{"id":8187,"date":"2019-06-21T12:12:10","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T12:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firstlinepractitioners.com\/the-neuroscience-of-terrorism-how-we-convinced-a-group-of-radicals-to-let-us-scan-their-brains\/"},"modified":"2019-10-03T10:59:13","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T10:59:13","slug":"the-neuroscience-of-terrorism-how-we-convinced-a-group-of-radicals-to-let-us-scan-their-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstlinepractitioners.com\/el\/the-neuroscience-of-terrorism-how-we-convinced-a-group-of-radicals-to-let-us-scan-their-brains\/","title":{"rendered":"The neuroscience of terrorism: how we convinced a group of radicals to let us scan their brains"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nafees Hamid<\/a>, UCL<\/a><\/em> and Clara Pretus<\/a>, Universitat Aut\u00f2noma de Barcelona<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The young man sitting in the waiting room of our neuroimaging facility wearing skinny jeans and trainers looked like a typical Spanish 20-year-old of Moroccan origin. Yassine* was bouncy, chatting up the research assistants, and generally in good spirits. He was like so many other Barcelona youths, except he openly expressed a desire to engage in violence for jihadist causes.<\/p>\n

As we took him through a battery of tests and questionnaires, we were barely able to keep him in his seat as he kept proclaiming his willingness to travel to Syria to kill himself. \u201cI would go tomorrow, I would do it tomorrow,\u201d he said. When we probed for the sincerity of his claim, he responded, \u201conly if we go together. You pay for the tickets\u201d, with a wink and a smile. Less budding foreign fighter and more extremist provocateur, he enjoyed insulting us with impunity and showed us the middle finger as he left. And yet, Yassine agreed to let us scan his brain \u2013 for the first ever brain scan study on radicalisation.<\/p>\n

Imagine being a young Muslim man, walking down the street in Barcelona, when you\u2019re approached by a stranger asking if they can do a survey with you. The survey is on your religious, political and cultural values. This might sound fine, if it weren\u2019t for a few details: we were at the height of Islamic State\u2019s reign in Syria and Iraq and the survey questions included questions about creating a worldwide caliphate, being ruled by strict Sharia law and engaging in armed jihad.<\/p>\n

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A market in busy Barcelona.<\/span>
\nMikeDotta\/Shutterstock.com<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You\u2019re then told the reason for the survey is to find people suitable for a brain scan. And those few people would be the most radicalised ones we could find; a fact that would only be revealed in the post-experiment debrief. To our surprise, the part about the brain scans piqued people\u2019s interest.<\/p>\n

The responses varied from concerned: \u201cYou think there\u2019s something wrong with my brain?\u201d, to pride: \u201cThere\u2019s definitely something different about my brain.\u201d Even the most hardcore jihadist supporters tapped into their nerdy side and started asking questions about how the brain works, what we\u2019ve found in other studies, and what might the implications be of this research. Some would even ask us for medical advice (we had to explain that we weren\u2019t those kinds of doctors). Once satisfied with the scientific merit of the work, most consented to participate.<\/p>\n

As Ahmed*, a 31-year-old Pakistani immigrant and staunch supporter of Al Qaida, told us: \u201cPeople like us, our brains are so different. You can\u2019t compare us to others. But go ahead and try. It\u2019s interesting what you\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he had one very important condition to be satisfied before agreeing to participate. He leaned in close, as if there could be someone listening, and whispered: \u201cCan I get a picture of my brain? Just to prove to my mother that I have one.\u201d Humour was never in short supply among our participants.<\/p>\n

We carried out two brain studies in Barcelona between 2014 and 2017. Spain ranks<\/a> among Europe\u2019s top countries for failed and completed terror attacks and the greater Barcelona region is the country\u2019s primary<\/a> recruitment hotspot. In fact, it was during our fieldwork<\/a> that the Islamic State-inspired attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils took place in August 2017, killing 16 civilians and injuring 152 others.<\/p>\n

Given that our aim was to study willingness to engage in violence for cultural and religious values, we needed a sample of people with the same cultural background and language. So, we recruited Sunni Muslim men of Moroccan and Pakistani origin (the two largest groups of Sunni Muslims in the province of Barcelona) to participate in our studies.<\/p>\n

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This article is part of Conversation Insights<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Conversation\u2019s Insights team<\/a> generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges. In generating these narratives we hope to bring areas of interdisciplinary research to a wider audience.<\/em><\/p>\n

You can read more Insights stories here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Despite years of research<\/a> to the contrary, two oversimplified categories of thinking about violent extremism still continue to hold sway in public opinion. On the one hand are those who want to reduce radicalisation to an individual pathology. In this view, people who become terrorists are all mentally ill, have a low IQ, or a personality disorder. On the other are those who ignore the individual altogether and explain away those who become terrorists by purely environmental factors \u2013 whether it\u2019s poverty, marginalisation, or being \u201cbrainwashed\u201d by online propaganda.<\/p>\n

So radicalisation tends to either be seen as caused by individual characteristics or purely social factors. And of course, neither of these depictions are true. We are instead trying to get to the bottom of the interplay between these factors.<\/p>\n

Sacred values<\/h2>\n

We\u2019re part of an international research team, Artis International<\/a>, that\u2019s been studying something called \u201csacred values\u201d and their role in violent conflicts around the world. Sacred values are moral values that are non-negotiable and inviolable. You certainly wouldn\u2019t trade them in for material incentives. Despite the label \u201csacred\u201d, these values don\u2019t have to be religious.<\/p>\n

For example, most readers would likely consider individual liberty a basic right. If it could be guaranteed that the entire world would experience untold levels of economic prosperity and individual wealth, and to achieve this all we would need to do is enslave a tiny fraction of the world\u2019s population, would you agree to it? If not, anti-slavery is a sacred value for you.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve studied sacred values across a range of conflicts, from nation states such as Israel and Palestine<\/a>, India and Pakistan<\/a> and Iran and the US<\/a> to sub-state groups, such as Kurdish militias<\/a> and Islamic State\/al-Qaeda<\/a>. We also looked into non-violent conflicts like the Catalan independence<\/a> movement. The sacred values that drive these conflicts are those that are perceived as (or actually are) being contested.<\/p>\n

From Israel\u2019s right to exist, to Palestinian sovereignty, or the future of Kashmir, to the resurrection of a caliphate, when people feel their sacred values are under threat, they muster the will to fight for them. This can happen for both long-held values or new values that people adopt as part of their radicalisation process. These threats can even be as abstract as cultural annihilation. As an imam in Barcelona who was implicated in a thwarted terrorist attack in 2008 told us:<\/p>\n

Say what you will about al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or others. If our culture survives modernity, it will be precisely because of these groups.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the case of radicalisation, the adoption of extremist values are concerning enough. But as more of these values become sacred, the propensity towards violence increases and the chance of de-radicalisation decreases.<\/p>\n

Social exclusion<\/h2>\n

For our brain scans we used a tool called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which records and identifies which areas of the brain are active during specific tasks. Our first fMRI study<\/a> explored what could make non-sacred values become more like sacred values.<\/p>\n

After conducting 535 surveys of young Moroccan origin men in Barcelona, we recruited 38 participants who openly said they would engage in violent acts in defence of jihadist causes. The young men were asked to play \u201cCyberball\u201d, a video game where they and three other young male Spanish players would pass a virtual ball to each other. Unbeknown to them until the debrief, the Spanish players were purely virtual.<\/p>\n

Half of these participants were \u201csocially excluded\u201d as the Spanish players stopped passing to the Moroccan players and only played among themselves. The other half continued getting passed the ball. Then, both the excluded and included participants got into the brain scanner, where we measured their willingness to fight and die for their sacred values (for example, forbidding cartoons of the prophet, banning gay marriages) and their important but non-sacred values (women wearing the niqab, Islamic teaching in schools) which were ascertained beforehand in the surveys.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, participants rated higher willingness to fight and die for sacred rather than non-sacred values. Neurally, sacred values activated the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) \u2013 an area associated with rule processing and previously correlated with sacred values in American university students<\/a>. But those who were excluded increased their willingness to fight and die for their non-sacred values, and the left IFG became activated even during non-sacred value processing.<\/p>\n