An instant later my body responded to the shock by feeling prickly and jangly and weak and debilitated. This sensation, Bob said, was a result of our amygdalae and our central nervous systems shooting signals of distress up and down to each other. It’s the feeling we get when we’re suddenly startled – like when a figure jumps out at us in the dark – or when we realize we’ve done something terrible, the feeling of fear and guilt and remorse, the physical manifestation of our conscience. ‘It is a feeling,’ Bob said, ‘that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing.’
