Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Wired magazine has an article about a new paper by Shane O'Mara in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that examines the neuroscience of using things like stress positions and abuse to get accurate information out of detainees. He bluntly calls the belief that abuse and torture are effective a form of folk neuroscience that does not conform to what we know about how the brain works.
The problem, he says, is that stress hormones actually make it less likely that someone subject to abuse can accurately recall information, so that such abuse ends up "destroying the very memories they're supposed to recover." And it can even result in false memories taking the place of real memories - and the person being abused not being able to distinguish between them.
"There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and humans," writes Shane O'Mara, a stress researcher at Ireland's Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. "These techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting memory and executive function."...A report published by the Intelligence Science Board in 2007 found that no research existed to support the use of enhanced interrogation. And O'Mara's review, published Monday in Trends in Cognitive Science, describes a wealth of science that supports ending the practice.
O'Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as "folk neurobiology" that "is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence." The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex -- the brain's centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval -- are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will "result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss," warping the minds that interrogators want to read.
What's more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they're lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors' allegations into their own version of reality.
This is something we've also seen from police interrogations. In the nearly 250 cases where DNA evidence has conclusively shown that someone convicted of a crime could not have done it, that person had actually plead guilty. In at least some of those cases, there is evidence that in the course of being broken down during interrogation, the person actually began to believe that they had done it, incorporating the scenarios offered by police officers seamlessly into their own memories under duress.
Politics
Comments
Lol, liberal scientists are at it again, twisting reality to fit their political agendas; pollution, the global warming hoax, the 'big bang', and now this. "Torture doesn't work", huh? Honestly, who's more credible to you: a bunch of elitist-ivory-tower liberals with fancy degrees and a lot of incomprehensible, 'footnoted' babble about 'double-blind tests' and 'statistics' and 'peer review' and so on, or courageous, patriotic Everyman Jack Bauer?
(Besides, 'neuroscience' is a category error from the beginning. The proper field for the study of the mind (which is to say, the study of the soul) is theology.)
Posted by: mad the swine | September 28, 2009 10:13 AM
'mad the swine' you actually made me laugh out loud.
No question that this is a very persistent Poe.
Posted by: Ashley Moore | September 28, 2009 10:27 AM
Unfortunately, a significant number of the comments at the article are not Poes. Nor do they exhibit reading comprehension skills.
Posted by: Monimonika | September 28, 2009 10:48 AM
. . . which is why, when guys like Cheney say torture works, they mean it works for them.
Posted by: Molly, NYC | September 28, 2009 10:56 AM
Star Trek was here first:
"There are four lights"
Posted by: KeithB | September 28, 2009 11:09 AM
It's taken me a while, but I think this post has finally convinced me that MtS is definitely a Poe!
Posted by: sinned34 | September 28, 2009 11:48 AM
Torture was used to get the Jews to confess to poisoning wells and causing the Black Death in Europe. So I guess anyone who thinks torture works must really hate Jews.
Posted by: Tilting At Windmills | September 28, 2009 12:02 PM
mad the swine, awesome. It wasn't until midway through the 2nd paragraph I realized you were kidding. Classic satire :)
I have said on many occasions that we don't even have to examine the thorny ethical and precedent-setting issues of using torture, because the "ticking time bomb" scenario is a false dilemma. If torture really was an effective means of interrogation, this would be a very difficult question, and I'm not entirely sure what my answer would be. (I think my opinion in that alternate reality would be that torture should never be sanctioned by a government, and always punished if discovered... but that at the same time it might be moral to do so under certain circumstances)
But torture is a lousy means of interrogation, so we can easily dodge the entire tradeoff. Who cares about the ethics; it's just a dumb idea. Don't do it.
Posted by: James Sweet | September 28, 2009 12:12 PM
A recent study has found a correlation in children between being spanked and IQ loss. Of course (all together now) correlation does not imply causation, but, if there is a causative factor here, I can't help but wonder if it is the same factor that is involved in torture. During torture, the body releases hormones that destroy the ability to recall memories; in children, constant release of these hormones may have a long-term effect on the functioning of the brain.
Posted by: thinkoplex | September 28, 2009 12:29 PM
@KeithB: Given that the plot for that episode was lifted straight from 1984, the best you could say is that Star Trek was there second :)
Posted by: jim | September 28, 2009 12:37 PM
MtS,
Hilarious. But I wasn't actually confused, so only great parody, not good Poe this time.
Posted by: James Hanley | September 28, 2009 1:21 PM
But Mad! Jack Bauer wants me to have health care reform and a public option! So...we should torture health insurance CEOs into giving people a fair shake? I'm so confused.
Posted by: JustaTech | September 28, 2009 1:47 PM
Another good depiction of torture, (albeit not so much physical) is the 1955 film "The Prisoner", with Alec Guinness. (Nothing to do with the TV series of the same name.) Not so much about extracting information as getting a man to give a false confession.
Posted by: SimonG | September 28, 2009 1:55 PM
"Not so much about extracting information as getting a man to give a false confession."
And that is truly what torture is best at. Speaking for myself, just show me the torture devices and I will confess to anything you want. Just write up the confession and I will be happy to sign. No need to water board me a few hundred times.
Posted by: Tilting At Windmills | September 28, 2009 2:47 PM
Wasn't the false confession the only thing anyone ever wanted to get out of torture, ever? (Aside from the obvious reign of terror angle, where you aren't interested in getting data "out" at all.) You never did like group "X", so you put the screws to "X-sub-1" until he implicated the rest of group "X" as conspirators, at which point you had the legal justification to round up the rest of group "X". Doesn't sound like that's changed in several thousand years.
Posted by: Scott | September 28, 2009 4:28 PM
Duh. I learned that in my first year as a Psychology major. Why can't RWers, even those who are ostensibly "experts" in the field, figure it out?
Posted by: Buffy | September 28, 2009 5:02 PM
I know you are likely stating rhetorical question, but I have noticed that there are two ways people seem to think:
J) Accumulate the evidence and see what outcome that leads you to.
11) Determine the outcome you want and see what evidence you need in order to reach that outcome.
Dogmatists tend to be of type-11, while rational thinkers tend to be of type-J. Unfortunately, people of type-11 tend to be able to push the "fear button" in the populace, since the "fear button" seems to allow a whole new level of latitude within which to operate. Similar strategies that work to trick the human psyche includes repeating everything you say over and over and over and over and over and over (and over) until it sticks in peoples' heads. Combine the "fear button" with the "iteration principle", and you have a great strategy to get people to believe (enough) in what you are selling that they will vote for you.
Of course, when one is in the minuscule minority, the "fear button" comes across as more shrill and the repetition comes across as mulishness. (Or it does to me, at least.)
Posted by: Umlud | September 28, 2009 6:09 PM
Good stuff, Ed. I think it's well supported by previous studies of things such as PTSD. For the POEers, there's actual science, then there's Faux News "science," which deserves it's own category under pseudosciences.
Posted by: SocraticGadfly | September 28, 2009 9:38 PM
Torture works or not depends on what you want to achieve. It's useless as a means to acquire dependable accurate new information, certainly. That's been known for a while. But it is really effective as a means to inspire terror in a specific group or population of people. It's also terrific as a brainwash technique. You can make someone believe anything with application of enough pain. So if all you want is a guilty plea and you're not to particular about getting the right person, or you want to let the guilty escape but you need a scapegoat to confess ...
Posted by: Katkinkate | September 29, 2009 1:59 AM
The problem with torture as a method of gaining information is that it works, unless it doesn't, and there's no way to establish which is which.
...
thinkoplex "A recent study has found a correlation in children between being spanked and IQ loss."
Are their parents spanking the right end? I mean, I got spanked a lot as a chil an it nvr hrt m non.
Posted by: Modusoperandi | September 29, 2009 6:17 AM
Yeah, mad the swine had me - I was wondering if someone stole the name.
I've given many reasons why I don't believe torture can provide reliable information, but it's good to see people who study how the mind works showing more evidence based on studies. People who claim that torture works have a habit of picking out a few instances where information was of some value and hiding all instances (the vastly overwhelming majority) where nothing was gained (think 'Guantanamo Bay').
Posted by: MadScientist | September 29, 2009 7:22 AM
Orwell called it The Ministry of Truth for a reason.
Posted by: JackU | September 29, 2009 5:15 PM
Torturing makes laziness in work.
Posted by: workplace bosses human resources | October 4, 2009 8:04 AM