The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction

4. Without a Trace: Brain Fingerprinting, Biometrics, and Body Snatching

4 Without a Trace Brain Fingerprinting, Biometrics, and Body Snatching “Not only your brain, but your entire body, every cell of it emanates waves as individual as ‹ngerprints. Do you believe that, Doctor?” —jack finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) From Luther Trant’s examination of the marks of crime on men, to William Marston’s hypotheses about the deceptive consciousness , to the mechanics of mind reading, I have illustrated several ways in which literature, science, and the media share the assumption that deception leaves a trace in our physiology. Instead of merely looking to the crime scene for ‹ngerprints and bloodstains, police have been asked to turn their gaze on the suspect in new and technologically mediated ways. Indeed, the body’s internal physiological mechanisms are central to both historical and contemporary lie detection: blood pressure, pulse, and respiration are all said to increase as a result of prevarication, as are blood oxygenation levels and brain waves. That we look to the body to identify deception is certainly problematic , for the reasons I have been outlining. However, this body-centricity is congruent with many biometric techniques, including Alphonse Bertillon’s nineteenth-century anthropometry, and its eventual rival, Francis Galton’s ‹ngerprint classi‹cation system. In recent memory, the sequence of our DNA and the shape of our retinas, among other measurements , have joined ‹ngerprinting as anatomical markers of unique-  99 ness, with DNA now surpassing ‹ngerprinting as the best method for identi‹cation of criminals and civilians alike. Yet, among biometric technologies, ‹ngerprinting has achieved, both practically and metaphorically, the most pervasive in›uence on how we understand the body as a self-reporting entity that will divulge information about identity and individuality—but not character1 —while thwarting attempts at deception. Early systems of ‹ngerprint identi‹cation, like many biometric systems of identi‹cation employed today, depended on the presumption that one’s unique identity can be traced through the measurement of various aspects of one’s anatomy: that biology is intimately connected to an individual’s identity. Or, put another way, “‹ngerprinting has embedded ‹rmly within our culture the notion that personhood is biological. The idea that our individuality is vouched for by our biological uniqueness” (Cole 2001, 5). It is no wonder that new biometric technologies often appropriate the word ‹ngerprinting and use it in their names: DNA (or genetic) ‹ngerprinting was coined in the 1980s to explain the process of testing cells for unique, identifying markers ; by the 1990s, Brain Fingerprinting emerged as a technology that could ostensibly provide a unique catalog of the “information stored in the human brain” (Farwell 2001a). Both techniques assume that individuality is “vouched for” in our anatomy, and both rely on a metaphoric connection to ‹ngerprinting as a way to ground their basic claims about the absolute and static nature of the body’s individual identity. In chapter 5, I analyze the discursive presentations of Brain Fingerprinting and fMRI in scienti‹c and journalistic publications; here, I make two preliminary points: ‹rst, classi‹cation systems are not the revelation of nature’s order;2 instead, classi‹cation and its objects are coconstitutive . Take, for example, Londa Schiebinger’s extended analysis of Linnaeus’s taxonomical system, which, she argues was the result of sociopolitical ideology rather than “objective” discoveries about nature’s inherent organization (1993). I place “objective” in scare quotes given that we have already encountered the genealogy of this term in chapter 2 and because certain de‹nitions of objectivity have been instrumental in de‹ning classi‹catory systems. These de‹nitions, which have taken several forms over the past three decades, are best encapsulated by what Sandra Harding has called “weak objectivity,” what scholars such as Robert Proctor have termed “value free science,” and what Donna Haraway has theorized as the “god-trick”: the belief that objectivity is equivalent to an uninvested view from nowhere. For each of these theorists, a 100 THE LYING BR AIN more responsible de‹nition of objectivity includes the admission of bias, position, situation, and context. Feminist theorists Karen Barad and Donna Haraway have insisted that responsible conceptualizations of objectivity will also account for the interplay of the material and immaterial, the constructed and the real. As an interlocutor for Judith Butler, Karen Barad argues speci‹cally that “objectivity means being accountable to marks on bodies” (Barad 2003, 824). In the context of ‹ngerprinting’s history, we could interpret Barad...