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SAN JOSE – The brain of Yosemite killer Cary Stayner is probably damaged in a region that controls emotional impulses, a neuropsychologist testified Tuesday as the triple-murder trial resumed. 

A battery of tests showed Stayner was above average in intelligence but psychologically impaired, said Ruben Gur, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. 

One test indicated that Stayner has some damage between the center of his brain, where emotional impulses are produced, and the frontal lobe that controls those urges. 

“You know the train hasn’t arrived,” Gur said. “You don’t know where it’s derailed.” 

Gur is a witness for Stayner’s insanity defense in the killings of three Yosemite National Park tourists. 

Stayner, 40, could be executed if convicted of murdering Carole Sund, 42, her daughter, Juli, 15, of Eureka, and their Argentine friend, Silvina Pelosso, 16. 

The three vanished in February 1999 from a rustic motel outside the park where Stayner worked as a maintenance man. Stayner is already serving a life sentence for murdering park nature guide Joie Armstrong and has confessed to all four killings. 

The defense claims Stayner killed because of bad genes, a tormented childhood and a deformed head that may have been caused before birth when his pregnant mother fell during a softball game. 

Gur said he reviewed other psychological exams, administered his own tests and reviewed scans of Stayner’s brain. 

Stayner had an incredibly good memory for faces and space, scoring better than 90 percent of the population, Gur said. But his memory of words was so low that the difference between the two types of recall, which would be negligible among normal people, put him in a category with less than 1 percent of the population. 

Another deficit was Stayner’s difficulty recognizing emotion, particularly sadness, Gur said. 

He also had hand coordination problems, adding to signs that Stayner’s frontal lobe was damaged. 

Gur described the frontal lobe as the one that says stop and think before acting. 

“Some can’t stop themselves,” he said.