The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction

5. A Tremor in the Brain: fMRI Lie Detection, Brain Fingerprinting, and the Organ of Deceit in Post–9/11 America

5 A Tremor in the Brain fMRI Lie Detection, Brain Fingerprinting, and the Organ of Deceit in Post–9/11 America Lies, damn lies—the prints are all over your cortex. —lone frank, Mind‹eld: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (2007, 253) In his 1996 novel The Truth Machine, James Halperin predicts that an altruistic child prodigy will design a foolproof and widely deployable lie detector by 2024.1 The Armstrong Cerebral Image Processor (ACIP) will be based on a “combination of physiologically enhanced MRI and cerebral image reconstruction” (176). This “Truth Machine” would be a far cry, technologically speaking, from traditional polygraphs that detect deception by monitoring various physiological processes (including heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration) and equating changes in these processes to emotional stress and therefore deception. Indeed, Halperin’s novel foretells a new class of lie detector: one that measures prevarication via brain imaging. Over the past decade—and particularly in response to the attacks of September 11— Halperin’s vision has become a reality as scientists developed detectors based in the brain imaging techniques of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). In the wake of these new detectors, the polygraph has been both demonized and ostensibly outmoded. The new technologies are said to offer all of the bene‹ts of lie detection with fewer drawbacks. However, as I have been arguing, brain-based detectors not only are related to as-  118 sumptions underlying historical instruments but also are products and perpetuators of their genealogical traditions, including the dynamic relationship between literature, science, and technology; the theoretical construction of the deceptive consciousness within laboratory science; the literacy of mind reading via the visualization of thought; and the code of the ‹ngerprint. While this chapter begins to draw together the many threads of argumentation running through this book, you will ‹nd more satisfying knots tied in the coda which follows. In this ‹nal chapter, I introduce one last set of terms and concepts. Here, I contend that the discursive juxtaposition of polygraphy and brain-based detection is a representational strategy that foregrounds the corrective advantage of brain-based techniques, creates an arti‹cial rupture between contiguous technologies, and ignores the shared assumptions foundational to fMRI, EEG, and two older “truth telling” technologies (polygraphy and ‹ngerprinting ), while also masking a complex genealogy of theoretical issues that I have been addressing throughout this book. The unfounded privileging of new technologies has been highlighted in STS scholarship, which “has tended to prioritize change and innovation rather than studying how dominant groups continually prevail at embedding meanings that maintain their continued power within technologies” (Campbell 2005, 395).2 Through a case study of post–9/11 scienti‹c experiments with fMRI and EEG, I highlight, historicize, and analyze the “embedded meanings” in the representation of brain-based detection. After brie›y explaining the 9/11 context for the emergence of brainbased detection, I address three pertinent but often overlooked assumptions that undergird fMRI and Brain Fingerprinting: ‹rst, brain-based detection simultaneously creates and describes the brain as the organ of deceit,3 establishing quanti‹able connections between brain and mind, biology and behavior. Proponents of brain-based detection attempt to rhetorically distance themselves from the body as it was examined in traditional polygraphy and ‹ngerprinting in order to more accurately record the secret interiority and intentionality of individuals; the result is not a shift in ideology but a repackaged psychophysiological approach to a long-standing construct of the mind-brain, what I term the biological mind. Second, brain-based techniques ground cultural norms, such as conceptions of truth and morality, in biology.4 By isolating deception and locating its sources in the brain, brain-based techniques reintroduce biology as the static building block for cultural conceptions and valuations of truth and morality. Alterations in the brain’s hemodynamics and A Tremor in the Brain 119 electrical activity become signi‹ers of deception’s physiological origins. Finally, as truth is essentialized as bodily default, deception is interpreted not only as morally wrong, but as a sign of biological deviance. Technological Exigency and the Guilty Knowledge Paradigm Exigency is typically de‹ned as one’s reason for speaking, for making arguments , for seeking solutions. Proponents of fMRI lie detection and Brain Fingerprinting often compare their techniques to polygraphy; however, they have found exigency for the further development and implementation of brain-based detectors based on the cultural...