The kill switch

"The kill switch", Nature, vol. 521, n° 160, 21 mai 2015.

Editorial au sujet du colloque The Brains that Pull the Triggers. Paris Conference on Syndrome E  (28-29 avril 2015), organisé par Itzhak Fried, résident de l'IEA de Paris.

Extrait de l'article

Brain researchers and social scientists are well placed to find out what makes humans murder.

Groups of humans have always slaughtered those who belong to other groups. The twentieth century was shot through with numerous examples, from the genocides of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and of Jews in Nazi Europe to the massacres of ethnic rivals in civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia during the 1990s. Today, the fundamentalist group ISIS is spooking the world with its willingness to butcher others who do not adhere to its extremist form of Islam.

Attempts to understand such events tend to focus on political reasons. But a conference in Paris last month dared to ask a different question: how, biologically speaking, do normally non-violent and psychologically stable people overcome the instinctive human aversion to killing when faced with circumstances of war or extremism? What drives them to participate in acts of genocide? This is arguably the biggest challenge for interdisciplinary dialogue across the fields that consider brain and behaviour. (...)

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