Inside the Brain of an Arsonist : Are some people born to burn? Studies blame everything from sexual urges to hormones to the weather, and debate is still hot.

He is an angry young man--a loner with a troubled past and a bad self-image.

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His blood sugar is dangerously low and there’s a measurable shortage of serotonin in his brain.

And when the Santa Anas blow, it pushes him right over the edge. . . .

The fire-setter. Since man first touched stick to fire, the question of why people burn things has made for fascinating theorizing and hypothesizing.

As Southern Californians reach for answers to the recent series of arsons that consumed thousands of acres of land and millions of dollars of property, some possible reasons--even those on the fringe of science--are getting another look.

Is arson a blatantly sexual act, as Freud contended? Is it caused by bizarre atmospheric conditions, as some have posited? Or is it a matter of a chemical imbalance?

The explanation may be as elusive as arsonists themselves.

As a crime of stealth, arson is among the most difficult crimes to investigate and arsonists are the toughest criminals to catch. The arrest rate--a mere 10%--is the lowest of any felony, says David Walizer, assistant California fire marshal, and only one in 10 who are arrested will go to jail.

“Arson is a crime that’s very tough to prosecute. Very seldom do you get an eyewitness. The entire case is almost always circumstantial. It’s just a darn tough crime.”

Still, theories abound.

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In March, 1987, four Finnish and American psychiatrists published one of the most scientifically tantalizing studies of arsonists since Freud, who said the warmth and excitement radiated by fire was sexually pleasing.

Twenty arsonists imprisoned in Finland voluntarily underwent spinal taps so researchers could measure their levels of serotonin, a brain hormone linked to violent behavior.

Using two control groups, one of habitually violent men and the other of nonviolent volunteers, the scientists found evidence that the arsonists had significantly lower amounts of serotonin.

The connection between fire-setting behavior and low serotonin--one of perhaps 30 brain chemicals that transmit signals from one brain cell to another--is still tenuous as research continues. But the Finnish findings sent scientists back to the laboratory to look for other possible ties between brain chemistry and undesirable behavior.

Links have since been found not only between hormones and fire-setting, but also between low serotonin and impulsive acts of suicide and murder. Whether such imbalances in themselves can explain or predict why some people are more prone to violence remains a subject of hot debate.

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The fact that most criminals--and nearly all arsonists--are male has inspired volumes of speculation and research into the role played by males’ extra Y sex chromosome--the so-called XYY syndrome of criminal behavior.

But psychologists such as Kenneth Fineman of Huntington Beach argue that the reasons most arsonists are men may be more social than genetic.

“I believe as women feel more free to openly express aggression we will begin to see more women setting fires.”

Even diet and metabolism have been investigated as possible predictors of fire-setting behavior. In the late 1980s, for example, researchers conducting a series of studies found a striking pattern of abnormally low blood sugar in 81% of the impulsive arsonists and murderers.

And when the scientists looked at their subjects’ brain chemistry as well, they found that low serotonin and low blood sugar levels were characteristic of 84% of those who had repeated their crimes.

Does that mean some people are simply born to burn? And others to burn again and again?

“All these serotonin studies say is that these people may be less able than others to control their impulses,” says Gregory Leong, UCLA psychiatry professor. “Low serotonin or low blood sugar by themselves don’t doom people to lives of fire-setting.”

Neuroscientists are ambivalent about what their findings mean to society. The implications of biologically destined behavior are troubling even to those who conduct the research. The Finnish psychiatrists, for example, have refused to lend their findings to attorneys defending arsonists.

“Certainly, the chemical component may prove important one day. But any look at human behavior cannot ignore the social factors. We still need to ask how he grew up, how he relates to others, how he deals with his environment,” says Dr. Jeffrey Geller, a Boston psychiatrist who has studied arson behavior for 17 years.

“People who set fires have significant social skills deficits . . . no good verbal skills, not very successful, poor self-image. Take a person like that and take an act like fire-setting and you can see the attraction. . . .

“With arson, he can get what he can’t get elsewhere in his life,” Geller says. “A fire is easy to set. It has significant results. It will create a lot of attention and, at some level, it will make this man feel very empowered.”

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At one time, all fire-setters were thought to fit into the same neat psychological profile--one that focused almost exclusively on childhood events. “We called it the triad: any child who wet his bed, set fires and tortured animals was thought to be at great risk for growing up to be an arsonist,” recalls UCLA psychiatrist Louis West, who in 45 years of practice has studied the motivations of thousands of fire-setters.

But as such theories lost their steam, others replaced them. After the riots in the late 1960s, researchers undertook a scientific look at how weather could influence aggressive and violent behavior, including arson.

Their findings confirmed that extreme weather of any kind--very high or very low humidity, long periods of rain or long periods of drought, great winds or endless drizzle--all can affect behavior in negative ways.

Santa Ana winds have long been associated with bizarre behavior. In his classic short story, “Red Wind,” mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the hot Santa Ana’s effect on “meek wives (who) feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”

“We know that a constant, howling wind can affect blood chemistry,” concedes behaviorist Bernard Friedlander. “Winds can be very anxiety-provoking and raise our blood pressures, and there may be something there . . . but the winds don’t make somebody set a fire.

“People who like to set fires are smart enough to know that a big, hot wind is going to make one hell of a fire. And that may be more of a motivation to light a fire than any brain chemical, low blood sugar or bizarre atmospheric condition you can imagine.”

“All you need to do is ask the fire-setter himself and you’ll get the answer,” West says. “He’ll say I’ve been thinking about this a long time and I read about the winds and I just couldn’t help myself. . . .”