I was wondering if there were any meds one could take before a poly to not have a reaction to the relevant quest??

Vincent,

In answering your question, the following points should be made:

(1) Yes, you can reduce/eliminate physiological response(s) to relevant questions through various pharmacological preparations (use of drugs).

(2) In general this is not a viable/useable approach to countermeasures for two reasons:

(a) It is more practical to INCREASE responses to CONTROL questions (not reduce responses to relevant questions) through physical or mental manipulations as described in the Lie Behind the Lie Detector (TLBTLD), and

(b)  Although you can reduce responses to relevant questions through drug usage, you will likely reduce responses to the corresponding control questions, offsetting any benefit you might have gained through reduction/elimination of responses to relevant questions.

(3)  This is not completely the end of the story, though, with pharmacological countermeasures.  Because drugs (somewhat) selectively affect the physiology which (somewhat) selectively affects the individual channels of the polygraph (respiration, electrodermal sweating, cardiovascular), one might successfully adopt a mixed approach such as the following:

(a)  Use a motion sickness preparation which contains the drug scopolomine which will drastically reduce sweating responses to both relevant and control questions.  The effect will be to largely eliminate this channel for scoring purposes, while at the same time

(b) DIRECTLY, as described in TLBTLD, produce scorable responses in the RESPIRATORY (breathing) channel to CONTROL questions (NOT relevant questions), and

(c) INDIRECTLY through physical (ie tongue biting) or mental (ie thinking of being bit by a venemous snake, or your significant other cheating on you, or trying quickly to determine the solution to a thought provoking math problem (the square root of 131) ) manipluations produce reactions to, again, CONTROL (not relevant) questions affecting the CARDIOVASCULAR channel.

Hope this helps...if it is unclear, feel free to ask additional questions...

Skeptic,

I'm glad you found the previous discussion interesting.  I would recommend one of several standard texts for supplemental reading.  Perhaps you might begin with Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics by Joel G. Hardman (Editor),  Lee E. Limbird (Editor), Alfred Gilman Goodman (Consulting Editor), 10th edition.  You might look beginning at p. 155 for a discussion of muscarinic agonists and antagonists (e.g. scopolamine (note: previously misspelled in my original post)).

So you know of a drug that can reliably distinguish between relevant and control questions during the conduct of a polygraph test?  Do tell! I gotta hear about this one! Perhaps you need to review your research. All you little lambs out there pay attention because Annoymous is about to lead you down the path of ruin!

An American,

I previously posted:

Quote:


You followed with:

Quote:


Are you:

1. A careless and/or poor reader?  (Since you referred to me/my advice in your post, I believe we can assume that you did see my post).

2.  Ridiculously optimistic in your assumption that by saying any inane thing that comes to mind that you are likely to confuse and/or dissuade intelligent readers from doing that which is logical?

3.  Mentally deficient?

4.  Other?

5.  Some combination of the above?