Inhibition can be reduced by stress and ingesting alcohol, making it more difficult to employ working memory, such as recall of instructions on how to avoid trouble. Alcohol tends to induce alcohol myopia; that is, a focus on the present and away from potentially future troubles. Some lust killers display ambivalence about offending, suggesting that excitation and inhibition are competing in strength. As with excitation, inhibition is organized in layers involving the Old Brain and New Brain. A distinction is drawn between cognitive empathy (the ability to simulate the mind and moves of another) and emotional empathy (feeling the pain of another). Lust killers are not deficient in the former but show serious deficiencies in the latter. Lust killers fit the role of dehumanization and employ neutralizing techniques of the kind ‘she should not have been out at night’. They have commonly experienced brain damage, which might explain the compromised empathy.

In keeping with the pattern established in the first part of the book, the sixth chapter turns to a literary development of some key theoretical points, in this case examining how A Midsummer Night’s Dream guides empathic responses of audience members. More precisely, the processes of empathic understanding and emotion are highly complex in any real-world activity. That complexity involves repeated cycles of perception, recollection, inference, and simulation that are inseparable from one another, regularly providing the conditions for one another’s operation. (Simulation is a quasi-perceptual imagination of particular causal sequences that may be hypothetical and/or counterfactual, or they may simply serve to fill in unobserved aspects of an ongoing situation.) All these inferential and simulative processes are on display in our spontaneous and elective, automatic and effortful forms of empathic processing of literature. Through the analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the chapter illustrates some aspects of this complexity as it bears on empathic response.