The Science of Stress: From Psychology to Physiology

[Music] thank you thank you very much it is good to know that the bake-off viewing figures will be down by about 400 tonight if you feel the need to tweet about it during the event please please feel free I'm always looking for events like this for things that touch on on on the interface of science and real life and the subject matter that we landed on tonight seemed absolutely tailor-made for we're real hard nosed science meets miss we all think we know something about stress and meets our our everyday everyday lives in the science of of stress we've put together three super speakers for you tonight one from University of Cambridge or herbert's who spent he refused to tell me how many decades he's been working on stress maybe you could ask him a question time I think I'd be a reasonable question the second speaker will be Julie Turner Cobb who works on lots of aspects of stress but we've has two tonight to emphasize her work on stressing childhood and the third speaker will be shown Amara professor of neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin who will speak on extreme stress and the effects of stress on memory under torture I encourage you to look at the books of Julie and and Sharon out there Julie's on on on child health psychology and Shen's on why torture doesn't work very consequential book which ended up within as the reporter at the United Nations General Assembly just last week so if you welcome our three speakers please Joseph Julie I'm sure [Applause] [Music] so they're going to speak for 15 minutes each if they go on for longer than 50 minutes shuffle uncomfortably make them noise because they're eating into your time to ask them questions and the real point of tonight is so that you can have access to the open minds of these three experts so job please thank you very much good evening everybody um as you heard I'm going to talk about stress so I'm going to begin with the traditional thing that all sciences begin move with what do you mean by it's the important lesson because stresses are why do you use word and it's actually very much misused let me tell you a bit about how some like me thinks of stress and which may or may not be with the way you think of it um the first time I the first thing about it is that it's a long various dimensions you would have physical stress you know no food or dehydration or hot and cold temperature and these are real stresses and they're at important ones because you have personal stresses which means who's getting terrible in your life like a loss breed for example or a loss of a job is kind of thing as yours Jess's there are social ones like for example relationships and friendships and or stages in the community and so and so forth and the first point to make of five sequels is these aren't separate they overlap of course you can see their current you and can overlap now the important thing about the stress is that it isn't that you out there it's in you nothing is actually a stressor unless the body regards it as such so it's a highly personal individual event and whilst for example a high temperature may be stress to most people there are some people of course which is not and same terms of starvation and so on and the same goes for events and all the rest of it so it's an individual thing so the important the important of a provision here is it the perception now this is the big problem here because this is the external event and this is the response and people use stress for both the external event and at a response and they're not the same Engineers call this strain for much better respondent biologists and medics don't talk about strain they talk about stress responses and these goes together across three different of the interlinked mechanisms as a physiological what your body does in hormones and things are talk about this in just a moment there's emotional no words why do you feel about it and this cognitive which is really better what you do about it and there were lots of this is of course that you adapt or not but even if you adapt there is usually a cost even if you don't know about it and that's the point about stress even as a successful or apparent success meditation may imply a cost okay now one particular source of stress is what's called a live event and here are some of them here these are things can happen to people here like this right and they can be either acute or chronic or more commonly acute on chronic desirable poverty or deprivation is a chronic stress losing your house which may result from poverty is an acute or a chronic stress and so on the important thing I want to talk about there is this I get a link stressful depression because that's my focus the feeling and the important thing is here is that most episodes of depression I actually preceded by an identifiable stress ball and I'm the reason for that but the converse is not true and that means that there must be some mechanism for resilience or subject all susceptibility to stress and the question is what we know about that here's an example of what might happen this is a graph here this is the risk or the or the risk of getting depressed and this is time and what has happened here is that in 207 women either they've lost their husband or the husband has had a serious heart attack so he's in danger of dying now three important things here first of all as you can see about 20 weeks later a great bulge of mental response so the first thing is what's happening in that interval the end of all bears if some people say it's less than that but it is an interval and that might have what happened so what's going on second thing is that I said - not everybody does it in this case does ever third showed some kind of mental disorder here and the third point is it wasn't all the same mental disorder some were depressed someone anxiety neurosis of course the two as you know can coexist alright so what do we know about what happens the brain isn't what I do the brain okay and this is where it all happens because as I said you stress is a brain event if you're stressed because your brain is it a particular conformation now the rephrase is this is a cross-section of the human brain there's the middle line there's the top as the bottom now this bit here is called the cortex and it's the color of Radio three part of your brain you know the car thinking bit is a little bit and that recognizes the situation because it is the basis of perception now it doesn't actually necessarily imply or a sign of value it just analyzed the situation what is happening there's somebody it's up to me with a little l-shaped piece of metal in his hand I recognize that as a gun right that's what the cortex does down here in the amygdala is the response the emotional which this case is is it dangerous incidentally the amenity can also do the ugly is it pleasurable but I'm not here to talk about pleasure we're talk about pain it's a dangerous now then what happens well another part of your brain that usamos organizes the response to it because your body needs to react to this and quickly and that's happening down here and the hypothalamus does it by sending a signal a chemical signal down to the pituitary gland here and the maturity gland sends another chemical signal down here giel glands be sit in your abdomen just above the kidneys side okay and adrenals do what is necessary and that is produces masses of this hormone cortisol and that's where our story starts cortisol the area's causes are now I'm in big danger here I'm always told if you show anybody a molecule of formula all going is going to sleep so before you go into coma let me show you why tell you why I'm showing you this now these black things are carbon atoms if you look carefully you see there are three rings of six for combats each and they share items and one here of five I'll show you that because that's a steroid all steroids look like that now what makes one steroid different from others pyramide this is cortisol but of course huh the whole audience here has a long after Michael testosterone in it males and females and if the ladies and the men initiative and the ladies some days anyway have progesterone they're all steroids now what matters are these things here these are oxygen and hydrogen atoms and if you rearrange them you change the function of this molecule quite astonishing so it's a very simple molecule compared with a protein which is molecular of thousands this has merkulov about 300 of nothing and yet it's one of those powerful substances we know why this well that cause when you're all dead and in fact Addison's disease comas Allison was a 18th century position from guys Hospital dahmer area described it and he didn't know why little died but they all did dies patients and he noticed that they died they all had great but tons of tuberculosis in their adrenals estate speculation kills wondering it before people you know now did anyway and of course nowadays people has disease don't die because they're given cortisol good safety when they were sex it's important has a mark daily rhythms I won't go into this is something but come back to women characteristically have about 20% more calls are in there in their in their blood the men does it matter wait stress it is as we've seen the one of the most let not the only but one of the most dramatic moments one of most dramatic events in response to stress it you need it people who Allison disease have to increase their calls or dose if they get ill otherwise they get be real so you needed okay whoops all right okay there's lots lots of things here and anyway I want to talk about is that thing here because we know from a whole variety of studies both in normal people and people give them steroids at steroids cortisol can predispose you to depression it can cause depression and it does in many people if you give them high doses for a long time okay so that's cortisol now let's get really friendly and talk about genes here's a gene a very interesting gene so gently with serotonin now as you know classically serotonin is related depression for a variety of reasons which I won't go into now but let's look at this particular gene here now this gene exists in two forms a long form and a short form and about 25% of you have two Long's 14 have to shorts and the rest of your how long a short do you know-know do you care well you might in a moment I'll tell you why look this is a study done very very famous on yet she's done is the most cited paper in the whole of behavioral genetics and this is why it's this is a sunny on about a thousand young people there and they did two things they determine the genotype and saying they are some three two questions how many life events that you have in the last five years and have you what are you depressed now as you can see here those with no life events the gene did nothing but as a life events increased and whether their lives became more stressful you can see what happening aren't you those were the short do shorts at about a fever 30 and 40 percent of depression as things were too long whether it's very increased and there's half in half or in the middle a fascinating fascinating example of a gene timing involving interaction which we will talk about but we very rarely see with such clarity a brief mention of childhood now Judy's going to talk much more about this so I'm going to take much bobby's I just want to very briefly make the fact that childhood adversity comes in various forms here they are again they have an app and there are there are prominent consequences which I which again I'm sure Julie will talk about we all know about that early early adversity has long-standing effects on later development the question is why why is the infant brain the neonatal brain a young brain so apparently sensitive to a diversity just recently just recently we've had one inkling of where this might be and I have to introduce you to the very modern and contemporary and very sexy field of epigenetics and here it is right now this thing here is a strand of DNA DNA of course remember it's like a long necklace with four colored beads in and the order of beads matter as the code it's wrapped and these are these are proteins called histones and on these things there are certain little sites which here are not occupied with everything but can be occupied by a methyl group and those of you who want like chemistry that's a methyl group now what that happened just called methylation well it happens there's two things first of all the DNA changes its shape like that but much more instantly it stops working so that gene suddenly doesn't work now how can that happen well it can happen as well as all their environmental event in this case this is a rat now wrap mothers like you mothers vary in how good they are some rats are very good and as soon as it everyone straight island s no you think about bigger back other mothers are a bit more and they look after their mutton then Victor so often they don't look look after so well don't care them so well when they grow up those little baby rats so a marked difference in stress responses the ones where the poor mothers have an increased stress response they also have an increased methylation of this gene the important thing is this methylation can last a lifetime now two big questions here how will the brain know how does that gene know about the mothering what's the link between the mother her mothering capacity and what happens in the brain we don't know secondly can we undo this I was if this is it this is a good curious event can be on do it not so far but that's where epigenetics is going at the moment fascinating area okay third thing which predisposed you so that's that's a learning environment and and yes in epigenetics the fourth or whatever I got to number is gender bad news for the audience one in four of all women have a diagnosed I have a episode of clinical depression which is a very frightening statistic that's true whereas any one in eight or ten men do why well here the possibilities genes what about the young this by way so this is the solution Churchill had the employer had done depression all his life he suffers this is his black dog and has a black dog anyway genes all right well we don't know about this but of course as you know females have two X chromosomes and males only have one is as a factor we don't know early adversity well it's not that's not different in in males and females but can we counter can we recognize people who are who are permanently disabled or permanently damaged by early adversity and do anything about it not so far but once you understand the mechanism you begin to look at a remedy high levels of cortisol well as I said you women do have high level of cortisol and that we think might push them a little bit nearer the precipice of depression life events interestingly interestingly women report more life events than men now regarding about this which I'm sure the feminists will love to join in do we really have a rougher time than men yes or are they simply more sensitive to adversity possibly we haven't decided that yet but the fact yes daytime on dangerous ground here I recognize that um but the the fact is the fact is that women do respond do have more life events that have high cortisol and have different genes and we don't know whether in this combination is actually increased depression the last thing I want our depression is this I mean talking about it as if it's a Saiyans it's not it's not we now know from a variety of of chemical and biochemical neurological and indeed psychiatric bits of evidence that depression is not a single illness so we have another complication here are the different sorts of depression and who different sorts of stress increase different sorts of depression and the big problem here is we have no idea of what happens in the brain depression do I have another minute I finished I think I finish while you're alive what on save time we've got lots and lots of things that we happy very much so cortisol depression genes epigenetics sex politics um nothing much to think about for questions there maybe we can equality out of that Julie do you want to take on the other discussion with childhood and stress thank you very much okay so I'm going to talk to you about the interaction between psychosocial factors and psychosocial stress and health across the whole lifespan so one of the questions I want to think about is can stress actually be good for you there's a lot of bad press about stress and obviously stress can is very frequently negative that can it be good for you so just bear that in mind now if you think about the early years they have a huge impact on your your health trajectory right across the lifespan so there's almost an exponential increase that the early years have this much greater effect my only is I mean childhood and adolescence but what can be done about that well stress as Joe mentioned is this interaction between the person and their environment and we can categorize stress in all these sorts of different ways whether they're major life events minor life events daily irritations and hassles and we might say stress is mild to severe or tolerable sometimes stress can be tolerable but then it may be the other extreme and may be toxic might be acute or chronic so we can categorize it in all these sorts of different ways but whichever type of stress that you're talking about there are four characteristics four characteristics that really define stress excuse me and and the first of those is on something being unpredictable but also something mean uncontrollable having an element of social evaluative stret social judgment and also time pressure so if you've got an event that combines all of those you're going to feel really stressed in whatever degree and whilst we categorized stress in those sorts of ways major and minor life of venison and hassles the current thinking is really that stress is much more like a mosaic and you have all sorts of stresses thrown at you at once stressors happen simultaneously and you can have compound stresses so you know the old adage it never rains but it pours once one stressor happens all these other things tend to happen so stress is a more like a mosaic of some way of thinking about it and we've already heard about the epigenetic aspects of the environment and genes or the orchid gene hypothesis proposes that some children are actually more vulnerable than others to stress as some children and they can flourish they can be resilient and do very well but only if they're in a very enriched and supportive environment and at the other end of the extreme of resilient children that would have known as the dandelion children who can flourish in whatever circumstances and obviously most people are somewhere in between rather than one extreme but it's a good comparison and as a psychologist we're interested in what these resilience factors are that help children cope so that we can perhaps intervene and promote coping and improve health so another way of thinking about about stress then is adaptability there I won't bore you with too much theory about stress but just to say there are two important concepts within stress and these are the concept of a low stasis and allostatic load now Alice stasis is the stability through change as Joe was talking about these different types of stresses stress can be physical as well as psychological it's a psychological stress that triggers a physical response or physiological response and the greater amount of change that you you need in the greater adaptability comes at a cost so you can actually adapt to a great number of different stresses the body is engineered in such a way that you can physically deal with a lot of stresses but it comes at this cost and that's your accumulated lifetime stress or your allostatic load and the way that your physiological stress response system becomes set early in life may mean that you need greater or less amounts of adaptability and generate greater or lesser amounts of lifetime stress and that seems to be what's associated with house so if we think about stress in the context of development and now a number of changes developmental changes that are going on you've got biological maturation where there's a development of the immune system and development of endocrine hormone systems and these are all part of the stress response system and there's cognitive understanding that's developing language development if you can't understand how to cope with something then it's more difficult to know what to do attach them to learning or developing and it's social relationships very important we know in protecting you against stress there was their stress is ongoing within childhood and adolescence you've got this backdrop or this context of these developmental changes and what I'm really interested in is how the physiological system of stress response systems can become set at an early age which may then influence this health trajectory now there are too many many different types of ways to look at stress in children there are two particularly good paradigms that have been looked at in the literature looking at child care and also starting school so I'm briefly going to mention those two this is some work done by some very prominent office researchers and you can see that this is comparing childcare experiences so those children who are looked after in LA either a large center based childcare arrangements or more like a child minders small group and comparing good-quality and poorer quality daycare this is American city so a nursery care would call it and as you can see as Joe mentioned cortisol is essential to life and also what we find across the day is there's a natural rhythm of a high cortisol level in the morning declining steeply across the day and that's a good response that's what that's a normal natural response so as they found here that you can see the children in the I can point in the top line here these are the ones who are in smaller group care of good quality you can see that they're declining cortisol across a day was nice and steep that's a good response that would be associated with better health in fact it's even steeper than you see in the control group of children who didn't have didn't go to child care and so you can see here that actually child care wasn't a bad thing if it was of good quality and in work that I've done previously we've looked at children transitioning to school so that's a natural normal stressor transitioning to school and you would expect to see a cortisol response in fact you'd want to see an acute response to starting school and increasing their cortisol levels and because that indicates much more adaptation so you can see here this is a children in the study for up to a year and up to six months before this is a chordal average cortisol levels is just in the red hair just looking in the mornings and then when they transition to school in the first couple of weeks and then six months after that we follow them and you can see here that they had a rise in cortisol in their main code so as they went to school as you'd expect and then quite a dramatic significant adaptation which is also good within the first six months so this is a good response we weren't saying that children shouldn't go to school they should be protected and bubble-wrapped and always stay at home and never never interact with teachers or other children in fact this was good we expect to see this response and when we looked at physical health what we found was that those children who had a higher cortisol level when they transition to school were actually the ones who are less likely to become ill across the next six months so in that respect within this healthy population acute stress and within the normal ranges of cortisol you you can see that stress is actually quite good for children in terms of their physical health okay so another way that we have looked we look at a psychologist look at stress is to not just look at stress naturalistically in the real world environment but to take that into the laboratory and look at experimental stress in the laboratory and this is a typical paradigm as one is just a mock-up but this is a typical paradigm where you would have - these are the experimenters the panel where they will put the participant in front of them and they would ask them to do a talk they put a camera in their face and get them to do a talk and also a mass task of serial subtraction some of you may have done this as a participant and this reliably in adults produces a stress response and we can look at all sorts of things such as how different individual differences contribute to that stress response and also different coping mechanisms now in children so this works in adults but in children the results are less conclusive some studies have found increasing in cortisol and other allostatic markers but not all studies and one of the reasons I think for this is because most all of the studies until recently were for children were using an adult panel so in order to stress children though he is an adult panel whereas often stresses for children within their environment remember that stress is a an interaction between the person and their environment a lot of the stressors for children seem to be from their own peer group from school from their friends so what we did was to change this and we actually put children on the panel as the experimenters we filmed this otherwise it would be impossible to repeat identically for that each each trial and what we found was that as you'd expect this line here you can see children increase in response to stress and then decrease but we actually found three groups of children and we interviewed them afterwards and we said what did it feel like to boot to be put through that paradigm what was your experience and what they told us an interview was very very eloquent they were able to tell us exactly in line with the cortisone results obviously they didn't know their cortisol results and needed a degree at that point but the what they told us whether that they felt stressed and then they felt better that actually they didn't find our silly test very stressful at all and they were really cool and too cool for school or that they felt stressed and they still felt stressed afterwards even during the the debrief session so they didn't filled it they didn't feel stressed by the time they left the laboratory I just like to make that point and so what we found that children are actually not only truthful but they have a very good insight into what their own stress responses are you don't find the same when you we ask adults adults generally you'll see this the cortisol hits hits the roof whereas they'll say no I was fine I didn't feel nervous at all okay so what about longer-term effects of early stress it's all very well so at starting school childcare putting people in the lab but what about this longer-term effect and much more severe stressors as you can see here well we know that these early life experiences can have negative effects on health if you project forward in young adults in middle aged men and women in also in the elderly across a whole range of different physical conditions from cardiovascular conditions up to pain conditions but we also know that if you can intervene at different points here you may be able to reverse that damage and the negative effects aren't necessarily the ones that are going to to be borne out so negative effects and are not necessarily permanent if there's a supportive in riched environment depending on the stressor obviously for some very severe stresses that's not that's going to have more of an effect and also there's evidence that moderate life adversity shows a better performance in those sorts of social stress testing compared to severe people who shouldn't be under severe stress all those who even in the control group who have had a normal amount of stress so moderate of moderate stress seems to be actually good for performance and before I finish I just wanted mention one other aspect so up until now I've been talking about childhood stress and childhood and adolescence but of course we know that the story starts way before then during pregnancy and there's work that's looked at the positive effects of increasing your child's brain capacity and cognitive abilities before birth but in terms of physical health there's also a lot of work that has looked at the negative effects on a child's health on the birth outcomes and on their subsequent health but there's also hidden in the literature because we tend to look at more negative health outcomes but hidden in the literature is also some evidence that some children actually become more resilient because of stress during pregnancy and there's evidence for a greater body weight and length at birth even though children may be born earlier they have physiologically become more resilient in the womb if you like okay so in summary there's a whole lifecycle of stress and I've spoken about how prenatal childhood and adolescent stress can have a really significant effect because of the level of different levels of development that are occurring but in paradoxically moderate amounts of stress I would argue can be trying to read there I can't read that small-screen can be very protective and facilitate the development of resilience so I'm going to leave it there thank you [Applause] Thank You Julie it's obviously emerging in my mind what what stresses it's not just the concert Chinese I think is what we call a super concept it applies to so many things pregnancy adolescence childhood is it good for you long-term effects I've got a few in the question time might run on from first day at school to first day at Guantanamo I guess it's kind of similar Shane thank you I so thank you for the chance to come and speak to you tonight I'm going to talk about two things one is a really a difficult and quite abhorrent topic which is the topic of torture and I'm also going to talk about the neuroscience of interrogation and these two things are linked I'm going to give you a couple of caveats first of all torture is not a neuro scientific concept it's a human rights concept it's a legal concept philosophical ethical or whatever you want to to make of it but in neuroscience we're well used to the idea of talking about stress or used to talking about stressors anxiety states and Pole states of pain all of these kinds of things and those kinds of states that are imposed in torture I map reasonably well on to the kinds of things that we understand that happen in the brain as a result of these stressors so I'm not going to talk anymore ality at all here tonight the analysis is entirely consequentialist so I'm not a Kantian as far as this talk is concerned and okay so I'm going to start with an assertion and you'll have to take my word for it that there is no reliable historical evidence for the efficacy of torture in this particular case which is as a veridical human information gathering practice and there's plenty of cherry-picked anecdotes but there is no reliable body of evidence that shows that torture is a good way to gather reliable information from other human beings and there is lots and lots of historical evidence for this this is a quote from Bonaparte from 200 years ago you can get similar quotes from George Washington from Lincoln from lots and lots of other authors and Bonaparte puts it very simply it has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men by putting them to torture produces nothing worth because the poor brutes will tell you whatever they want to make the pain stop the modern historian of torture is Darius rue jolly this book is an amazing book it's a very depressing in a very sad book to read but it's well well worth reading torture and democracy and in this book Roselli makes the case that democracies have never given up torture entirely that they resort to it under times of stress and when you survey the archives of democracies and other states that are engaged in torture you never find anything like this there are no reports of its effectiveness and particularly believe in the effectiveness of torture need no proof and leave no reports a really really remarkable claim but these do not exist when you go and look in the archives they may have been destroyed in every country that he's investigators which is about 160 countries or they don't exist I think this the latter they don't exist and they don't exist for a real that I'll elaborate towards the end of the talk okay now this is the point that I want to get to if torture is this it's the attempt to force information from the unwilling it has to be this it's the effort to force information from the brain systems of the unwilling it can't be anything else but it is that by definition and this is the kind of information you want the terrors of information facts events knowledge of the world these kinds of things and we know which bits of the brain do these the medial temporal lobe this picture the brain here at the side of your head and this is the place for government theories a government policy documents things like the torture memos interface with what we know about brain function now what does the brain do well as you've got I'm sure a good native sense of what the brain does it's responsible for keeping us alive it's responsible for our mood and motivation vegetative functions cognition our ability to think ability to behave through time and the theory goes that if we take somebody who is unwilling to speak and we impose a supervening stressor stage hunger thirst cold you name is cold eat fear anxiety predator stress physical assault state of pain what ever somehow over time and when you look at the what has been done it's always a prolonged period of time period I we're looking at months weeks periods of time like that not minutes not hours that somehow this will force the release of veridical information from long-term memory in other words information that faithfully describes what it is that the person knows now we can go to the literature and ask in a variety of different populations patients military personnel volunteers a whole variety of individuals what the effect of these supervening stressors are on motivation on mood cognition whatever you have to hope it's positive if you're a torturer you have to at best you hope it's negative but you can predict that it's sorry it's neutral and at best or at worst it will be negative and we can ask quantitatively what happens when these states are imposed on individuals now here's just a simple example you don't need to look through all the data here this is a study of soldiers engaged in simulated combat they've been starved they've been sleep deprived they've been liquid deprived I over a period of 48 hours and every measure of psychological state from simple reaction time through to mood through to their ability to remember simple events that happen to them just two days previously is degraded and degraded really really dramatically these are Special Forces soldiers from the US and this is something I'm sure you've all heard of waterboarding became a verb about 15 years ago and this is a description of what waterboarding is from the torture memo that John you wrote in this case the individual is bound on a min time bench their feet are bound and you place a cloth over the face you pour water on the person and while they're breathing and you have this amazing phrase that the this effort plus the cloth produces the perception of suffocation and incipient panic perception of drowning now you are actually drowning because the partial fraction of air in the lungs is blocked by the inflow of water into the oropharynx so by definition you are drowning because you cannot breathe through the nose or the mouth we actually know what this position is it's a surgical position which is no longer used it's the Trendelenburg position because it's extremely dangerous people die in this position it was used devised originally for hypoperfusion of the brain condition where people's I didn't have sufficient blood flow around the brain now what do we know I'm sorry this is a bit hard to see we know actually surprisingly a lot about what happens to people under conditions of water induced stress why do we know this because there's a very large literature on the physiology of diving and it goes back over a hundred years and this is an example of a volunteer it's going to be very difficult to see here but in essence this is somebody who agreed to allow themselves to have whole body immersion in an ice-cold water tank which is again a very common method used for torture and you get changes in heart rate you get a sudden slowing in the heart here this is a Bradley cardia and then sudden jump in heart rate tachycardia and I'm sure you'll all have heard anecdotal stories of people having heart attacks from being exposed to cold water this is what happens breathing in this case the person was only able to withhold their breath for around 10 or 12 seconds so this is a volunteer not somebody who's having it forced upon them and this is an example of a description of somebody being waterboarded in Sienna this is a picture of a woodcut that I took and this is at the description and the terror of drowning endlessly repeated is an agonizing torment and it causes unimaginable anguish and all the rest of it now what happens in more recent times well here are some examples from the Senate torture report that was released two years ago so Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 183 times at 2230 at a time and in his case has induced convulsions and vomiting he became completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open full mouth and amazingly they extracted precisely no useful information and both rice and beans that he had eaten 10 hours previously did come back up really remarkable oxygen deprivation we know a lot now about the physiology of oxygen deprivation a plastic bag is a very very good way of torturing somebody is tied in a chair air hunger is possibly our most fundamental metabolic drive without air our every cell in our body I will die quickly if you ask people to voluntarily I withhold a breath and to exhaustion what do you find Joel mentioned the amygdala you get a very strong activation in the amygdala which is associated with fear and anxiety responses and if you experimentally reduce the amount of oxygen this is a specimen result I think of somebody climbing up a mountain and they're suffering from altitude sickness because they've got hypoxia you can do this in the lab and this is how you do it you get somebody to wear a mask and you reduce the fraction of oxygen so from 20% which would be normal maybe down to 15 maybe to 12 maybe to 10% and and you ask them to do a variety of tasks and this is what you find every aspect of your perceptual life changes and changes for the worse people report they're tired they lose coordination their vision becomes dim they become weak they feel sick they feel faint all of these kinds of things every aspect of cognition that you can measure degrades as well people's cognition becomes worse so their ability to remember information that they've previously learned is degraded dramatically but in this case about 30 to 40 percent and their ability to respond quickly is degraded their ability to take a measure of executive function again degraded quite dramatically you shouldn't be surprised by this buzz torturers I think always are sleep deprivation is not a very common of torture and there's a very large literature on the effects of sleep deprivation which I won't go into I just want to show you the single specimen results sleep deprivation is very commonly used in police stations as a method to get people to confess to crimes they may not have committed those crimes but it is very very common worldwide so if you bring somebody to your lab and you get them to participate in what's ostensibly a sleep deprivation study and you bring them back and they either get it sleep or they don't get sleep and then in the morning a false allegation is made against them so there's an ethical issue about these studies but we can set that to one side the allegation is that they've broken a piece of computer equipment what you find is that people are very sleep-deprived are about three times as likely to admit something that they did or that they didn't do compared to somebody who has slept normally and this is in a very low pressure situation for you're in a university lab it's not in a situation where you're imprisoned in any jail cell so come back to my question does torture work and I won't say that it doesn't work for a couple of reasons what I will say is this that the signal to noise ratio is astonishingly low and the false positive race is astonishingly high compared to other non coercive methods of interrogation and this is why there are innocents all over the world have been convicted on the basis of confession evidence and torture is great if you want confessions if you want to force people to repudiate a political stance a scientific stance it's really really super but if you want to gather reliable information it's about the worst method possible and field studies of experienced interrogators will show you that the old repudiates are useless as a vertical information gathering practice okay so let's just I'm going to skip on a few slides I just want to talk about a few other aspects of our pervasive interactions with each other the self reporting conversation those kinds of things it turns out that if you listen to people in cafes out in the wild and feels about 40% of what people say to each other involves self disclosure that a different way we like talking about ourselves don't be surprised by that you shouldn't be even more interestingly than that if you put people in a brain scanner and you ask them to engage in either personal disclosure or disclosure about famous third parties this is what you get you get a very strong activation in the brain's reward system when you're talking about yourself but not when you're talking about somebody else I think that's a good clue her interrogation is concerned and people will do this even to the extent that it will cost them money so they will gain lesser monetary reward during acts of voluntary self disclosure compared to talking about somebody else so we like talking to about ourselves even if it costs us money ok so and there is a new science of slowly developing of human information gathering is is a big problem for the behavior and brain sciences but it's one that does it can be solved and it's one that's very important because law enforcement agencies engage in practices which are shall we say behind the curve in terms of what is required to gather information reliably from individuals and we now know a lot of a makes a good interrogator and these are the kinds of things I'm not going to go through the list here those are one of the things that they need to be is to be a very good actor they need to be of high levels of impulse control they need to be very very good at perspective taking and in particular being able to take the perspective of the individual that they're talking to and and those kinds of variables are actually ones that have been sitting in psychology for about the past 50 years in areas like Clinical Psychology and also in psychiatry and clinical psychiatry having a very good bedside manner I it is often said does in times of great stress people will say we are going to have to torture these guys whoever these guys and it's tipping to guys that get tortured but interrogators will say this repeatedly that interrogation should not be left to amateurs because amateurs do not know what they're doing and at the moment we do not have but it is being slowly put together an experimental social psychology and an experimental cognitive neuroscience of interrogation and this leads to a challenge because institutions law enforcement institutions the law intelligence agencies and others have to change what they do in order that the science the ethics and the policy are all lined up together thank [Applause] you [Applause] you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 57,833

Rating: 4.8513513 out of 5

Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, science, lecture, stress, joe herbert, shane omara, julie turner cobb, Vincent Walsh, stressful, why we get stressed, psychology, medicine

Id: uOzFAzCDr2o

Length: 50min 41sec (3041 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Uncle_Charnia]

This lecture is in three parts: 1. Very general intro to stress. Primarily useful if one has no previous knowledge on the topic, and then only as basic foundation. Too short to be applicable. 2. Short review of the effects of stress on children. A place to start. 3. Torture as a means of eliciting information. A brief review of what research has shown, and a withering repudiation of the effectiveness of the practice. By far the most valuable of the three parts. Every person who can understand English should hear this.