The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction

3. Thought in Translation: Reading the Mind in Science and Science Fiction, 1930–50

3 Thought in Translation Reading the Mind in Science and Science Fiction, 1930–50 In a very true sense psychology contains all the possibilities of ‹ction and can become as fascinating. —david seabury, Unmasking Our Minds, 1924 (xxii) In October 2003, PBS and Wired Magazine featured brain-based lie detection on their new show Wired Science. The show and the imaging technology it featured were advertised with the caption “We’ve got mind reading down to a science.” The unspeci‹ed we is reminiscent of the ever-vigilant Esper Police in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1951/1953) or perhaps the Thought Police of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). But in the Wired Magazine advertisement, reading the mind through brain imaging suggests that science has surpassed science ‹ction in that there is an objective, interpretable correlation between anatomy, physiology, and thought. Through the technologies of brain imaging, the advertisement claims, we can ‹nally visualize not only the brain but the mind itself. As with Hugo Münsterberg’s mental microscope, the foundational assumption is that the mind (though not inherently material) can be made so through technical intervention. And forget about hiding from or evading the searchlights of science. Below the caption, the ad copy reads, “Beating a polygraph test is one thing. Beating a machine that can actually read your thoughts is another.” As this advertisement illustrates, popular representations of brain  67 imaging often envision the technologies as not only objective and invasive but also capable of translating electrical activity or blood oxygenation levels into meaningful messages. In short, we imagine these technologies could do what the ad copy promises: read our minds. In recent years, scholars have addressed representations of brain imaging in the media with speci‹c attention to the way visible models are often seen as more objective and true than other types of data (Galison 1997; Daston and Galison 1992; Joyce 2008); the tendency for and consequences of using imaging and visualization as a means to understand human behavior (Dumit 2003); and the elision of brain and mind, or the “mind-inthe -brain” (Beaulieu 2004). In this chapter I illustrate a complex genealogy for our popular perceptions of brain imaging technologies, one strand of which goes back to the development of a literacy for mechanical mind reading in the sciences and science ‹ction of the 1930s to the 1950s. During this era telepathic experiments were recognized as academic science, human electroencephalography (EEG) produced graphic images of the brain’s electrical activity, and ‹ctional narratives imagined machines that could read the mind, projecting thoughts as sound and image. Examining these earlier conceptions of mechanical “mind reading” in multiple disciplinary sites reveals a persistent belief in a psychophysiological literacy that constructs the mind as, at best, a transparent medium and, at worst, a text to be translated and interpreted by a set of expert technicians. When this literacy was ‹rst constructed for and by a lay audience, as it was in the sciences and science ‹ction of the 1930s to the 1950s, its simpli‹ed, mechanized vision helped to shape perceptions of and expectations for what would become the sciences of brain imaging . As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, the legacy of mind reading continues to inform the scienti‹c and journalistic representations of contemporary lie detection. In this chapter, I address the construction of several ideological assumptions about the mechanics of mind reading: ‹rst, that thought and energy are essentially interchangeable or transmutable , if not one and the same; second, that thought can be translated rather transparently from energies into recognizable sounds and images and, moreover, these thought pictures are representative of one’s character ; third, that there is an anatomical and psychological space (the hidden lower brain) that houses dangerous, primitive thoughts; and, ‹nally, that thought can serve as material evidence in a criminal prosecution. To make my case, I take seriously Susan Squier’s assertion that “sci68 THE LYING BR AIN ence and literature are more like each other than they are different, not only because both operate in culture and society to produce subjects and objects but also because both ‹elds have come into being through a crucial act of institutional self-creation: the creation of a disciplinary divide between scienti‹c and literary knowledges and practices” (2004, 31). Science and literature are not distinct enterprises, even though they often appear to be discrete because of the...