The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction

Introduction

Introduction In 2008, the Harvard Business Review listed fMRI lie detection among its “Breakthrough Ideas.” The inclusion of this brain-imaging technology is somewhat surprising given that neither the technology nor its application to deception is new: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was developed in the early 1990s as a way to monitor brain functions; almost immediately, the technology was employed in laboratory experiments that attempted to detect deception in the brain. What have changed over the past decade are American investments in lie detection. From commercial applications, including No Lie MRI (located in Nevada), to Homeland Security, lie detection has once again1 gained cultural cachet as a promising, progressive technology, this time via neuroscience and the panic of post–9/11 anxiety. After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, U.S. government of‹cials, scientists, and independent researchers began to subsidize and popularize technologies that they hoped would more accurately and quickly detect threats to national security. What the Harvard Business Review—and a host of recent academic and popular articles on fMRI lie detection—takes for granted is that fMRI represents real progress in the battle against deception. In the recent past, Paul Root Wolpe and Daniel Langleben, coauthors of the review essay and psychiatric colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, have disagreed about the promise of fMRI lie detection. Wolpe, a bioethicist, has penned many worried pages about the potential dangers of the latest applications of brain-imaging technologies; Langleben, one of the ‹rst to spearhead an experimental initiative involving fMRI and lie detection, has been a savvy but wary advocate of the technology’s application. What the two researchers agree on is the progress being made through fMRI lie detection. Until recently, we had not improved very much on the methods of the ancient Greeks, who took the pulse of a suspect under questioning— a rudimentary polygraph in concept. But recent research using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, has begun to identify the areas of the brain involved in deception. These laboratory experiments (many done by coauthor Daniel D. Langleben) suggest that accurate, reliable lie detection is ‹nally within reach. (2008, 25) A quick glance at such a statement might bring a sense of relief: at long last a solution to what Wolpe and Langleben describe as the “ubiquitous, yet dif‹cult to detect” problem of deceit. However, Wolpe and Langleben ’s narrative of technological and scienti‹c progress covers over a much more dynamic genealogy of approaches to lie detection and begs several questions: Why should they compare the brain-imaging technology of fMRI to the polygraph, to the taking of a pulse, to ancient methods of interrogation? Indeed, why leap from the Greeks to the twenty- ‹rst century in the space of one clause? Why assume that laboratory experiments are a recent (if not recently successful) phenomenon in the science of lie detection? Why insinuate that the brain’s blood oxygenation levels, which is what fMRI lie detection relies on, are a better means for the detection of deception than the taking of the body’s pulse? This book begins by questioning what bioethicists, scientists, pundits, and the press often take for granted: that lie detection research has remained relatively unsophisticated until its most recent leap into brainimaging technologies and that forms of mechanical lie detection preceding brain-based technologies can be subsumed under the rubric of “polygraphy,” the process of graphically recording several of the body’s autonomic responses to various stimuli. Through impoverished and dehistoricized representations, an artifact (the polygraph) and an imagined machine (the lie detector) have come to stand in for a century of technological explorations and expectations about deception and its mechanical detection. The Lying Brain argues that instead of providing a break from or a novel approach to lie detection, neuroscience is implicitly recycling scienti ‹c and cultural assumptions about deception and its mechanical detection : that lies are measurable phenomena that manifest themselves in the body’s physiology, particularly in the autonomic and central nervous 2 THE LYING BR AIN systems; that the body produces objective data that are easily and unambiguously interpretable; and that deception demands the knowledge and suppression of truth. These assumptions took shape during the ‹rst half of the twentieth century and were the result of a dialogue between scientists from psychology, physiology, and forensics; law enforcement agents; lawyers; and authors of science ‹ction and scienti‹c...