I was listening to a radio talk show today and there is a company now who is trying to get a MRI truth assement machine on the market.
The person from the company No Lie MRI was saying that the machine shows oxegen use in parts of the brain that are used when one lies.
A neurologist called in to dispute that the brain works that way when it come to lying. He claimed the human brain simply does not have a set part of it that can be soley used for fabicating a lie and that detecting a lie or assesing truthfulness can not be readily seen on an MRI as one would if a picture of something repulsive or scary was show to the subject.
So my question perhaps to George. Is this another witch hunt or can it be that we may have a geniune lie detector?
By the way all experts on this show agreed that current polygraph is not reliable for use in lie detection that is why results are not admissable in court.  A lawyer with 30 + yrs in criminal law was on to say that the reason that laws against the use of polygraph have been established by courts is simple.
To be accepted polygraph (or any other process) has to be proven by a battery of independant scientific tests if it doesn't as polygraph doesn't it simply cannot be used.

Hi George,
Yes it was KPBS.
Thats what I thought and the expert on the program basically confirmed wht you said. Sounds like again a unproven technology that will be shoved down our throats regardless of accuacy.

I am reminded of those cartoons images that show a small fish about to be eaten by a larger fish which, in turn, is about to be eaten by an even larger fish.

You have your voice stress people claiming that is a reliable lie detector--and that it can be yours for such and such a number of easy monthly installments.  Then the polygraph people who are totally unified against voice stress analysis and produce a bunch of good data against it.  Instead of VSA you should use the polygraph--financing available!  Then the MRI people are opposed to the polygraph but, of course, all about how awesome their technology is--coming soon to a job near you.

History shows that it is relatively easy to get people to believe a falsehood if they either (1) hope that it is true or (2) fear that it is true.  The polygraph itself takes advantage of this (and many other) psychological shortcoming(s) in very obvious ways.

We'd all like there to be a magic box that can tell us who the bad guys are.  And we all fear being detected in most of the lies that we tell, so we also wouldn't want such a thing to be used on us.  But just because lots of people believe something doesn't make it true.  You've got to look at the data, not rely on bandwagon arguments (which are logical fallacies).

I don't know much about the MRI technology, other than that it is in early stages of development and shows some promise of being able to detect lies above chance levels.  My suspicion is that human cognition is far too complicated to ever allow lies to be detected with anything above a 90% success rate, which is about what the polygraph can get under totally ideal circumstances (which, alas, almost never exist outside of very carefully controlled laboratory conditions).

I like science fiction as much as the next guy, but let's hold off on the brain probes until they're proven to work, people.