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Awards
Overview"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.""" Full Product DetailsAuthor: Shane O'Mara , S M O'MaraPublisher: Harvard University Press Imprint: Harvard University Press Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 21.00cm Weight: 0.499kg ISBN: 9780674743908ISBN 10: 0674743903 Pages: 336 Publication Date: 30 November 2015 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsO'Mara shows that the processes of enhanced interrogation do indeed create such stressful states--interestingly, both in the interrogated person and in the interrogator--that it is enormously destructive not only to the person but to the information; and not only immediately but in the longer term... [The book's] greatest strength, to me, is the rigor of its evident deductivism and the way this is demonstrated, which seems to act almost as a catechism against those who, with Vice President Dick Cheney, would embrace 'the dark side' rather blithely... [It] provide[s] key documents testifying to the assumptions of our time about what constitutes a human being.--Rebecca Lemov Times Literary Supplement (11/30/2016) Fascinating Why Torture Doesn t Work is the empirical case against torture, a reading of scientific research which concludes that torture is a poor method of extracting information, and that the people who argued for it and used it had no idea what they were doing The message of science, according to O Mara, is unambiguous: torture makes it harder to obtain useful information, not easier O Mara deserves a lot of praise for writing a convincing and moral book.--Greg Waldmann Open Letters Monthly (02/03/2016) With accurate and compelling neuroscience, this book will be valuable to individuals outside the neuroscience world in politics, in the military who should know the scientific basis of torture as they make and execute policy in this area.--Howard Eichenbaum, Boston University Does torture actually work? To be sure, it can compel people to confess to crimes and to repudiate their religious and political beliefs. But there is a world of difference between compelling someone to speak and compelling them to tell the truth Yet the assumption underlying the ticking time bomb defense is that abusive questioning reliably causes people to reveal truthful information that they would otherwise refuse to disclose. Few scholars have scrutinized this assumption and none with the rigor, depth, and clarity of Shane O Mara in his excellent book, Why Torture Doesn t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation Invoking the relevant science, he shows that torture undermines the very neurocognitive mechanisms requisite for recalling veridical information from memory.--Richard McNally Science (10/16/2015) The book takes readers on an extended tour of the brain and the way it functions under the chronic, severe, and extreme stressor states produced by forms of torture such as starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. O Mara looks at the scientific literature examining the effects of these grim methods and determines that information obtained using them is inherently suspect The last refuge in the defense of torture has always been an appeal to elevate pragmatism and security over ethics and the law in the face of a ticking time bomb. O Mara s book reveals the hollowness of that argument.--G. John Ikenberry Foreign Affairs (02/16/2016) Author InformationShane O’Mara is Professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity College, Dublin, and Director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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