The idea of accessing not only control over people but also the information they could be hiding is so attractive that The concept of “truth serum” has become very popular and well known
It has been presented as a liquid whose potential to achieve perverse ends is difficult to fully imagine, and with effects as simple as its method of use: you get someone to drink it and, shortly after, an interrogation begins in which they are What we will hear will correspond completely to what the person being questioned believes he knows reliably. The option to lie will have disappeared.
Representations of truth serum seem idealized in works of fiction such as Harry Potter (under the name Veritaserum), but in real life it has also been a substance used, especially by intelligence services, in its sodium pentothal variant Now, do these kinds of substances really work?
At the beginning of the 20th century, news emerged that scopolamine, also known as burundanga, a substance that was administered to women to help them better endure the pain of childbirth, caused them to become much more uninhibited and began to speak. about intimate details of their lives with people they didn’t know.
In the absence of a cognitivist psychology and a scientific perspective based on neuroscience, it was psychoanalysis, the dominant paradigm at that time when talking about mental processes, that was in charge of offering an explanation of how this truth serum worked.
Resorting to the egoic structures of the psyche, it was proposed that certain substances, upon entering the organism, caused the ego to be neutralized and consequently could not repress the forces coming from the It so that neither morality nor the expectations of not “getting into trouble” were a barrier for many of the person’s most intimate thoughts to emerge to the surface.
It was later, when we began to know how psychotropic drugs act, that we began to understand what the mechanism of truth serums works… and why they are ineffective.
Entering the nervous system
Basically, truth serums like sodium pentothal are central nervous system depressants. This means that, due to their chemical composition, they cause various parts of the brain to be less activated and, consequently, the executive processes related to the way in which we control where our focus of attention goes and what kinds of actions we should avoid are relaxed. , as if they let their guard down.
That means that there are virtually no significant differences between, for example, sodium pentothal and any other hypnotic drug, in the sense that Its characteristic effect is drowsiness, sedation and altered states of consciousness
Seen this way, it makes sense that it produces disinhibition in the content of what is said, because with that substance circulating through the brain it is practically impossible to take into account what kinds of things are not appropriate in a given context, the networks of neurons that work together creating our thoughts are so dormant that they cannot perform several complex actions at the same time, such as evoking an idea and at the same time needing not to say it.
But what theoretically characterizes the truth serum is not simply disinhibition, but the truth of the content of what is said. In that sense, both sodium pentothal and other similar barbiturates fail miserably.
Because? Among other things because a truth serum is still a psychoactive drug, and since it is not an intelligent entity; It simply circulates through our body, coupling where its chemical characteristics allow it and passing it by (or transforming into other components) in the rest of the cases.
That means it has no way to detect neurochemical processes specifically related to truth, it just “fits” into certain slots, for better or worse. This is also why sodium pentothal, like any drug, not only produces the expected effect that the doctor or soldier who is supplying it is trying to achieve, but also generates various side effects of greater or lesser intensity
In the case of pentothal, this substance is coupled to several receptors for a neurotransmitter called GABA, which depresses brain activity, and acts by imitating it, which means that it reinforces the effects of a substance that is already present in our body. The consequence of this is that you enter a state of drowsiness in which “everything doesn’t matter” and in which factors such as social norms and concern for the image being given lose much of their importance
The most absurd interrogations
In conclusion, the use of truth serum, in addition to being unethical as such, can at most serve to make the person being interrogated begin to speak inconsistently, without paying attention to whether what they say is true or not.
The defenses that separate your thoughts and what you say may relax but it will also be true that the quality of your thoughts, in terms of their relationship with their reality, will have plummeted.
