And I'm not saying that that's a great thing. I'm saying that it's bad, it's particularly bad in relationships. But that is the way that I was sort of, not raised, but the the way that my child self learned to think and operate in the world.
Rob Kall: Okay. You know, what you've just described makes me think of the story of Phineas Gage, have you heard of him?
M.E. Thomas: Right, yes.
Rob Kall: He was a railroad manager who was a responsible guy, and then something exploded and it put an iron rod through his head, and then after that he was angry and cursing, and just, he just became a very different kind of person. And it's almost like you just described how you were unable to have some of those kinds of controls and things like that. Now clearly, you are a very high functioning individual. In your book you repeatedly make it clear you scored in the top one percentile, you consider yourself smarter than just about anybody else you deal with. Am, am I getting that right? I want to keep checking with you that I'm reading this book the right way.
M.E. Thomas: *chuckles* No, no I appreciate. A lot of people think that, you know to me these are just descriptors, the way that my height is a descriptor, my gender is a descriptor, my hair color is a descriptor. I don't necessarily think that, I, I mean to be smarter than most people is just what testing in the ninety ninth percentile means. That's all, *chuckles*, to say you're in the ninety ninth percentile just means, the only thing it means is you, you know are in that, the bracket that happens to be above the other ninety eight percentiles, right? So, or I should say ninety nine percentiles.
So, these things are true. I don't think they're specific about sociopaths. The reason why I address them is, I am not just my diagnosis, right? I, I am female, I am smart, I have been educated in a particular way, I grew up religious, I grew up in this era, I'm sort of a cusper, I'm both millennial and generation X, you know I grew up with computers. And all these things inform my personality in ways that, in a lot of ways are equally strong, at least when you consider them all together. As the, the diagnosis of sociopathy.
You know, you mentioned Phineas Gage, he has this brain issue. I do think that my brain is different. I do think that there's evidence that shows that sociopaths, their brain is just physically different, it's just wired differently. It, to think in particular ways. That is true about me, but there's variety in everything. You know I have relatives who have downs syndrome, and they're very different in personality, they're very different in skill level with each other, and they're also different from other down syndrome people that I know.
Rob Kall: Okay, that's fair enough, and you've really gotten into some detail, in some useful, interesting ways in just looking, and summarizing some of the studies on the differences, and the different parts of the brain and what have you. Let me, by the way, I'd like to get back to where I was. You know the reason I brought up the way you've described how you learn about people to manipulate them, mostly because I asked the question how many books you read, and you said a couple. And, it, it struck me that in your book you described how you, you can be evasive in your answers. And that was an evasive answer, have you read five books, ten books, twenty books, fifty books on this?
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