There is no telltale sign that reliably shows someone is a liar, although investigators have long used physical indications of arousal such as sweating and changes in heart rate
Image: © iStockPhoto / Michel de Nijs
In Brief
- There is no telltale sign that reliably shows someone is a liar, although investigators have long used physical indications of arousal such as sweating and changes in heart rate.
- More recently, researchers have probed the brain for a neural signature of a fib. They found that lying activates brain regions involved in suppressing information and in resolving conflicts—such as that between the impulse to describe reality and the wish to contradict it.
- The use of brain imaging combined with physiological measures, along with a clever questioning strategy, could lead to an improved method for detecting lies.
A young man steals across the hallway, slips through a door and scans the room. He opens a drawer, snatches a wristwatch inside and puts it in his pocket. Then he hurries out the door.
Sixty more people perform the same drill, half of them filching a watch and the others, a ring. Psychiatrist F. Andrew Kozel, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and his colleagues promised to give a bonus payment to anyone who could conceal the deed from the scientists, who planned to look into their brains for signs of a cover-up.
This article was originally published with the title Portrait of a Lie.
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6 Comments
Add CommentWhy so many page for this article ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy not put all on a single page ?
There is no telltale sign that shows someone knows the truth. Absolute knowledge is a lawyer's trick, the bane of the religious, the philosopher's grist, and the hubris of scientists. Truth is the sense of rightness that accommodates the personality, the emotional conviction that satisfies memories and perceptions of the self.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe rely on our imagination to fill in the gaps our limited perceptions allow. We choose those conclusions which best fit our idea of right. Belief is the final commitment of our innermost feelings to absolute truth.
"The use of fMRI represents the cutting edge of lie-detection technology."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBaloney. The investigative value of fMRI, as noted in the pages of Scientific American, is overstated. I wish the editors would adopt a policy.
My ex-husband is a compulsive liar. I have doubts that such tests would detect his lies because he does it so easily. I don't think there is any sense of guilt or cognitive recognition associated with it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMatthias, I found your article on polygraphs very vague. Many of the facts and statistics in your article are slanted and you don't go into very much detail. The article is very misleading. It seems almost like you're glittering generalities by using short sweeping statements that don't mean very much.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article by Mr. Gamer is incredibly biased. He must know that Kozel and collaborators have a major conflict of interest, since they area affiliated with Cephos, a for-profit lie detection entity (not that it will go anywhere). Furthermore, he must know that the latest studies by that group were unable to replicate their original findings and that the detection rates in the closest thing they did to a clinical trial were ridiculously low. So, Mr. Gamer, you should inform yourself before you spread misinformation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-Joseph K.