The Brain: The Story of You

by David Eagleman

What allows a diminished emotional reaction to harming another person? The neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried points out that when you look across violent events all over the world, you find the same character of behavior everywhere. It’s as though people shift from their normal brain function to act in a specific way. In the same way a physician can look for coughing and fever with pneumonia, he suggested that one can look for and identify particular behaviors that characterize perpetrators in violent situations – and he named this “Syndrome E”. In Fried’s framework, Syndrome E is characterized by a diminished emotional reactivity, which allows repetitive acts of violence. It also includes hyperarousal, or as the Germans call it, Rausch – a feeling of elation in doing these acts. There’s group contagion: everybody’s doing it, and it catches on and spreads. There’s compartmentalization, in which somebody can care about his own family, and yet perform violence on someone else’s family.