Ethics

The Science of Why Torture Doesn't Work

By Ed Brayton

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.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on September 28, 2009 (boomark / email).