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Serum of truth: does this drug really work?

Serum of truth: does this drug really work?

March 24, 2024

The idea of ​​accessing not only the control of people but also the information that 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 reach perverse ends is difficult to imagine at all, and with effects as simple as its method of use: you get someone to drink it and, shortly after, an interrogation begins in which that we will listen will correspond totally with what the interrogated person believes to know in a reliable way. The option to lie will have disappeared.

Truth serum representations ideally appear in works of fiction like Harry Potter (under the name of 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?


The truth serum story

At the beginning of the 20th century, the news spread that scopolamine, also known as burundanga, a substance that was administered to women to better withstand the pains of childbirth, made them much more uninhibited and began to speak about intimate details of their lives with people they did not know.

In the absence of a cognitivist psychology and a scientific perspective based on neuroscience, it was psychoanalysis, the dominant paradigm at the time when talking about mental processes, that was in charge of offering an explanation of how this truth serum worked.

Resorting to the ego 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 the moral nor the expectations of not "getting into trouble" constituted a barrier so that a good part of the most intimate thoughts of the person would emerge to the surface.


It was later, when we began to know how psychoactive drugs act, when we began to intuit what is the functioning mechanism of the truth serums ... and why they are ineffective.

Entering the nervous system

Basically, truth serums such as sodium pentothal are depressants of the central nervous system. This means that, due to their chemical composition, they cause several 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 kind of actions we should avoid are relaxed , as if they let down their guard.

This 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 this substance circulating through the brain it is practically impossible to take into account what kind of things are not appropriate in a given context, networks of neurons that work together creating our thoughts are so numb that they can not perform several complex actions at once, like the evocation of an idea and at the same time the need not to say it.

Sodium pentothal and true confessions

But what theoretically characterizes the truth serum is not simply disinhibition, but the true content of what is said. In that sense, both sodium pentothal and the rest of similar barbiturates fail miserably.

Why? Among other things because a serum of the truth does not stop being a psychotropic drug , and as it is not an intelligent entity; simply, it circulates through our organism, coupling where its chemical characteristics allow it and passing by (or transforming into other components) in the rest of the cases.

That means that it has no way of detecting neurochemical processes related specifically to the truth, it simply "fits" into certain slots, for better or for worse. That is also why sodium pentothal, like any drug, not only produces the expected effect that the doctor or military man that is providing it is trying to achieve, but also generates several side effects of greater or lesser intensity .

In the case of the Pentothal, this substance is coupled to several receptors of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which is a depressant of brain activity, and acts 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 does not matter" and in which factors such as social norms and concern for the image that is taking place 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 best serve to make the interrogated begin to speak inconsistently, without paying attention to whether what he says is true or not.

It may relax the defenses that separate your thoughts and what it says , but it will also be true that the quality of your thoughts, as to the relationship with the reality of these, will have fallen sharply.


The Truth About 'Truth Serum' (March 2024).


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