Truth Serum: Does This Drug Really Work?

The idea of ​​accessing not only people's control but also the information they might 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 imagine at all, and with effects as simple as its method of use: it is get someone to drink it and, shortly after, an interrogation begins in which what we will hear will fully correspond to what the person questioned thinks he knows in a way reliable. The option to lie will have disappeared.

Representations of the truth serum seem idealized in works of fiction such as Harry Potter (low in name of Veritaserum), but in real life it has also been a substance used, especially by services of intelligence, in its variant of sodium pentothal. Now, do these kinds of substances really work?

The story of the truth serum

At the beginning of the 20th century, news spread that the scopolamine, also known as burundanga, a substance that was administered to women to better support the pain of childbirth, caused them to become much more uninhibited and begin to talk about intimate details of their lives with people who do not they knew.

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

Resorting to ego structures of the psyche, it was proposed that certain substances, upon entering the organism, caused the ego to be neutralized and that consequently could not repress the forces coming from the ItSo that neither the moral nor the expectations of not "getting into trouble" were a barrier for a good part of the most intimate thoughts of the person to emerge to the surface.

It was later, when it began to know how psychotropic drugs act, when it began to intuit what is the mechanism of operation of truth serums... 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 make various parts of the brain 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 remain relaxed, as if they were lowering the guard.

That means 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 numb that they cannot perform several complex actions at once, such as 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 certainty of the content of what is said. In this sense, both sodium pentothal and other similar barbiturates fail miserably.

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

That means it has no way of detecting truth-specific neurochemical processes, it just "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 the military that is supplying it tries to achieve, but also generates various side effects of varying intensity.

In the case of pentothal, this substance is coupled to several receptors of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which is a depressant of 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 does not matter" and in which factors such as social norms and concern for the image that is being given lose much of their importance.

The most absurd interrogations

In conclusion, the use of the truth serum, in addition to being unethical as such, can at most serve to cause the respondent to start talking inconsistently, without paying attention to whether what he says is true or not.

The defenses that separate your thoughts and what you say may be relaxedBut it will also be true that the quality of your thoughts, in relation to their reality, will have plummeted.