Last year Sean A. Spence, a professor at the school of medicine at the
University of Sheffield in England, performed brain scans that showed that a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care appeared to be telling the truth when she denied committing the crime. This deception study, along with two others performed by the Sheffield group, was funded by Quickfire Media, a television production company working for the U.K.’s Channel 4, which broadcast videos of the researchers at work as part of a three-part series called “Lie Lab.” The brain study of the woman later appeared in the journal European Psychiatry.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) purports to detect mendacity by seeing inside the brain instead of tracking peripheral measures of anxiety—such as changes in pulse, blood pressure or respiration—measured by a polygraph. Besides drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers, fMRI has pulled in entrepreneurs. Two companies—Cephos in Pepperell, Mass., and No Lie MRI in Tarzana, Calif.—claim to predict with 90 percent or greater certitude whether you are telling the truth. No Lie MRI, whose name evokes the casual familiarity of a walk-in dental clinic in a strip mall, suggests that the technique may even be used for “risk reduction in dating.”
Many neuroscientists and legal scholars doubt such claims—and some even question whether brain scans for lie detection will ever be ready for anything but more research on the nature of deception and the brain.
An fMRI machine tracks blood flow to activated brain areas. The assumption in lie detection is that the brain must exert extra effort when telling a lie and that the regions that do more work get more blood. Such areas light up in scans; during the lie studies, the illuminated regions are primarily involved in decision making.
To assess how fMRI and other neuroscience findings affect the law, the MacArthur Foundation put up $10 million last year to pilot for three years the Law and Neuroscience Project. Part of the funding will attempt to set criteria for accurate and reliable lie detection using fMRI and other brain-scanning technology. “I think it’s not possible, given the current technology, to trust the results,” says Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who heads the project’s study group on lie detection. “But it’s not impossible to set up a research program to determine whether that’s possible.”
A major review article last year in the American Journal of Law and Medicine by Henry T. Greely of Stanford University and Judy Illes, now at the University of British Columbia, explores the deficiencies of existing research and what may be needed to move the technology forward. The two scholars found that lie detection studies conducted so far (still less than 20 in all) failed to prove that fMRI is “effective as a lie detector in the real world at any accuracy level.”
Most studies examined groups, not individuals. Others have not been replicated. Subjects in these studies were healthy young adults—making it unclear how the results would apply to someone who takes a drug that affects blood pressure or has a blockage in an artery. And the two researchers questioned the specificity of the lit-up areas; they noted that the regions also correlate with a wide range of cognitive behaviors, including memory, self-monitoring and conscious self-awareness.
The biggest challenge—and one for which the Law and Neuroscience Project is already funding new research—is how to diminish the artificiality of the test protocol. Lying about whether a playing card is the seven of spades may not activate the same areas of the cortex as answering a question about whether you robbed the corner store. In fact, the most realistic studies to date may have come from the Lie Lab television programs.
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Add CommentHaving read this article, 'on line', I am surprised that the author found it necessary to call me at my office, on my cell phone and at my home in the evenings, in Britain, on so very many occasions, often repeatedly, again and again on the same evening, when so little science was destined to enter the article. I understand that our conversations were taped to enable transcription but that hardly seems to have been necessary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAssuming Scientific American readers may be interested in the science as it stands, and the brain processes implicated, may I offer these articles which provide both the pros and the cons of the techniques outlined:
Spence SA, Kaylor-Hughes CJ. Looking for truth and finding lies: the prospects for a nascent neuroimaging of deception. Neurocase 2008; 14: 68-81.
Spence SA, Kaylor-Hughes CJ, Farrow TF, Wilkinson ID. Speaking of secrets and lies: the contribution of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex to vocal deception. NeuroImage 2008: 40: 1411-1418.
Spence SA. Playing Devils advocate: the case against fMRI lie detection. Legal and Criminological Psychology 2008; 13: 11-25.
Spence SA, Kaylor-Hughes CJ, Brook ML, Lankappa ST, Wilkinson ID. Munchausen syndrome by proxy or miscarriage of justice: An initial application of functional neuroimaging to the question of guilt versus innocence. European Psychiatry 2008; 23: 309-314 on line 29th October 2007.
Spence SA, Hunter MD, Farrow TFD, Green RD, Leung DH, Hughes CJ, Ganesan V. A cognitive neurobiological account of deception: evidence from functional neuroimaging. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London series B 2004; 359: 1755-1762.
It seems strange in these sorts of pieces that we are repeatedly offered quotes from other authors stating that the science cannot work but then informing us that they have graciously accepted large grants to study the same question. I suspect the issue has less to do with the science than with the 'problem' that the initial work was not performed in USA. If the MacArthur Foundation really has 10 million dollars to spend on this area of research then it might wish to spend that money at centers that have experience of the science concerned and have had to grapple with the very real challenges in this area. But sometimes that means the work might be done outside USA...!
This piece was not very Scientific, but it was very American.
Bravo Mr Stix!
Sean Spence
PS, I was promised a PDF but it hasn't arrived. Was the promise less than truthful?
RE: Can fMRI Really Tell if You're Lying? -- Will brain scans ever be able to tell if you're really being deceptive? In addition to Sean’s valid arguments above, my short answers to the good titled questions are: No, and No! This is because at the current states of our art, science, and technology of ME (Mind & Emotion, including morality and ethics) research, the reading of fMRIs is still not much refined than the more crude form of a polygraph (or even EEGs)! Unless the Quantum Mechanics (or Memophorescenicity) of our memory and thought processes could be further (contextually) defined, identified, and localized in our brain (like those fine pixels on a screen), the current neuroimaging technology is still unable to decipher the contents of our memory or a thought process; let alone identifying them (in context and content) as a lie or truth, under any circumstances (intellectual, spiritual, emotional, or mixed feelings)!? -- Author "Gods, Genes, Conscience" (iUniverse 2006; please see more arguments in Chapter 15: The Universal Theory of Mind).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell if Bush administration wants to rpove someone is terrorist and the dubious technique helps in their claim, the tabloid corporate media will make it appear as though it works. They will find huge number of scientists to prove their point. The corporate media will make sure that public beleives that the techniques works (TELL LIES REPEATEDLY SO IT BECOMES TRUTH). However, if one of their own neocon comrade is established guilty using the method, they will deny that techniques works. The story will go on to discredit the technique. So it depends whom you ask and on whom it is used.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe distressing aspect of this article is that it further proved that if someone will fund the research, there are people out there who will take the money no matter how misguided the proposal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that it would be impossible to detect lie as claimed by sheffield group.For that to br feasible first the types of lies and their effect on brain should be mapped out and that would be quite tedious as different people lie in a different way for the same situation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's not be t0o quick to judge this as a failure. The research is just getting started. They have some dramatic results already, i.e., the ability of the fMRI to determine when someone is thinking about a particular object.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt will be hard to determine a lie with complete certainty, but achieving a high rate of detection could be very useful.
As for the idea that this research should not even be done, that is so naive. IF we don't understand the technology, only our enemies and competitors in this wolrld will potentially have it. We should not fear knowledge