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Brain on Fire
His clients' questions, Huizenga says, all seem to revolve around "sex, power or money." So far, everyone wants to prove their innocence, not establish someone else's guilt -- which is convenient. Moving your head a fraction of an inch will ruin the images. He has women who want to demonstrate their fidelity to jealous boyfriends and husbands, men in divorce cases who want to refute charges that they touched their children inappropriately, one incarcerated fellow who feels he was railroaded into a plea bargain, and even a client who is trying to prove he didn't steal a large amount of cash from a family member's purse.
Damasio and other skeptics are concerned that Huizenga is engaging in nothing more than "neo-phrenology." Phrenology is the discredited 19th-century idea that you can figure out a person's character by examining the bumps on his head.
  The fMRI machine scans the brain of Style writer Joel Garreau as he is asked questions. (Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post) |
"It's not a question of putting someone in a scanner and see what lights up," says Damasio. "The idea of going immediately to the commercialization of a product identifying different mental states is premature."
Steven Laken, the founder and CEO of Cephos Corp., has a résumé that includes being a recipient of the MIT Technology Review 100 Young Innovators Award, being instrumental in developing four commercially available DNA-based diagnostic products, and holding a PhD in cellular and molecular medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
For him, "admissibility is the Holy Grail. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think that admissibility" of his product into court as evidence was feasible. "We won't go commercial until we have the scientific data."
Laken sees a huge opportunity in government top-secret security testing that he says has not been well served by the polygraph. "The accuracy rates are not high enough." Like No Lie, Cephos says it has no government clients yet, although Laken says the intelligence communities "have given good constructive feedback."
At the same time, Laken can imagine his product being useful to someone who "looks like Martha Stewart" and, "when accused, in desperation mode, you need to clear your name."
"Martha has not called yet," he adds.
The True Test
The day the test results arrive from Langleben's lab starts portentously. His e-mail is stiff and formal: "I would like to debrief you over the phone about the extent you followed my instructions in the scanner and about any strategies you may have used during the task."
Turns out there were some surprises.
The three truths showed utterly predictable, calm brain activity. They clearly register as the truth.
But the lies -- each of which featured complex shades of gray -- take remarkable bounces. They revealed perhaps even more about the dark recesses of the mind than was intended.
The reporter had followed instructions to behave like someone who really wanted the job he was supposedly applying for. To that end, he had tried to direct his attention not to the question about whether or not he had that bachelor's degree, but just on the university where he'd spent all those fruitless years. He tried to focus not on whether he had written the book "Lying," but on how intently he had just read it. Finally, he tried to concentrate not on the false idea that he had ever been a soldier but on his memories of the Marine Corps, on which he had reported extensively, even accompanying troops into simulated combat in a war game in Oakland, Calif.
The university degree claim registered as a roaring, soaring, leaping, screaming lie. Not a shadow of a doubt.
The counterfeit book produced a less vivid response -- but well within the profile of a lie.
The phony discharge papers from the Marine Corps and the question "Have you ever served in the military?," however, registered as the truth .
Even more jaw-dropping, a portion of the brain lit up that never before had been observed as important. It is about as far away from the conscious thought lobes as you can get. It was the amygdala, that portion of the limbic system popularly known as the "reptilian brain" that is associated with intense emotional response.
"You love the Marine Corps! Or maybe you hate it. You have an emotional response to the Marine Corps!" Langleben exclaimed. "All our findings focus on the cortex. We don't know much about the limbic system. Your test is the first. Hard to imagine. We never carefully looked there. We deemed it unreliable.
"You should start working on your disability claim. You should claim 100 percent post-traumatic stress from the invasion of Oakland, California."
Honest Questions
The researchers reacted with aplomb to their brand-new experiment blowing up in their cortexes. Just another fascinating day at the office in a business where you learn something new every day if you're not careful. Their first reaction was to start figuring out how they could reconstruct the experiment in the future to more efficiently lasso and hog-tie this messy reality called human nature.
It takes more effort to get them thinking about what a society without lies might be like.
The day after the experiment, Gur, of the Brain Behavior Center, writes in an e-mail:
"About the future world in which my children will live . . . .
"Our interest in lie detection technology is just as a practical outcome of our work on neural systems . . . focusing on schizophrenia. We neither invented lie detection technology nor can do much about the need for it, we have just devised a more reliable version. You know that polygraphy is rampant 'as we speak,' and its imperfections can cause honest people their jobs, or worse, or set loose real bad people. Wouldn't my children's world be better if more innocent people are released and more bad people caught?
"Of course, if the public and its representatives believe that there is a threshold beyond which this technology should not progress, I am ready to stop and focus my energy in other directions. I can understand the ethical revulsion against a 'truth-telling machine.' . . . Every technology can bring good or bad results, depending on who uses it, no? It's the scientist's job to try to push the envelope, and it is the job of people like yourself, the public and its representatives to help gauge when we are approaching a danger zone.
"As a researcher, more than anything, I for one need some guidance."
Staff researcher Bob Lyford contributed to this report.
