Why Torture Doesn’t Work
The Neuroscience of Interrogation
Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O’Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does.
In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely this justification. But does torture accomplish what its defenders say it does? For ethical reasons, there are no scientific studies of torture. But neuroscientists know a lot about how the brain reacts to fear, extreme temperatures, starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and immersion in freezing water, all tools of the torturer’s trade. These stressors create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive. As O’Mara guides us through the neuroscience of suffering, he reveals the brain to be much more complex than the brute calculations of torturers have allowed, and he points the way to a humane approach to interrogation, founded in the science of brain and behavior.
Torture may be effective in forcing confessions, as in Stalin’s Russia. But if we want information that we can depend on to save lives, O’Mara writes, our model should be Napoleon: “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”
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While we wait for Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, or the CIA to
release evidence that "enhanced interrogation techniques" produced
useful, truthful intelligence that could not be obtained without
torture, neuroscientists are weighing in on how likely torture is to
elicit such information—and they are not impressed.
It's become the conventional wisdom that the tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that "anything" need not be truthful as long as it is what the torturers want to hear. But years worth of studies in neuroscience, as well as new research, suggest that there are, in addition, fundamental aspects of neurochemistry that increase the chance that information obtained under torture will not be truthful.
The backstory. The inspector general of the CIA last month released a 2004 report on the interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects. As my colleague Mark Hosenball reported, it and other internal documents (which Cheney called on the CIA to release, believing they would back his claim) do not show that torture worked. In fact, The New York Times reported, the documents "do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness."
Scientists do not pretend to know, in any individual case,
whether torture might extract useful information. But as neurobiologist
Shane O'Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin explains in a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science called
"Torturing the Brain," "the use of such techniques appears motivated by
a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific
evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and
executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests
these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of
that intended by coercive or 'enhanced' interrogation."
The CIA documents released last month implicitly set forth a specific scientific rationale for enhanced interrogation: someone possesses information in his long-term memory, withholds it under normal questioning, and releases it as a result of prolonged periods of coercive interrogation. That rationale seems to be "seem based on the idea that repeatedly inducing shock, stress, anxiety, disorientation and lack of control is more effective than standard interrogatory techniques," says O'Mara, who was one of nine scientists appointed to the Panel of Experts of Ireland's Chief Scientific Adviser earlier this year.
So let's break this down anatomically. Fact One: To recall information stored in the brain, you must activate a number of areas, especially the prefrontal cortex (site of intentionality) and hippocampus (the door to long-term memory storage). Fact Two: Stress such as that caused by torture releases the hormone cortisol, which can impair cognitive function, including that of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Studies in which soldiers were subjected to stress in the form of food and sleep deprivation have found that it impaired their ability to recall personal memories and information, as this 2006 study reported. "Studies of extreme stress with Special Forces Soldiers have found that recall of previously-learned information was impaired after stress occurred," notes O'Mara. "Water-boarding in particular is an extreme stressor and has the potential to elicit widespread stress-induced changes in the brain."
Stress also releases catecholamines such as noradrenaline, which can enlarge the amygdale (structures involved in the processing of fear), also impairing memory and the ability to distinguish a true memory from a false or implanted one. Brain imaging of torture victims, as in this study, suggest why: torture triggers abnormal patterns of activation in the frontal and temporal lobes, impairing memory. Rather than a question triggering a (relatively) simple pattern of brain activation that leads to the stored memory of information that can answer the question, the question stimulates memories almost chaotically, without regard to their truthfulness.
These neurochemical effects set the stage for two serious pitfalls of interrogation under torture, argues O'Mara. The first is that "information presented by the captor to elicit responses during interrogation may inadvertently become part of the suspect's memory, especially since suspects are under extreme stress and are required to tell and retell the same events which may have happened over a period of years." As a result, information produced by the suspect may parrot or embellish suggestions from the interrogators rather than revealing something both truthful and unknown to the interrogators. Second, cortisol-induced damage to the prefrontal cortex can cause confabulation, or false memories. Because a person being tortured loses the ability to distinguish between true and false memories, as a 2008 study showed, further pain and stress does not cause him to tell the truth, but to retreat further into a fog where he cannot tell true from false.
The other barrier to eliciting truthful information through torture is that the captive quickly learns that, as O'Mara puts it, "while I'm talking, I'm not being water-boarded." In other words, speaking = relief from pain. That conditions the suspect to speak at all costs, not distinguishing between what is true and what is made up. "To briefly summarize a vast, complex literature: prolonged and extreme stress inhibits the biological processes believed to support memory in the brain," says O'Mara. "Coercive interrogations involving extreme stress are unlikely, given our current cognitive neurobiological knowledge, to facilitate the release of veridical information from long-term memory."
In what is probably a futile effort to avert a flood of pro-torture comments and e-mails, let me point out that whenever science learns something about the brain, it is always possible that the generalization fails to apply to some particular brains. Maybe the brains of Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, and of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, are different, and their torture elicited truthful information. Neuroscientists would very much like to see the evidence of that.
It's become the conventional wisdom that the tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that "anything" need not be truthful as long as it is what the torturers want to hear. But years worth of studies in neuroscience, as well as new research, suggest that there are, in addition, fundamental aspects of neurochemistry that increase the chance that information obtained under torture will not be truthful.
The backstory. The inspector general of the CIA last month released a 2004 report on the interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects. As my colleague Mark Hosenball reported, it and other internal documents (which Cheney called on the CIA to release, believing they would back his claim) do not show that torture worked. In fact, The New York Times reported, the documents "do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness."
The CIA documents released last month implicitly set forth a specific scientific rationale for enhanced interrogation: someone possesses information in his long-term memory, withholds it under normal questioning, and releases it as a result of prolonged periods of coercive interrogation. That rationale seems to be "seem based on the idea that repeatedly inducing shock, stress, anxiety, disorientation and lack of control is more effective than standard interrogatory techniques," says O'Mara, who was one of nine scientists appointed to the Panel of Experts of Ireland's Chief Scientific Adviser earlier this year.
So let's break this down anatomically. Fact One: To recall information stored in the brain, you must activate a number of areas, especially the prefrontal cortex (site of intentionality) and hippocampus (the door to long-term memory storage). Fact Two: Stress such as that caused by torture releases the hormone cortisol, which can impair cognitive function, including that of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Studies in which soldiers were subjected to stress in the form of food and sleep deprivation have found that it impaired their ability to recall personal memories and information, as this 2006 study reported. "Studies of extreme stress with Special Forces Soldiers have found that recall of previously-learned information was impaired after stress occurred," notes O'Mara. "Water-boarding in particular is an extreme stressor and has the potential to elicit widespread stress-induced changes in the brain."
Stress also releases catecholamines such as noradrenaline, which can enlarge the amygdale (structures involved in the processing of fear), also impairing memory and the ability to distinguish a true memory from a false or implanted one. Brain imaging of torture victims, as in this study, suggest why: torture triggers abnormal patterns of activation in the frontal and temporal lobes, impairing memory. Rather than a question triggering a (relatively) simple pattern of brain activation that leads to the stored memory of information that can answer the question, the question stimulates memories almost chaotically, without regard to their truthfulness.
These neurochemical effects set the stage for two serious pitfalls of interrogation under torture, argues O'Mara. The first is that "information presented by the captor to elicit responses during interrogation may inadvertently become part of the suspect's memory, especially since suspects are under extreme stress and are required to tell and retell the same events which may have happened over a period of years." As a result, information produced by the suspect may parrot or embellish suggestions from the interrogators rather than revealing something both truthful and unknown to the interrogators. Second, cortisol-induced damage to the prefrontal cortex can cause confabulation, or false memories. Because a person being tortured loses the ability to distinguish between true and false memories, as a 2008 study showed, further pain and stress does not cause him to tell the truth, but to retreat further into a fog where he cannot tell true from false.
The other barrier to eliciting truthful information through torture is that the captive quickly learns that, as O'Mara puts it, "while I'm talking, I'm not being water-boarded." In other words, speaking = relief from pain. That conditions the suspect to speak at all costs, not distinguishing between what is true and what is made up. "To briefly summarize a vast, complex literature: prolonged and extreme stress inhibits the biological processes believed to support memory in the brain," says O'Mara. "Coercive interrogations involving extreme stress are unlikely, given our current cognitive neurobiological knowledge, to facilitate the release of veridical information from long-term memory."
In what is probably a futile effort to avert a flood of pro-torture comments and e-mails, let me point out that whenever science learns something about the brain, it is always possible that the generalization fails to apply to some particular brains. Maybe the brains of Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, and of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, are different, and their torture elicited truthful information. Neuroscientists would very much like to see the evidence of that.
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In his exhaustive examination of the psychological literature on human (and animal) stress responses, O’Mara (Trinity Coll. Institute of Neuroscience; co-editor: The Connected Hippocampus, Volume 219, 2015, etc.) combs through numerous studies demonstrating how those stress responses are related to memory retrieval and communication, which are the stated goals of the U.S. military’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The author’s main argument—that we could argue forever about the ethics of torture, but the point is moot if the techniques don’t even work to solicit the information sought—is confirmed over and over as he works through experiments on the effects of sleep deprivation, pain, drowning, heating, cooling, sensory deprivation, and more. The experiments range from the well-known obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram to lesser-known studies that measured the cognitive effects of changes in core body temperature. O’Mara leaves no stone unturned as he meticulously details the procedures and outcomes of each experiment. It is important information, but as the studies arrive one after another with little narrative in between, readers are challenged not to become overwhelmed by the minutiae. O’Mara’s knowledge of his subject obviously extends beyond simply compiling the research, however; he is conversant in anatomy, neuroscience, and social psychology. At the same time, he takes pains not to assume readers’ knowledge, explaining the results of each study in layperson’s terms. O’Mara gives scant attention to alternative interrogation techniques that might not only be more humane, but also more effective. This makes sense, as the author is merely reporting on the studies that have been conducted, and these possible alternatives—virtual reality and role-playing options are among the most intriguing—are few and far between. Perhaps this book will spark more interest in new methods.
Everything you never wanted to know—but probably should—about interrogation techniques and outcomes.
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http://www.newsweek.com/neurosciencetorture-doesnt-work-and-heres-why-79365
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/shane-omara/why-torture-doesnt-work/
