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Brain on Fire
Nonetheless, as the 3,200-member American Polygraph Association observes, the polygraph remains in widespread use -- there has been nothing better. The center of the federal government's polygraph world is the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI -- pronounced DOD-pie) in Fort Jackson, S.C. Its main building is the length of a football field. Andrew Ryan, its research division chief, estimates that the world of national security employs five times as many polygraphs as does that of criminal justice.
There are three main additional criticisms of the polygraph:
  The fMRI machine scans the brain of Style writer Joel Garreau as he is asked questions. (Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post) |
· It doesn't measure lying, it measures the body's reaction to stress. As a result, it doesn't catch people who can lie stress-free, such as the FBI turncoat Aldrich Ames. It also unfairly implicates those innocents who are freaked just by being accused.
· Even after all these decades of use, the NRC said it could find no large-scale, scientifically rigorous, readily replicated clinical trials that examined exactly how well the polygraph works, on what kinds of people, under what sorts of circumstances.
· Results are highly dependent on the skill of the person who administers the test. Polygraphers admit that their work does have elements of an art. Critics hear "art" and think "voodoo."
Advocates hope brain scans will be superior on all counts.
In 2003, the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for discoveries that have made magnetic resonance imaging possible. X-rays make good pictures of hard bones and teeth. Magnetic resonance imaging has revolutionized understanding of how the body works by producing more highly detailed pictures of soft tissue than had ever before been possible. In the United States, more than 20 million MRIs are performed each year.
The greatest impact has been on brain research. Its consequence is often compared to the telescope's contribution to physics or the microscope to biology. If an ordinary MRI gives you stunning internal snapshots, an fMRI is like a movie. As different parts of the brain work, demanding oxygen, researchers can watch the flow deep in the brain, in three dimensions, in close to real time. If you are shown a photo of someone about whom you have deep emotion, for example, you can watch parts of the brain rage like a Santa Ana brush fire ripping through a California canyon.
What the lie detection research has shown so far is that "the truth is always simpler," says Gur, of the Brain Behavior Center. "To make a lie you have to know what is true, and you have to distort it. That is the extra work that goes into lying." It lights up the parts of the brain that control behavior, watch for mistakes, and create physical reflections of your thoughts such as blushing. Gur compares it to a stutter.
But much is not known.
Customer Pool
Entrepreneurs who would commercialize fMRIs for lie detection take one look at the apparently telltale brain pictures and, ding ding ding, they think they have a winner.
"We've never advertised or marketed, but people keep calling -- from Australia, Spain, Italy, other parts of the world," says Huizenga, the founder of No Lie MRI, whose résumé includes a bachelor's degree in molecular, cellular and developmental biology from the University of Colorado, a master's in molecular biology from the State University of New York at Stonybrook, an MBA from the University of Rochester, and a background in business development of diagnostic systems for pharmaceutical companies. No Lie plans to charge $900 for a half-hour test.
