Psyche, Science, and Society

Self-control takes effort, but can be strengthened

The concept of “psychic energy,” once popular, has been decidedly unpopular in recent years. Yet it is having a small revival. The cause of this is the work of personality-social psychologist Roy Baumeister. This week the New York Times had an Op-Ed that referred to Baumeister’s work on self-control, part of his broader research program in this area. The take home message is that self-control is difficult and that its exercise in one area makes it more difficult to exercise in another. Yet the message is that one’s capacity for self-control can be strengthened. Self-control, by the way, is a central component of what psychoanalysts used to call “ego control”:

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind

By Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.

Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.

Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.

What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.

In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.

On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.

Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.

Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

Add comment April 6th, 2008

Maiming, drugging, poking eyes out, all allowable interrogation techniques, DoJ said

A Washington Post article today give a sense of just what was considered permissible under John Yoo’s 2003 torture memo. The answer is, virtually anything short of murder, Yoo argued. Remember, current Attorney General Mukasey said he could not prosecute interrogation abuses because they were authorized by OLC [Office of Legal Council] decisions which he had read and agreed with. And George Bush met every Congressional act limiting his powers with a signing statement asserting his right to ignore any constraints on his authority to order anything he thought would aid “national security.”

There is no avoiding the conclusion that we have a government of  war criminals. If these are not war crime, the term has lost all meaning. The only question is whether our system has any capability left of dealing with responsibility for those crimes. So far, the answer is “no.”

Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail
Drugging Detainees Is Among Techniques

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner’s eyes poked out?

Or, for that matter, could he have “scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance” thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?

These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which “body part the statute specifies.”

But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief.

The dry discussion of U.S. maiming statutes is just one in a series of graphic, extraordinary passages in Yoo’s 81-page memo, which was declassified this past week. No maiming is known to have occurred in U.S. interrogations, and the Justice Department disavowed the document without public notice nine months after it was written.

In the sober language of footnotes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of unsavory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality of forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a “frog crouch.” It repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in “death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions.”

Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

Written opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel have the force of law within the government because its staff is assigned to interpret the meaning of statutory or constitutional language. Yoo’s 2003 memo has evoked strong criticism from legal academics, human rights advocates and military-law experts, who say that he was wrong on basic matters of constitutional law and went too far in authorizing harsh and coercive interrogation tactics by the Defense Department.

“Having 81 pages of legal analysis with its footnotes and respectable-sounding language makes the reader lose sight of what this is all about,” said Dawn Johnsen, an OLC chief during the Clinton administration who is now a law professor at Indiana University. “He is saying that poking people’s eyes out and pouring acid on them is beyond Congress’s ability to limit a president. It is an unconscionable document.”

Yoo defends the memo as a “near boilerplate” argument in favor of presidential prerogatives, and says its fundamental assertions differ little from those made by previous presidents of both parties. In comments to The Washington Post and other news organizations, Yoo has also criticized the Justice Department for issuing new legal opinions that do not include detailed discussions of specific interrogation tactics, which he views as crucial to defining the boundaries of what is lawful.

“You have to draw the line,” Yoo said in an Esquire magazine interview posted online this past week. “What the government is doing is unpleasant. It’s the use of violence. I don’t disagree with that. But I also think part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more — we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague.”

The 2003 memo includes long discussions of the relative illegality of a wide variety of coercive interrogation tactics, including a British technique in which prisoners are forced to stand in a spread-eagle position against a wall and an Israeli technique, called the Shabach, in which a suspect is hooded, strapped to a chair and subjected to powerfully loud music.

Various courts had declared both tactics to be inhumane, but not torture, Yoo noted. This meant that they were illegal under a provision of the Geneva Conventions that the administration said had no relevance to unlawful combatants in its custody.

In another passage, discussing the bounds of Eighth Amendment protections involving confinement conditions, Yoo concluded that “the clothing of a detainee could also be taken away for a period of time without necessarily depriving him of a basic human need.” Yoo cited the need to prove “malice or sadism” on the part of an interrogator before he or she could be prosecuted.

The interrogation memo was considered a binding opinion for nine months until December 2003, when OLC chief Jack Goldsmith told the Defense Department to ignore the document’s analysis.

In his 2007 book “The Terror Presidency,” Goldsmith, who now teaches law at Harvard University, said that some of the memos written by Yoo and his colleagues from 2001 to 2003 were “deeply flawed: sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President.”

Douglas W. Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor who served as constitutional legal counsel for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said Yoo can be faulted “for not writing more narrowly.” It is often better to “brush in hazy gray” rather than “spray paint in black and white,” Kmiec said.

Add comment April 6th, 2008

Were drugs used on detainees?

Many of the detainees at Guantanamo have reported forcibly receiving unknown drugs. There have been persistent rumors that drugs were used at the CIA black sites. Yet hard evidence has been lacking. Jeff Stein of CQ has put together these stories with the fact that the recent Yoo memo explicitly justified the use of drugs to aid interrogations.

It should be noted that, even by the U.S.’s limited understandings [the "U.S. Reservations"] of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, use of mind-altering substances can be torture:

United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from… (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.

Further, use of such drugs constitutes a “grave breach” of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, otherwise known as a war crime.

Here is Stein’s article:

Evidence Grows of Drug Use on Detainees

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

There can be little doubt now that the government has used drugs on terrorist suspects that are designed to weaken their resistance to interrogation. All that’s missing is the syringes and videotapes.

Another window opened on the practice last week with the declassification of John Yoo’s instantly infamous 2003 memo approving harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects.

Yoo advised top Bush administration officials that interrogators could employ mind-altering drugs if they did not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.”

Yoo had first rationalized the use of drugs in a 2002 memo for top Bush administration officials.

But this latest revelation shows Yoo reiterating conditions on the use of drugs a year later, despite the rising resistance to harsh interrogation techniques by military lawyers and the FBI.

“The new Yoo memo, along with other White House legal memoranda, shows clearly that the policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs was being laid,” says Stephen Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror.” “The recent memo on mood-altering drugs does not extend previous work on this area,” he said. “The use of these drugs was anticipated and discussed in the memos of January and February 2002 by DoD, DoJ, and White House counsel using the same language and rationale. The executive branch memos laid a comprehensive and reiterated policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs.”

“Yes, I believe they have been used,” Jeffrey S. Kaye, a clinical psychologist who works with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco, told me.

“I came across some evidence that they were using mind-altering drugs, to regress the prisoners, to ascertain if they were using deception techniques, to break them down,” said Kaye.

Yet the situation remains unclear.

No ‘Truth Serums’

The Pentagon’s use of sedatives to help calm shackled and hooded prisoners during long “rendition” flights from the Middle East to Guantanamo has been widely reported,

But hard evidence that U.S. interrogators today are employing hallucinogens, like the LSD the CIA tested on unwitting subjects for at least 20 years beginning in the 1940s, has yet to surface.

Michael Caruso, the chief federal defender appointed to represent al Qaeda suspect Jose Padilla, asserted in a motion last year that his client “was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations.”

But he could offer no proof.

It could have been a placebo. A 1963 CIA interrogation manual, code-named KUBARK, advocated the use of placebos, as well as the real thing, on prisoners.

But Michael Gellers, a psychologist with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service at Guantanamo, who had objected to harsh interrogation methods, told me “he never saw anything related to drugs.”

“I never saw that raised as an issue,” he said.

In any case, hallucinogens don’t make subjects “tell the truth.”

“Their function is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation,” the KUBARK manual explains.

Yet there is tantalizing evidence that the use of such drugs since 9/11 has been, at a minimum, seriously contemplated, if not implemented.

On July 17-18, 2003, for example, the CIA, the RAND Corp. and the American Psychological Association hosted a workshop entitled the “Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory.”

One session focused on the question, “What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?”

Desperados

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, top Bush administration officials pushed military commanders for intelligence about any other impending attacks, as Philippe Sands, an international lawyer at the firm Matrix Chambers and a professor at University College London, details in a forthcoming piece in Vanity Fair.

Sands demonstrates that the offending interrogations weren’t conducted by a few bad apples, as the White House and Pentagon have long maintained.

They were reacting to pressure from above, to go to “the dark side” and “take the gloves off,” as Vice President Cheney put it.

But they didn’t know how, December 2006 study by the Intelligence Science Board, a wing of the National Defense Intelligence College in Washington, D.C., suggested.

Under pressure, interrogators started to “‘make it up’ on the fly,” the study said.

“This shortfall in advanced, research-based interrogation methods,” it said, “at a time of intense pressure from operational commanders to produce actionable intelligence from high-value targets may have contributed significantly to the unfortunate cases of abuse that have recently come to light.”

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantanamo, who tried to throttle the excesses, told Vanity Fair that prison officials and interrogation managers drew inspiration from Jack Bauer, the fictional action-hero of FOX’s counterterror drama, “24,” who uses torture and drugs on terrorists.

“It was hugely popular,” Beaver said. Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.”

Beaver makes no mention of drugs in the piece.

She may not have seen or heard about their use, says Ewe Jacobs, the director of Survivors International, which specializes in the psychological and medical treatment of torture survivors.

“The Guantanamo camps were isolated from one another,” he says.

FBI interrogators and naval investigators, fearing involvement in illegal acts, were told to leave the island.

Professor Miles says, “I suspect that most of the use of interrogational drugs was by CIA and Special Ops interrogators, and thus still remains classified.”

We just don’t know - yet.

The CIA kept its MKULTRA, a mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, and other drug-testing programs secret for more than 20 years.

In the early 1970s, when then-CIA Director Richard Helms got wind of congressional investigators sniffing around, he ordered its records destroyed - a precursor of the agency’s recent destruction of interrogation videotapes.

But it turned out that Helms missed a box.

A disenchanted State Department official, John D. Marks, who had resigned over Vietnam, got hold of the remaining files and produced an astonishing book, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”

Many more books, some by persons who said they were victims of the mind-altering experiments, were produced.

Few believed them. Their tales sounded looney absent patient records (which Helms had ordered destroyed) of the drug experiments (many carried out in a secret wing of Georgetown University Hospital).

Likewise, few believe Padilla. Even fewer will believe the other prisoners, a number of whom are deranged from prolonged interrogation - if they ever get out.

We may never know the truth.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

1 comment April 6th, 2008