seems to apply to Kohberger.
Why? Because, as I’ve covered in previous parts of this series, we know that:
- Toxic heavy metals fuel EBV, and he already displayed many severe symptoms of EBV (eye floaters, a thyroid condition, depersonalization), and
- he also displayed signs of autism as a youth (social awkwardness, lack of eye contact), which is caused by toxic heavy metals in the brain.
So Kohberger must have had a great deal of toxic metals in his brain to begin with.
Thus it makes sense that those metals would also eventually disconnect his soul from his brain’s emotional centers — enabling him to engage in unconscionable acts.
The Link Between Brain Damage and Psychopathic Behavior
In that long July 2011 post, Kohberger hurls a question into the vast, murky abyss that is modern neurology:
Am I brain damaged? NO?! Then why am I like this?
He knew that something had damaged his brain, even though none of his doctors could tell him that.
We typically think of brain damage as resulting only from traumatic injury such as a gunshot wound, blunt force, or prolonged oxygen deprivation. But as Medical Medium explains in Brain Saver, there are other sources of brain damage that affect a much greater swath of humanity than acute trauma does.
One surprising source is psychologically traumatic experiences, such as emotional abuse or betrayal in a relationship. That’s why they often feel excruciating: When we lack critical nutrient reserves, emotional trauma literally hurts certain areas of the brain (a topic I’ll cover in a separate story).
Toxic heavy metals are a big source of brain damage, too. Here’s an example: As Medical Medium explains in Brain Saver, Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a combination of mercury and aluminum deposits in the brain that are oxidizing and corroding. These aging metals saturate brain tissue and interfere with the normal flow of electricity in the brain, creating dead areas.
But he notes that this effect isn’t exclusive to Alzheimer’s:
When metals are a millimeter this way or that way in someone’s brain or brain stem, they can create completely different symptoms, ranging from delusions to severe tantrums to the need to walk for hours with no direction. It varies in every way. Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia are the same disease. They’re both severe brain tissue damage [emphasis added] from large deposits of metals that have oxidized.
Note the word “delusion” in this passage. You might recall that Kohberger listed “delusions of grandeur” and seeing “things that were not there” among his symptoms. Clearly he was suffering from the damaging effects of heavy metal toxicity.
He hadn’t received a diagnosis of dementia (young people almost never do). But while modern medicine has created so many names and categories for what it considers unrelated neurological conditions, the important message from Medical Medium is that all these conditions are connected to toxic heavy metals — and those metals actually damage brain tissue and create a wide range of symptoms, depending on where in the brain they are located.
So Kohberger was right to suspect that his brain was damaged.
Conventional Findings Mesh with Medical Medium’s Information
In the past several decades, many studies have established links between brain damage and criminal behavior. Across those studies, brain damage is very narrowly defined as traumatic brain injury, from events like accidents or assault.
But a brain-mapping study published in 2017 by researchers at Vanderbilt University is the first of its kind to link brain lesions — tissue damage resulting from any cause, not just blunt force trauma — to a greater tendency toward criminal behavior, when those lesions are within the neural network governing morality. (Study subjects who had lesions in other brain areas were less prone to that behavior.) This is entirely consistent with what Medical Medium says in Brain Saver about heavy metals disabling someone’s ability to feel guilt.
The Vanderbilt study doesn’t specifically mention lesions caused by heavy metal deposits, as conventional medicine still barely acknowledges the role of metals in the brain. But if we accept Medical Medium’s logical explanations and expand the definition of brain damage to include the more hidden tissue injury from toxic heavy metals in the brain oxidizing and corroding, then the link between brain damage and violent criminal behavior could become even stronger than scientists have found so far.
In the meantime, it certainly seems to help explain Kohberger’s dark turn.
Yet we still don’t seem to have a satisfying answer: What exactly made him more prone to malevolence instead of mere apathy? If depersonalization lessened his capacity for emotion, then why would he desire to kill someone who rejected him (if it’s true that at least one of the victims didn’t respond to Kohberger’s messages to her on Instagram, as reported by People magazine)?
Murder in such a case would seem to be an act of revenge. But revenge is fueled by emotion, typically anger due to perceived unfairness. Yet Kohberger apparently didn’t feel much emotion. So what drove him to (allegedly) kill?
In Part 8, I speculate on a possible spiritual aspect of Kohberger’s malicious behavior.
Note: I’m not sponsored by or affiliated with Medical Medium in any way. I simply feel compelled to share his information because it has massively improved my own health and that of so many others.
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