Brain Study: Torture Impairs Suspects' Recall

The objections to torture have been moral, legal, even pragmatic. Here's another: from a neuroscience standpoint, it doesn't work and in fact could actually make subjects less able to remember credible information.

A review for the journal "Trends in Cognitive Science" takes the details from the legal memos released by the Department of Justice on the use of torture on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration and compares the information to current neuroscience research. The findings were that not only were their interrogations likely to create a host of memory problems, but the person being tortured was more vulnerable to coming up with false memories.

Professor Shane O'Mara of the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, who authored the review, calls rationales by the Bush administration -- that torture can force a reluctant suspect to give up truthful information -- "folk psychology." Instead, O'Mara says it's more likely that the prolonged stress floods the brain with hormones that can drive it into a compromised, hyper-aware state. The hormones corrode the brain's memory function and damage the person's ability to form an intention or make a decision.

Last month, Delia detailed the push to release more information on interrogation tactics, and in fact, among the information that still hasn't been released, is what scientific or medical advice -- if any -- the Bush administration sought on whether these techniques were likely to even work. Of course, as David Corn notes, Dick Cheney continues to assert that what he calls "enhanced interrogation techniques" did work.

In fact, there is one effect that torture is likely to elicit: talking. Subjects are more likely to talk under torture, but they are no more likely to give true information. Because they associate talking with safety, they are likely to prolong it, mixing in whatever comes to mind regardless of the truth.