The Neuroscience of Terrorism: How We Convinced a Group of Radicals to Let Us Scan Their Brains

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.

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. “I would go tomorrow, I would do it tomorrow,” he said. When we probed for the sincerity of his claim, he responded, “only if we go together. You pay for the tickets”, 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 – for the first ever brain scan study on radicalisation.

Imagine being a young Muslim man, walking down the street in Barcelona, when you’re 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’t for a few details: we were at the height of Islamic State’s 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.

You’re 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’s interest.

The responses varied from concerned: “You think there’s something wrong with my brain?”, to pride: “There’s definitely something different about my brain.” Even the most hardcore jihadist supporters tapped into their nerdy side and started asking questions about how the brain works, what we’ve 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’t those kinds of doctors). Once satisfied with the scientific merit of the work, most consented to participate.

As Ahmed*, a 31-year-old Pakistani immigrant and staunch supporter of Al Qaida, told us: “People like us, our brains are so different. You can’t compare us to others. But go ahead and try. It’s interesting what you’re doing.”

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: “Can I get a picture of my brain? Just to prove to my mother that I have one.” Humour was never in short supply among our participants.