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Chances are, at some point in your life, you've known a psychopath.

The disorder - characterized by a lack of empathy and fear, impulsive behavior and a manipulative nature - is present in about 1 percent of the population.

They're not all serial killers, murderers and criminals - although some of the more famous ones like Ted Bundy were.

But by studying their populations in prisons, Kent Kiehl, a scientist at the University of New Mexico, hopes to help all of them.

"I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think there was a way to treat them," Kiehl said of the notoriously difficult group.

Kiehl, who is also director of clinical cognitive neuroscience at the Mind Institute, has been using a mobile MRI scanner to image the brains of more than 100 volunteers who are inmates in New Mexico's prisons.

He has four grants from the National Institutes of Health worth about $7 million to study them over the next five years.

Psychopaths are much more common in prisons - making up about 20 percent of the population - than in society at large. So, it's an easier place to find a large group, Kiehl said.

So far, there is no treatment or cure for the personality disorder.

Normal talk therapy tends to make psychopaths worse, because they learn from it, Kiehl said.

"In groups where people share feelings - psychopaths tend to learn in those situations how to inflict more pain," he said.

Finding a way to effectively treat them could save lives, save those around them emotional pain and potentially save taxpayers a lot of money, Kiehl said.

"These are people that lack empathy, guilt and remorse," Kiehl said. "They don't understand how other people experience the pain they inflict on them."

The cost of their impact on society, including lost revenue from work, the cost of their crimes and the cost to incarcerate them, is more than $250 billion a year, he said.

That's a lot more than the cost for schizophrenics, who also make up about 1 percent of the population. That group's mental illness costs society about $65 billion a year, Kiehl said.

"Even if we don't get to the point where we can treat psychopaths enough to release them from prison, if we can manage their behavior better all this will be worth it," Kiehl said. "Even if that means they cause one less fight per year."

The secret to the psychopathic personality disorder seems to lie in the deep reaches of the primal brain, Kiehl said.

What he's found so far is that there seems to be a problem in their paralimbic systems - a primitive part of the brain located near its core.

"It's an older, deeper area of the brain that controls emotions," Kiehl said.

That part of the brain is present in most animals, unlike the cortex, which sits on top of the limbic system, said Joe Newman, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"A lot of time when people talk about the brain they make a fist, then put a hand over that fist," said Newman, an expert on psychopaths. "Old brain is the fist, and the hand is the cortex over top of it. Most animals have the old brain, but the cortex is more rare."

Newman has been following Kiehl's work with interest, because Kiehl is collecting a new body of data with one of the most advanced instruments in the United States, Newman said.

"I think it provides some useful information," Newman said. "People behave in an abnormal or impulsive way, but if you can look at their brains and see which brain structures are active when they're responding to stress, then you can start to have an idea where this group is different."

In psychopaths, there seems to be less activity when the paralimbic system processes emotions, Kiehl said.

It's sort of like a learning disability, but it's focused on emotions rather than book learning or physical skill, Newman and Kiehl said.

"What we find is they use other areas of the brain - the common saying is they understand the words but not the music of emotions," Kiehl said. "They know the book definitions, not the reality."

In some animals that don't have strong social bonds, drugs that work with the limbic system can make them more interested in pair-bonding with their mates, Kiehl said.

In the same way, perhaps a drug could be developed and used to induce empathy in psychopaths, he said.

"This is a serious form of mental illness that needs to be understood and treated," Newman said. "It's a major problem that has a major cost to society in terms of distorted trust, but the cost to themselves is immense as well. Lots of them end up in prison for life."